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Travel bans were a globally prevalent policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, travel bans against China and European countries proved a broadly popular mitigation tool among Americans. Why did Americans support COVID-19 travel bans? We fielded two novel survey experiments, surveying 3000 American citizens across five waves (between March 2020 and March 2021). In randomizing the country of origin of those potentially subject to travel ban measures, we find consistent evidence that racial attitudes drive support for travel bans. The strength of this relationship varies across political parties and across hypothetical target countries but is not explained by objective caseloads that change across countries and over the course of the pandemic.

Electoral rules can affect who wins and who loses elections. Most cities select office holders through plurality rule, but an alternative, ranked-choice voting (RCV), has become increasingly popular. RCV requires voters to rank candidates, instead of simply selecting their most preferred candidate. Observers debate whether RCV will cure a variety of electoral ills or undermine representation. We test the effect of RCV on voter’s choices and perceptions of representation using survey experiments with large, representative samples of respondents. We find that candidates of color are significantly penalized in both plurality and RCV elections, with no significant difference between the rule types. However, providing respondents with candidates’ partisan affiliation significantly increases support for candidates of color.

It is widely agreed that dissatisfaction with Supreme Court decisions harms the Court’s standing among the public. However, we do not yet know how or why Court performance affects legitimacy. We examine the role that mass perceptions of the Supreme Court’s institutional nature—particularly how “political” it is—plays in assessments of its legitimacy. We find that policy disagreement with Supreme Court decisions causes individuals to view that decision, and the Court itself, as being political in nature. We then show that the more political people think the Court is, the less legitimate they consider it to be. In this way, we show that policy disagreement with decisions strongly and directly reduces Court legitimacy.

Policy Points Mass vaccination is essential for bringing the COVID-19 pandemic to a close, yet substantial disparities remain between whites and racial and ethnic minorities within the United States. Online messaging campaigns featuring expert endorsements are a low-cost way to increase vaccine awareness among minoritized populations, yet the efficacy of same-race/ethnicity expert messaging in increasing uptake remains unknown. Our preregistered analysis of an online vaccine endorsement campaign, which randomly varied the racial/ethnic identity of the expert, revealed no evidence that information from same race/ethnicity experts affected vaccine interest or the intention to vaccinate. Our results do not rule out the possibility that other low-cost endorsement campaigns may be more effective in increasing vaccine uptake, but do suggest that public health campaigns might profitably focus on issues of access and convenience when targeting minoritized populations in the United States.The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has been unequally experienced across racial and ethnic groups. Mass vaccination is the most effective way to bring the pandemic to an end and to manage its public health consequences. But the racialization of public health delivery in the United States has produced a sizable racial/ethnic gap in vaccination rates. Closing this gap in vaccine uptake is therefore essential to ending the pandemic.We conducted a preregistered, well-powered (N = 2,117) between-subjects survey experiment, fielded March 24 to April 5, 2021, in which participants from YouGov's online panel-including oversamples of Black (n = 471), Hispanic/Latino/a (n = 430), and Asian American (n = 319) participants-were randomly assigned to see COVID-19 vaccine information endorsed by same- or different-race/ethnicity experts or to a control condition. We then measured respondents' vaccination intentions, intention to encourage others to get vaccinated, and interest in learning more information and sharing information with others.Same-race/ethnicity expert endorsements had no measurable effect on nonwhite or white respondents' willingness to get the COVID-19 vaccine, to encourage others to get the vaccine, or to learn more or share information with others.Our study provides empirical evidence suggesting online endorsements from same-race/ethnicity experts do not increase vaccine interest, advocacy, or uptake, though same-race/ethnicity endorsements may be effective in other venues or mediums.

The partisan politics and polarized messaging surrounding COVID-19 have attracted wide interest. We present the findings of a novel survey experiment, fielded March 21-23, 2020, on a nationally-representative sample of Americans. We found no statistically significant effects of partisan endorsements or messaging from President Trump on a wide range of health behaviors and policy attitudes. We speculate on potential explanations for these null results, such as America's saturated media environment or heterogeneous effects by party. Our results suggest that priming experiments face serious obstacles when implemented at the same time as a national crisis is unfolding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Objective To study the U.S. public’s health behaviors, attitudes, and policy opinions about COVID-19 in the earliest weeks of the national health crisis (March 20–23, 2020). Method We designed and fielded an original representative survey of 3,000 American adults between March 20–23, 2020 to collect data on a battery of 38 health-related behaviors, government policy preferences on COVID-19 response and worries about the pandemic. We test for partisan differences COVID-19 related policy attitudes and behaviors, measured in three different ways: party affiliation, intended 2020 Presidential vote, and self-placed ideological positioning. Our multivariate approach adjusts for a wide range of individual demographic and geographic characteristics that might confound the relationship between partisanship and health behaviors, attitudes, and preferences. Results We find that partisanship—measured as party identification, support for President Trump, or left-right ideological positioning—explains differences in Americans across a wide range of health behaviors and policy preferences. We find no consistent evidence that controlling for individual news consumption, the local policy environment, and local pandemic-related deaths erases the observed partisan differences in health behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. In further analyses, we use a LASSO regression approach to select predictors, and find that a partisanship indicator is the most commonly selected predictor across the 38 dependent variables that we study. Conclusion Our analysis of individual self-reported behavior, attitudes, and policy preferences in response to COVID-19 reveals that partisanship played a central role in shaping individual responses in the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic. These results indicate that partisan differences in responding to a national public health emergency were entrenched from the earliest days of the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of all Americans, but the severity of the pandemic has been experienced unevenly across space and time. Some states saw sharp rises in COVID-19 cases in early March, whereas case counts rose much later in the rest of the country. In this article, we examine the relationship between exposure to COVID-19 and citizens’ views on what type of measures are required to deal with the crises, and how experience with and exposure to COVID-19 is associated with greater partisan polarization. We find consistent evidence of partisan divergence in pandemic response policy preferences across the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic: Republicans support national control measures whereas Democrats support welfare policies, and interparty differences grow over time. We find only limited evidence that exposure or experience moderates these partisan differences. Our findings are consistent with the view that Americans’ interpret the COVID-19 pandemic in fundamentally partisan manner, and that objective pandemic conditions play at most a minor role in shaping mass preferences.

Voters use heuristics to help them make decisions when they lack information about political choices. Candidate appearance operates as a powerful low-information cue. However, widely held stereotypes mean that reliance on such a heuristic can reduce support for candidates of color. We argue that racial prejudices are more likely to dominate decision making when electoral environments require voters to expend more cognitive resources—such as when they must choose multiple candidates at once. Using two experiments we find that black candidates receive less support from cognitively taxed voters than from voters who have the cognitive space to intentionally limit their prejudices when voting. We also reveal that this pattern is particularly evident among ideologically liberal voters. Respondents who profess politically liberal views support black candidates more often than white candidates when the cognitive task is simple but are less likely to do so when they are cognitively taxed.

Terrorist attacks can instigate widespread and long-lasting fear. Mass media can enforce fear by framing the events and affecting their perceptions. We implemented a news experiment to investigate the fear-triggering effects of different types of terrorist threats. We manipulated the type of terrorist group in three scenarios: a homegrown Islamist group, a foreign Islamist group, and a domestic far-right group. The fourth group served as the control group. The data were collected in early 2017 from Finland (N= 2024), Norway (N= 2063), Spain (N= 2000), France (N= 2003), and the United States (N= 2039). The results showed that in Finland and France, fear was higher in groups primed with jihadist scenarios. Ethnic intolerance was associated with fear related to jihadist news across all of the countries. Institutional trust was positively associated with fear, whereas interpersonal trust was negatively associated when significant. Moreover, highly neurotic individuals were likely to fear more across the cultural context or threat type. The results support previous studies on two cross-culturally merging dimensions of personality and emotions; neuroticism, and negative affect., This study was funded by The Research Council of Norway.

Political scientists have increasingly looked to the role that disgust plays in shaping public opinion and attitudes. This emotion plays an important role in building and reinforcing boundaries in the polity. It is particularly important in shaping attitudes toward gay rights. We analyze data from the 1993 American National Election Studies (ANES) data and two original studies. We find that disgust is a powerful but contingent rhetorical tool. It can powerfully shape public attitudes, especially on issues of sexual purity, but that efficacy must come with a strong caveat: our findings show that some members of the public will reject disgust rhetoric as an indignant reaction against the speaker.

While higher education is associated with healthy lifestyles and health literacy, it remains unclear whether education shapes reactions to varying levels of genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this study, participants (N = 701) in the National Genetic Risk Survey Experiment (NGRISE) received a hypothetical genetic risk assessment for AD (ranging from 20 to 80% lifetime risk) and then completed items on their cognitive (perceived threat to health), emotional (general negative affect), and anticipated behavioral (seek information, improve health behaviors, engage in public or private civic action) reactions to this risk. Individuals with a college education showed reactions to increasing genetic risk approximately twice or several times as strong relative to those of individuals with lower (high school, HS) education. In fact, behavioral reactions do not significantly increase with AD risk among those with HS education. Some educational differences in risk response widen at older ages.

Political persuasion relies on emotion. Emotions grab people’s attention and can be a starting point for changing minds. Positive emotions tend to reinforce standing dispositions and encourage us to proceed as usual, but often politics and political science research involve negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, disgust, and shame. Where anxiety leads people to consider new information, most research suggests that anger does not facilitate this process of reconsideration and thus can make persuasion more difficult. Emotions like anger, shame, and enthusiasm all underlie the decision to participate in politics and can motivate voting while hatred can lead to support for violence. The chapter ends by considering how different research designs can uncover the effects of multiple, competing emotions, how emotions matter in small group discussion and how emotions color the acceptance of news.

We examine the role that mass perceptions of the Supreme Court’s institutional nature—particularly how “political” it is—plays in assessments of its legitimacy. In a series of original studies, we find that policy disagreement with Supreme Court decisions leads individuals to view that decision, and the Court itself, as being political in nature. We then show that the more political people think the Court is, the less legitimate they consider it to be. In this way, we show that policy disagreement with decisions strongly and directly reduces Court legitimacy.

Whether the threat is terrorism, immigration, infectious disease, or the economy, American political life is often frightening, and 2016 is no exception. Recent terrorist attacks in Europe and the ...

The appropriateness of experiments for studying causal mechanisms is well established. However, the ability of an experiment to isolate the effect of emotion has received less attention, and in this letter we lay out a guide to manipulating and tracing the impact of emotions. Some experimental manipulations are straightforward. Manipulating an emotion like anxiety is less obvious. There is no magic “political anxiety pill” and placebo that can be randomly assigned to participants. While the magic political anxiety pill is still elusive, we advocate using multiple manipulations, extensive pretesting, and mediation models. These approaches have allowed us to situate a discrete emotional experience in a complex political environment.

Despite dramatic progress in winning election to political office, women remain underrepresented at all levels of government in the USA. A great deal of research has focused on institutional barriers to equal representation, particularly at the city level. Yet, the findings have been inconsistent across studies and little attention has been paid to the possible mechanisms that might account for the relationships between institutions and representation. In this paper, we focus on one particularly well-studied institution – the method of election for city councilors. We use a decade of candidate-level data from a single, large state (California) to show that women are significantly advantaged in district (versus at-large) elections and in city clerkships compared with mayoralties and council positions. We suggest that this may be the result of the competitiveness of elections, the status of the offices, and gender stereotypes. We offer support for this argument by analyzing the proportion of women elected t...

Politics is often frightening, whether because of a terrorist attack, a public health outbreak, or an immigration crisis. In this essay, we argue that when politics is threatening, an anxious public wants to feel protected. In turn, the public support leaders and policies they believe will keep them safe. In a world made threatening by terrorism, politicians may be all too eager to amplify alarm bells in order to promote their preferred policies. We hope that the election season means Americans will see some contestation over the best way to keep us safe.

Medical sociologists contend that we are living in an era of surveillance medicine, in which the emphasis on risk blurs the lines between health and disease. Yet, data to examine these claims are generally drawn from patients, raising questions about whether this modern experience of medical risk extends beyond the clinic to healthy people in the larger population. We use the specific case of genetic risk to construct a survey experiment designed to induce the conditions theorized by surveillance medicine. Each respondent in a nationally representative sample (N = 2,100) was assigned a genetic risk (20%, 30% … 80%) for a disease (colon cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease) and asked about many potential reactions. We find that people in the general population-regardless of health status or family history-respond to hypothetical genetic risk information by wanting to take action, and their reactions are stronger in domains related to self and family than to community and polity.

Journalists, candidates, and scholars believe that images, particularly images of war, affect the way that the public evaluates political leaders and foreign policy itself, but there is little direct evidence on the circumstances under which political elites can use imagery to enhance their electoral chances. Using National Election Studies (NES) panel data as well as two experiments, this article shows that, contrary to concerns about the manipulative power of imagery, the effect of evocative imagery can enhance candidate evaluations across partisan lines when they originate from the news but are more limited when they are used for persuasive purposes. By looking over time, the three data sets demonstrate different circumstances in which terrorism images have different effects on candidate evaluations—crisis versus non-crisis times and through news exposure versus direct use by a candidate. The NES data reveal that exposure to watching the World Trade Center fall on television increased positive evaluati...

In this article, we use the issue of immigration to explore the role of anxiety in responses to political appeals. According to previous literature, anxiety motivates citizens to learn and pay more attention to news coverage. Literature in psychology demonstrates that anxiety is associated with a tendency to pay closer attention to threatening information. We predict that anxious citizens will seek more information but that they will seek out and be attracted to threatening information. In an experiment, we induce anxiety about immigration and then subjects have the opportunity to search for additional information in a website designed to mimic online news sources. The website has both immigration and nonimmigration stories, and the immigration stories are split between threatening coverage and nonthreatening coverage. We find that anxious subjects exhibit biased information processing; they read, remember, and agree with threatening information.

Selling Fear is a must read for scholars of the mass media, public opinion, and terrorism. The book matches extensive content analysis of television coverage of the war on terrorism with public opi...

This paper uses the elections of 1980 to 2004 to illustrate that political candidates from opposing parties face different incentives in mentioning foreign policy during campaigns and in taking foreign policy positions. The paper demonstrates that citizens connect their own foreign policy views clearly to their evaluations of Republican candidates, but these same foreign policy opinions are much less likely to affect evaluations of the Democratic party and Democratic candidates. In addition, this paper reveals another significant asymmetry—in a threatening environment, Americans reward candidates and parties perceived to hold hawkish positions but even more severely punish candidates perceived to be dovish. Using two datasets, I find that Americans’ opinions on defense spending and diplomacy mattered significantly for the type of political leadership the public preferred at election time.

In this paper, I argue that the features of the media environment after 9/11, particularly the media’s emphasis on threatening information and evocative imagery, increased the public’s probability of supporting the policies advocated by political leaders, principally the president. Using the National Election Studies 2000–2004 panel and a controlled, randomized experiment, I demonstrate that citizens form significantly different foreign policy views when the information environment is emotionally powerful than when it is free of emotion, even when the factual information is exactly the same. Citizens concerned about terrorism are more likely to adopt the hawkish foreign policy views communicated in threatening news stories when that policy is matched with fear-inducing cues than when it is not. These findings suggest that the role of the media is broader than simply providing a conduit for elites to speak to the public; the media influences the public through their own means as well.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. Bertrand Russell Contemporary American political life abounds with crises and worry. Terrorist attacks, a warming planet, and flu pandemics all trigger the public's anxieties. Meanwhile, politicians use fears of economic downturns and cultural changes to evoke the public's worries about immigration. Given that politics often involves anxiety, in this book, we ask how and when is anxiety successful at causing citizens to engage with politics? In addition, we ask what is the substance of that political engagement? Political thinkers and democratic theorists express concern that anxiety may undercut citizens’ abilities to make rational political choices, yet recent research from political science and psychology paints a more hopeful picture of anxiety, suggesting that political fears may lead to more knowledgeable and trusting citizens. Our theoretical contribution reconciles the normatively attractive portrait of anxiety in recent political science literature with the uses of fear in contemporary politics. We use four policy areas to test how anxiety shapes citizens’ engagement with political information and political trust. Together, these components paint a fuller picture of the ways that anxiety shapes political life than accounts that either simply vilify or praise the role of emotion in politics. Anxiety does not preclude man or nation from acting or thinking sanely, but “under the influence of great fear” the public is likely to support protective policies that may undercut democracy. Throughout the course of the book, we find that political anxiety systematically shapes citizen engagement by encouraging attention to politics and increasing acceptance of leaders and policies framed as able to protect the public. Political anxiety leads citizens to learn more about politics, but anxious citizens are systematically drawn to threatening news. Political anxiety increases trust in political actors, but trust is confined to those actors seen as useful for handling the source of the anxiety. Political anxiety makes people more likely to take protective policy positions, and the dominant protective policies are shaped both by partisanship of individuals and the partisan politics around the issues. An anxious politics both helps citizens to reach a democratic ideal of an informed, interested polity and leaves the public open to manipulation. In this chapter, we consider what this book contributes to the study of political psychology and emotion in public life. We also reflect on when anxiety strengthens democracy and when it may undermine democracy.

Emotions matter in politics - enthusiastic supporters return politicians to office, angry citizens march in the streets, a fearful public demands protection from the government. Anxious Politics explores the emotional life of politics, with particular emphasis on how political anxieties affect public life. When the world is scary, when politics is passionate, when the citizenry is anxious, does this politics resemble politics under more serene conditions? If politicians use threatening appeals to persuade citizens, how does the public respond? Anxious Politics argues that political anxiety triggers engagement in politics in ways that are potentially both promising and damaging for democracy. Using four substantive policy areas (public health, immigration, terrorism, and climate change), the book seeks to demonstrate that anxiety affects how we consume political news, who we trust, and what politics we support. Anxiety about politics triggers coping strategies in the political world, where these strategies are often shaped by partisan agendas.

This is a time when we're faced, not with a nation that is – that is extraordinarily secure in a very, very calm world. We're facing a very dangerous world. Mitt Romney, 2011, New Hampshire GOP Primary Debate Politicians regularly sound alarm bells. To listen to contemporary political debates, immigrants are taking hard-working Americans’ jobs, terrorists are getting past our defenses, and we are irreversibly destroying our environment for future generations. It is a very dangerous world. If we think back to two of the most memorable presidential advertisements, LBJ's 1964 Daisy ad and the 1988 Willie Horton ad, both have strong elements of fear. The Daisy ad confronts viewers with a nuclear war while the Willie Horton ad warns of a world where lax law enforcement allows dangerous criminals out on weekend passes. Both ads are designed to scare viewers and urge them to choose the safer option. Our purpose here is not to evaluate the veracity of any particular threats but to evaluate how people react to political alarms. In previous chapters, we explored the effects of anxiety on learning and trust and found that anxiety biases learning and the kinds of leaders that we trust in systematic ways. So far, we have not addressed the basic public opinion question – what sorts of policies do anxious people support? This final empirical chapter is devoted to the attitudinal consequences of anxiety. We argue that anxiety can trigger support for protective measures. In each section, we draw specific hypotheses about how protection is manifest across the four policy areas: public health, immigration, terrorism, and climate change. Policies can be considered protective based on the quality of the policy, because political leaders frame them as such, or because few opposing policies effectively challenge them. These four cases provide examples of policy areas with clear best protective practices (public health) and where elite frames shape views of what constitutes protection (immigration, terrorism, climate change). These policies also vary in their connection to partisan politics. How to tackle disease outbreaks is less contentious on partisan grounds than is the best way to stem illegal immigration flows or prevent future terrorist attacks, where “best practices” tend to depend on the party advocating the policy. In three of the policy areas (immigration, terrorism, climate change), one party's ownership creates an advantage for its preferred protective policy.

Collection and especially analysis of open-ended survey responses are relatively rare in the discipline and when conducted are almost exclusively done through human coding. We present an alternative, semiautomated approach, the structural topic model (STM) (Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi 2013; Roberts et al. 2013), that draws on recent developments in machine learning based analysis of textual data. A crucial contribution of the method is that it incorporates information about the document, such as the author's gender, political affiliation, and treatment assignment (if an experimental study). This article focuses on how the STM is helpful for survey researchers and experimentalists. The STM makes analyzing open-ended responses easier, more revealing, and capable of being used to estimate treatment effects. We illustrate these innovations with analysis of text from surveys and experiments.

The aim of this study was to examine public opinion on major policy issues in genetics and genomics, including federal spending on genetic research, the perceived significance of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, and whether clinicians should be involved in direct-to-consumer genetic testing. This was a survey with a nationally representative sample of 2,100 American adults administered by the nonpartisan research firm YouGov in January 2011. The majority of the respondents (57%) believe that the federal government should spend more on genetic research, 82% rank the 2008 antidiscrimination law as “important,” and 65% say that clinicians should be involved in explaining genetic test results (contra the practice of some direct-to-consumer companies). On all three policy issues, gender and political party affiliation were statistically significantly associated with respondents’ views, whereas race/ethnicity and education were less consistently associated with policy opinions. Americans demonstrate widespread support for scientific research on genetics, laws protecting citizens against genetic discrimination, and the need to involve medical professionals in the process of genetic testing. These results are useful for scientists designing research projects, clinicians interacting with patients, professional organizations lobbying for resources, federal agencies setting budget priorities, and legislators designing regulation. Genet Med 16 6, 491–494.