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When individuals evaluate policies, they consider both the policy's content and its endorsers. In this study, we investigate the conditions under which these sometimes competing factors guide preferences. In an effort to combat the spread of COVID-19, American President Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau bilaterally agreed to close their shared border to refugee claimants and asylum seekers. These ideologically opposed leaders endorsing a common policy allows us to test the influence of a well-known foreign neighbor on domestic policy evaluations. With a large cross-national survey experiment, we first find that Canadians and Americans follow ideological positions in evaluating the policy, with right-leaning respondents offering the most support. With an experiment, we reveal how both populations shift their views when told about their neighboring leader's endorsement. Our findings highlight ideologically motivated reasoning across an international border, with broad implications for understanding how individuals weigh a policy's content against its political cues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been renewed interest in recent years in both the foreign perceptions of the United States as well as the foreign policy attitudes of the American public. In this light, it is interesting to observe that there is a substantial body of research on Canadian public opinion toward the United States but relatively little on American public opinion toward Canada. Further, most literature neglects the effect of spatial proximity to the other country on perceptions. This article addresses both shortcomings in the literature. It investigates the mutual perceptions of the Canadian and American publics drawing on public opinion data from both Canada and the US. The explanation of attitudes toward the other country has three main foci: the roles of political party identification and political ideology; the role of spatial proximity to the Canada–US border; and the interactive relationship between political attitudes and border proximity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

People form political attitudes to serve psychological needs. Recent research shows that some individuals have a strong desire to incite chaos when they perceive themselves to be marginalized by society. These individuals tend to see chaos as a way to invert the power structure and gain social status in the process. Analysing data drawn from large-scale representative surveys conducted in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, we identify the prevalence of Need for Chaos across Anglo-Saxon societies. Using Latent Profile Analysis, we explore whether different subtypes underlie the uni-dimensional construct and find evidence that some people may be motivated to seek out chaos because they want to rebuild society, while others enjoy destruction for its own sake. We demonstrate that chaos-seekers are not a unified political group but a divergent set of malcontents. Multiple pathways can lead individuals to 'want to watch the world burn'. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.