Fall 2023 Colloquia
Monday, October 16, 2023
Company Towns: Capacity, Corruption, and Trust in Single-Industry America
ABSTRACT: Former coal mining areas are among the most economically and socially depressed in the United States. Their governments have largely proven unable to arrest their decline. These areas are also politically distinctive: their voters have swung dramatically towards the Republican Party over the past 30 years, and they are mistrustful of officials at all levels of government. Many attribute these outcomes to pure economics; mining's withdrawal from the eastern United States has devastated former mining areas' economies. But this book presents evidence that the political dysfunction in former mining areas is far older than their economic decline. In the early 20th century, when they were most prosperous and economically powerful, mining companies dominated politics in coal-endowed areas. These companies were motivated and able to keep the local governments they lived under corrupt and low in capacity. As the mining industry has withdrawn, the political institutions it weakened have not recovered: governments in former mining areas remain more corrupt and lower in capacity than their neighbors. People who live in these places have unsurprisingly long been cynical about their local governments, and today, they continue to mistrust officials, expect corruption, and have little faith in elections to produce responsive governments. As they have realigned towards the Republican Party, spurred by the decline of unions in the region, disaffection with government has only deepened. These findings help account for political discontent among the many Americans who live in places that, today or historically, have been dominated by an economic interest at odds with the development of state capacity. They also shed broader light on why voters who live under ineffective institutions sometimes demand less, not more, from their governments.
Elizabeth Elder, Hoover Institution and Political Psychology Research Group at Stanford University
Monday, October 23, 2023
AP VoteCast’s Innovative Weighting Methodology
ABSTRACT: AP VoteCast is a survey of the American electorate conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for The Associated Press and Fox News. Developed by The Associated Press and NORC, VoteCast combines a probability-based sample of registered voters, non-probability samples from opt-in online panels, and AmeriSpeak®, NORC’s nationally representative, probability-based panel. Respondents sampled from the state voter files are mailed a postcard or letter inviting them to complete the survey either online or by calling a toll-free number to take the survey with an interviewer. In 2022, AP VoteCast conducted more than 120,000 interviews across the 50 states in the 10-days leading up to the November 8th midterm election, including more than 30,000 probability interviews. This presentation will highlight the sampling, recruitment, and weighting innovations of AP VoteCast that contributed to it providing reliable estimates for more than 70 governor, Senate, and ballot measure elections in 2022.
David Sterrett, National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago
Monday, October 30, 2023
Vaccine Hesitancy and Ways to Intervene
ABSTRACT: Beginning in March 2020, the U.S. confronted the COVID-19 pandemic, which lead to more than one million deaths, and continues today. Although medical research has suggested that getting vaccinated against COVID-19 reduces risk of catching the disease and reduces the severity of symptoms, about one-quarter of Americans are still not vaccinated. Case counts continue to increase, and infections continue to decrease quality of life, cause loss of work days, and even still cause fatalities. Therefore, public health officials still hope to increase the vaccination rate. This talk will describe two research projects exploring vaccination promotion. The first project, based on Moral Foundations Theory, examined the effects of two messages emphasizing the purity of vaccines. Both messages, one with a scientific framing and one with a religious framing, significantly improved vaccination attitudes and intentions among unvaccinated Republicans. The second project drew upon previous literature on how partisans would follow elite cues and explored whether a video of former President Trump endorsing the COVID-19 vaccine would positively impact vaccination attitudes and intentions. Contrary to expectations, the video did not improve attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines or intentions to get vaccinated, even among unvaccinated Republicans. However, the video significantly increased the tendency to vote for former President Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
Catherine Chen, Department of Communication at Stanford University
Perceptions of Global Warming as a Serious Problem for the Nation: Testing Propositions of the Attitude-Certainty-Existence (ACE) Model
ABSTRACT: Perceptions of national problem seriousness matter in democratic societies because politicians are more likely to address problems that the public perceives to be serious. Identifying the roots of problem seriousness judgments, therefore, helps researchers to understand the mechanisms at work as Americans’ political agenda-setting shifts over time. The current study tested propositions derived from the Attitude-Certainty-Existence (ACE) Model about the causes of problem seriousness judgments, with a focus on global warming. Consistent with the model, cross-lagged panel regressions implemented using national survey data collected between 1997 and 1998 showed that changes in national seriousness judgments over a period of three months were predicted by four pre-existing constructs: beliefs about the existence of global warming, the certainty of the existence beliefs, attitudes toward global warming, and beliefs about whether global warming has been caused by human activity. Furthermore, mediational analyses of repeated cross-sectional surveys conducted between 2009 and 2020 showed that changes in national seriousness judgments were predicted by all four posited causes, most often by the belief that humans have been responsible for inducing global warming. This evidence constitutes important new support for the ACE model and sets the stage for applying it in other domains besides climate change.
Catherine Chen, Department of Communication at Stanford University
Monday, November 6, 2023
Do People Lie in Their Beliefs on Global Warming and Support for Green Policies?
ABSTRACT: The Item Count Technique (ICT) is a commonly used survey technique to address social desirability bias. Join us for a talk that will unveil real-world data, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of ICT, and showing how seemingly small details of wording can lead to misleading results.
Catherine Chen, Department of Communication at Stanford University
Social Media Sensitivity Across People, Places and Platforms
ABSTRACT: Research on the effects of social media on wellbeing has been equivocal. Social media impacts people’s wellbeing in different ways, but relatively little is known about why this is the case. Here we introduce the construct of “Social Media Sensitivity” to understand how social media’s effects on wellbeing differs across people and the contexts in which these platforms are used.
Sumer Vaid, Department of Communication at Stanford University
Monday, November 13, 2023
The Decolonizing Wealth Project: Making the Case for Reparations
ABSTRACT: How do you use principles of political psychology and behavioral science to build a data-derived narrative strategy for philanthropic organizations who want to support reparations for Black Americans? This talk will present a case study of a multi-year, research effort to create and deploy solutions to the racial biases inherent in nonBlack Americans’ opposition to reparations policy. This talk will feature research findings about how to talk to segments of the American public who are not Black about Black political issues. This talk will conclude with an exploration of the professional opportunities and challenges of using social scientific research to develop tools that promote social progress.
Janay Cody, President of J&J David LLC
Monday, December 4, 2023
Moral Renewal in Cyberspace: The Progress and Freedom Foundation and the Creation of a Reactionary Information Age
ABSTRACT: How did new information technologies become vehicles for old forms of exclusion and inequality? This talk uncovers one answer: a think tank called the Progress and Freedom Foundation, whose founders worked throughout the 1990s to shape cyberspace and Silicon Valley towards reactionary social ends. Join us to learn how these efforts made the internet a less hospitable place for marginalized groups.
Rebecca Lewis, Department of Communication at Stanford University
Social Media Mindsets: A New Approach to Understanding Social Media Use and Psychological Well-being
ABSTRACT: Social media mindsets are the core beliefs that orient individuals’ expectations, behaviors, attributions and goals about social media’s role in their lives. In four survey studies we show people hold distinct mindsets about the amount of agency they have over their social media use.
Angela Lee, Department of Communication at Stanford University