Fall 2022 Colloquia
Monday, September 26, 2022
Too Important to Ignore? Why Ambiguity and Broad Appeals Fail with Rising Issue Salience
ABSTRACT: When do voters penalize ambiguous, broad appeals? This paper proposes a new argument by bringing individual issue salience into existing models of projection and ambiguity. I argue that to understand the conditions under which ambiguity fails, we must focus on the issue a politician is ambiguous on: as the salience of an issue increases for voters, they are less likely to project their own views onto ambiguous politicians and penalize ambiguity. I find evidence for this argument using a survey experiment that combines Quadratic Voting to measure salience with a Conjoint that captures when voters prefer ambiguous politicians. The argument implies a representation challenge for mainstream parties who try to build diverse coalitions: as dividing issues become more important, broad appeals and ambiguity become less effective, making it harder to build a coalition of voters with heterogeneous preferences. Consequentially, it becomes easier for political actors at the fringes to attract voters. In this presentation, I will present the results of the main experiment and will discuss the design of a new experiment that intends to randomize issue salience in response to reviewer comments.
Jonne Kamphorst, Department of Political Science at the European University Institute
Monday, October 3, 2022
Measuring Knowledge in Surveys: The Case of Knowledge about Science
ABSTRACT: For decades, the National Science Foundation has fielded annual surveys measuring the American Public’s understanding of science by administering quizzes. For example, one quiz question asks which is larger: an atom or a molecule. Assigning scores on such quizzes is thought to reveal individual’s ability to understand news stories about science and to create informed opinions on science-related controversial issues of government policy. But remarkably, that assumption has not been tested until now. In this talk, I will describe research done by Matt Berent (PPRG team director) and me on these issues. Matt has found that aspects of the structures of the quiz questions have not conformed to best practices and have compromised the accuracy of the measurements. Furthermore, an in-depth exploration of the content of the questions revealed that some questions have been biased against some subgroups of the population, causing them to have misleadingly low scores. Additional studies revealed that other ways of measuring knowledge of science produce surprising and troubling results. These findings set the stage for future research improving the design of these questions.
Jon Krosnick, Department of Communication at Stanford University
Monday, October 10, 2022
New Money, New Scams
ABSTRACT: As outlined in Dr. Swartz’s recent book (New Money: How Payment Became Social Media; Yale University Press 2020), one of the basic structures of everyday life, money, is at its core a communication media. Payment systems—cash, card, app, or Bitcoin—are informational and symbolic tools that integrate us into, or exclude us from, the society that surrounds us. Examining the social politics of financial technologies, Lana Swartz reveals what’s at stake when people pay. This analysis comes at a moment of disruption: from “fin‑tech” startups to cryptocurrencies, a variety of technologies are poised to unseat traditional financial infrastructures. Swartz explains these changes, traces their longer histories, and demonstrates their consequences. She shows just how important these invisible systems are. Getting paid and paying determines whether or not you can put food on the table. The data that payment produces is uniquely revelatory—and newly valuable. New forms of money create new forms of identity, new forms of community, and new forms of power.
Lana Swartz, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia
Monday, October 17, 2022
COVID-19 as a Real-world Test of Psychological Theories of Threat and Politics
ABSTRACT: Did the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic cause changes in political attitudes? We test the external validity of psychological theories of threat and politics by estimating the causal effect of the pandemic’s onset on 84 political attitudes and 8 perceived threats using fine-grained repeated cross-sectional data (Study 1, N = 232,684) and panel data (Study 2, N = 552) collected in the United States. The pandemic’s onset caused some attitude change, but the precise way it changed attitudes is heterogeneous and not clearly predicted by psychological theories of threat. It significantly changed some attitudes, in particular liberal shifts in social welfare attitudes, but these changes were often small and rarely consistent with theoretical predictions. Many attitudes were unaffected; however, these average effects mask heterogenous treatment effects across people. These data suggest that there is not just one threat effect, but many threat effects depending on the attitude and the person.
Mark Brandt, Department of Psychology at Michigan State University
Monday, October 24, 2022
Political Embarrassment and Openness to Compromise
ABSTRACT: In a time of affective polarization and partisan division, how can Americans be encouraged to cooperate with the opposing side? This talk will consider how emotional reactions to politics motivate people to consider compromise. While negative emotions like anger can lead people to rally in support of their partisan side, another negative emotion - embarrassment - can instead encourage people to think about politics in more principled ways. In recent years, many Americans have said that politics makes them feel embarrassed. These feelings of embarrassment can be a civic good, encouraging people to move past their partisan commitments. As a reaction to a sense of violated social norms, embarrassment affects how people think politics should be practiced. Experimental and survey evidence demonstrate that when people feel embarrassed, they are more likely to defend the democratic norm of compromise.
Jennifer Wolak, Department of Political Science at Michigan State University
Monday, October 31, 2022
Predicting Preferences among Environmental Policies
ABSTRACT: There is a clear need to address several environmental problems, with much attention to the need to address climate change. Despite the need, we stumble in our collective ability to address large-scale environmental issues. This stumbling is often credibly attributed to political parties who happen to be in power and variation in public perceptions of the need to prioritize addressing these problems. Yet, many already believe that we need to address these problems and support policies that address these problems–more than what people expect. Moreover, there are many ways to address these problems, some of which are more popular than others. In the present talk, I will describe research on reactions to various climate change and water quality policies and how these reactions influence preferences among the policies. The reactions are anticipated environmental, economic, and social consequences and anticipated emotional responses (anxiety, anger, hope, and neutrality) if a policy is adopted. Thus, rather than focusing on why people may not want to take action to address climate change or their general dislike or lack of prioritizing environmental policies, I report research on which policies people prefer and why they might prefer some over others.
Janet Swim, Department of Psychology at Penn State University
Monday, November 7, 2022
The Primacy of Ideological Beliefs in The Ever-Shifting World
ABSTRACT: The world is changing at an accelerating pace. For example, the demographic landscape in just a couple of decades will be drastically different from what we know today, and novel technologies are constantly introducing new opportunities and challenges. What are the results of these changes to the psychology of humanity? In this talk, I will discuss how my research answers this big question from multiple angles. First, I will discuss how social changes such as demographic shifts can trigger a cascade of right-wing political backlash, recasting the meaning of identities for many of us. Second, I will discuss how ideological beliefs in the dynamic political landscape can play an increasingly critical role in helping people navigate the complexities of their social world. I will highlight my findings about how we often see others through their beliefs and discuss how these findings challenge the conventional theories of inter-group conflicts and impression formation. Finally, I will discuss my emergent research program that interfaces novel methods, techniques, and technologies. I will highlight both methodological innovations that I introduce to the field of psychology as well as how I use new technologies to develop tools to help solve the challenges of the ever-changing social world.
Max Bai, Department of Sociology at Stanford University
Monday, November 28, 2022
Evaluating the Minority Candidate Penalty with a Regression Discontinuity Approach
ABSTRACT: Do parties face an electoral penalty when they nominate candidates of color? We use a regression discontinuity design with state legislative election data from 2018 and 2020 to isolate the effect of nominating a candidate of color on the party’s general election performance. Using this approach with real-world data heightens external validity relative to existing racial penalty studies, which are largely supported by surveys and experiments. We find no evidence that candidates of color are disadvantaged in state legislative general elections, relative to narrowly nominated white candidates from the same party. These findings challenge leading explanations for the underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minority groups, with implications for candidate selection across the United States.
Eric Juenke, Department of Political Science at Michigan State University