Spring 2022 Colloquia
Monday, April 4, 2022
Anonymous Cross-Party Conversations Can Decrease Political Polarization: A Field Experiment on a Mobile Chat Platform
ABSTRACT: There is widespread concern that social media is exacerbating political polarization, but it is less clear if and how the design of social media platforms might shape the nature and influence of cross-party interactions. We created a mobile chat app to study the impact of anonymous conversations between opposing partisan identifiers. We conducted a field experiment in which Republicans and Democrats completed a survey about their political views and then were later recruited to use our platform to discuss a divisive political issue with opposing partisan identifiers with varying amounts of information about their discussion partners. Broadly, we find that people who engage in anonymous cross-party conversations about controversial topics exhibit substantial decreases in polarization compared to a placebo group that was asked to write an essay using the same conversation prompts—in contrast to the popular wisdom about online cross-party engagement. These depolarizing effects were particularly strong among Republicans and correlated with the civility of dialogue between study participants. Our findings highlight the potential for well-designed social media to promote positive political exchanges and the need for a flexible platform for scientific research on social media.
Sunshine Hillygus, Department of Political Science at Duke University
Monday, April 11, 2022
The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers' beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers
ABSTRACT: Partisan media impacts voting behavior, yet what changes in viewers' beliefs or attitudes may underlie these impacts is poorly understood. We recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers using data on actual TV viewership from a media company, and incentivized them to watch CNN instead for a month using real-time viewership quizzes. Despite regular Fox viewers being largely strong partisans, we found manifold effects of changing the slant of their media diets on their factual beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of issues' importance, and overall political views. We show that these effects stem in part from a bias we call partisan coverage filtering, wherein partisan outlets selectively report information, leading viewers to learn a biased set of facts. Consistent with this, treated participants concluded that Fox concealed negative information about President Trump. Partisan media does not only present its side an electoral advantage---it may present a challenge for democratic accountability.
David Broockman, Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley
Monday, April 18, 2022
The Relevance of Generations to Understanding a Changing American Electorate
ABSTRACT: This talk uses longitudinal data from the American National Election Studies to examine if and how generational replacement has contributed to four macro-political trends: (1) The rise in the percentage of Americans identifying as Independent rather than as Democrat or Republican; (2) The erosion of the Democrat’s advantage in the balance of party identifiers; (3) The growth in affective polarization; and (4) The decline in trust in government. The research uses an Age-Period-Cohort analysis to estimate the effects of generation (and age, period, and demographics) at the individual level and to infer how generational replacement is shaping the macro-level trends. The results show that generational differences are large in three of the four cases and important to understanding how the American polity has been changing.
Laura Stoker, Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley
Monday, April 25, 2022
News and Public Opinion: Which Comes First?
ABSTRACT: Much research demonstrates a positve association between news coverage and public opinion, both perceptions and preferences: When the news goes in one direction, opinion does too. While this relationship is clear, what accounts for it is not. The assumption in almost all of the previous research is that the media causes public opinion; this is true in most observational studies and almost all experimental ones. But there is reason to expect that the causality runs in the other direction as well, that is, where the public drives media coverage. In this paper, I describe the logic of two-way flows and consider the possible conditioning role of demand for information by both the public and media actors. I then undertake an analysis of three cases of US public opinion over time – economic perceptions, candidate support, and policy preferences – using measures of the content of news coverage based on automated content analyses. Vector autoregression results indicate that opinion tends to come first; it “causes” coverage in every case and the reverse holds less frequently and always to a lesser degree. Although much research remains, the results underscore the role the public can play in news coverage, one that always should be entertained and assessed empirically, not settled by assumption.
Chris Wlezien, Department of Government at UT Austin
Monday, May 2, 2022
The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Election and the Challenge to American Democracy
ABSTRACT: To many people it feels like everything is stuck. Democrats and Republicans seem to disagree about everything. Few in Washington want to cooperate with the other side. Elections seem closer than ever, outcomes seem to turn on a coin flip, and each side thinks its candidate won. Politics has become calcified. How did we get here — and can it end? This talk brings data from The American National Election Study, The Cooperative Election Studies, The VOTER Survey, Kantar Media, the Crowd Counting Consortium, and Nationscape —a 500,000 interview election study — to explore the long-term trends and short-term shocks that have shaped this political moment. We’ll assess the role of advertising, COVID-19, and social justice protests in figuring out why the winner won, while also entertaining possibilities about what could turn the bitter end of the 2020 election into a new beginning.
Lynn Vavreck, Department of Political Science at UCLA
Monday, May 16, 2022
Masking Prejudice? The effect of facial covers on trait evaluations and hiring decisions
ABSTRACT: Face coverings have become a highly charged political issue in Western countries, raising issues of religious intolerance in the case of Muslim niqabs and objections over personal liberty in the case of medical masks to curb the spread of Covid-19. To investigate questions of prejudice concerning the niqab and attitudes towards health compliance concerning medical mask wearing, we conducted a single factor between-subjects experiment in Israel using an online panel of 400 non-Arab participants. Participants were shown one of three treatment conditions featuring the same, neutral expression ethnically ambiguous female model (equally rated in a pre-test for being Israeli Jew or Israeli Arab) either wearing a niqab face covering, a medical mask, or a ski scarf. In all three conditions, only her eyes and a portion of her face were visible. A control condition featured the same model with her entire face showing. Participants were each shown one stimulus image to evaluate, along with five distractor images of different female models. Respondents rated the images on a series of trait evaluations and whether they would hire the person as a store manager. Preliminary analyses indicate lower ratings for niqab and head scarf wearing compared to medical mask and maskless conditions. These findings are consistent with the information deficit literature, which would predict that both the niqab and scarf conditions would be evaluated negatively in comparison to the full face because the judgment is based on incomplete information (i.e., only a partial view of the model’s face). No significant differences were found between the niqab and scarf, suggesting that religious prejudice did not play a significant role. The high ratings for the medical mask are probably driven from the timing of the study, February 2020, when the people wearing such masks were medical personnel.
Israel Waismel-Manor, Department of Political Science at the University of Haifa
Monday, May 23, 2022
Accepting Responsibility Predicts Useful Emotions for Regulating Prejudice Expression
ABSTRACT: Confronting is a practical and effective prejudice reduction strategy. People who are confronted after expressing bias (vs. not) are subsequently less likely to express biased attitudes and use stereotypes because they feel guilt, which leads to self-regulation. To date, little research has investigated how perpetrators interpret, or make meaning of, confrontation messages. In the present study (n = 133), we examine how accepting and rejecting responsibility for utilizing stereotypes is associated with self-reported affect after confrontation. Three trained, independent coders examined written reactions to being confronted for racial stereotyping. Overall, 15 people (11.28%) neither rejected nor accepted responsibility for their actions, 47 people (35.34%) rejected responsibility, 19 people (14.29%) accepted responsibility, and 52 people (39.10%) expressed both rejection and acceptance of responsibility. Consistent with theories about the self-regulation of prejudice expression, accepting responsibility positively correlated with negative self-directed affect (r = .192, p = .027), whereas rejecting responsibility negatively correlated with it (r = -.227, p = .009). Taken together, the present findings suggest that accepting (vs. rejecting) responsibility after expressing racial stereotypes is important for generating negative self-directed affect (e.g., guilt, embarrassment), which should prompt self-regulation in the future.
Natalie Neufeld, Political Psychology Research Group at Stanford University
Monday, June 6, 2022
The Subversion Dilemma: Why Voters Who Cherish Democracy Participate in Democratic Backsliding
ABSTRACT: Around the world, citizens are voting away the democracies they claim to cherish. How is this possible? In this article, we examine whether they do so because they fear that, if they don’t, their opponents might do so first. In an observational study (N=1,973), we find that US partisans who most fear the other party’s willingness to break democratic norms are also those most willing to support breaking these norms themselves. In an experimental study (N=2,543), we use an intervention to reduce these often exaggerated fears. Less fearful partisan then become more supportive of democratic norms. They also become more willing to vote against candidates of their own party who are willing to break these norms. The findings suggest that we can foster democratic stability by strengthening trust in opposing partisans’ commitment to democracy.
Gabe Lenz, Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley