Most recent papers:

• Deep Alignment with Country Shrinks the Moral Gap Between Conservatives and Liberals.
  Sanaz Talaifar, William B. Swann.
  Political Psychology. October 26, 2018
  --- - |2 Moral foundations theory suggests that relative to liberals, conservatives care more about values that are believed to bind group members together: loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation. In contrast, we propose that individuals who are deeply aligned (“fused”) with their group should display elevated commitment to group‐oriented moral values, regardless of their political orientation. The results of three studies supported this hypothesis. The tendency for conservatives to endorse the binding foundations more than liberals only emerged among weakly and moderately fused Americans. In fact, liberals strongly fused with the United States endorsed “binding” foundations more than average conservatives and to the same extent as strongly fused conservatives. These results indicate that to fully understand moral prerogatives, one must consider the nature of the connections people form to the group, as well as their political orientation. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 26, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12534   open full text
• Solidarity Not Homogeneity: Constructing a Superordinate Aboriginal Identity That Protects Subgroup Identities.
  Scott D. Neufeld, Michael T. Schmitt.
  Political Psychology. October 26, 2018
  --- - |2 Superordinate identities formed around shared oppression provide political and psychological resources for marginalized groups. However, superordinate identities can also threaten the identities of the subgroups they attempt to bring together. We examined how a superordinate identity was constructed to protect subgroup identities using data from 31 urban Aboriginal participants who strongly identified with both their subgroup (heritage cultures) and superordinate Aboriginal identities. Participants defined the superordinate Aboriginal identity as a fundamentally diverse category where no one subgroup was more representative of the wider category than others. Participants also put their respect for subgroup diversity into practice by regularly engaging with Aboriginal (subgroup) cultures other than their own. Finally, participants felt that representations of the superordinate Aboriginal category should prioritize local cultures. We discuss these findings in relation to research in social psychology on superordinate and subgroup identities, multiculturalism, and collective resistance and provide some suggestions for how this work may be extended. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 26, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12530   open full text
• Fostering Contact After Historical Atrocities: The Potential of Moral Exemplars.
  Marta Witkowska, Marta Beneda, Sabina Čehajić‐Clancy, Michal Bilewicz.
  Political Psychology. October 25, 2018
  --- - |2 Intergroup contact is a known remedy for complicated intergroup relations. At the same time, contact is rare in postconflict settings. In the present article, we examine whether exposure to narratives about moral exemplars (i.e., members of a perpetrator group who acted morally and in opposition to the passivity or aggression displayed by majority) could increase openness to contact among historical adversaries. In Study 1 (N = 73), presenting members of a historical perpetrator group with information about ingroup moral exemplars led to a decrease of prejudice towards individuals from a historical victim group, which, in turn, resulted in higher openness to contact with them. In Study 2 (N = 100) and 3 (N = 92), exposure to narratives about outgroup moral exemplars in a historically victimized group increased openness to contact with members of a perpetrator group. These effects were mediated by a decrease in prejudice (Studies 2 and 3) and by an increase in trust towards historical perpetrators (Study 2). - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 25, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12529   open full text
• Intuitive Political Theory: People’s Judgments About How Groups Should Decide.
  Peter DeScioli, Scott E. Bokemper.
  Political Psychology. October 24, 2018
  --- - |2 Societies must make collective decisions even when citizens disagree, and they use many different political processes to do so. But how do people choose one way to make a group decision over another? We propose that the human mind contains an intuitive political theory about how to make collective decisions, analogous to people’s intuitive theories about language, physics, number, minds, and morality. We outline a simple method for studying people’s intuitive political theory using scenarios about group decisions, and we begin to apply this approach in three experiments. Participants read scenarios in which individuals in a group have conflicting information (Experiment 1), conflicting interests (Experiment 2), and conflicting interests between a majority and a vulnerable minority who have more at stake (Experiment 3). Participants judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. Overall, we find that participants prefer majority‐rule voting over consensus, leadership, and chance when a group has conflicting interests or information. However, participants’ support for voting is considerably diminished when the group includes a vulnerable minority. Hence, participants showed an intuitive understanding of Madison’s concerns about tyranny of the majority. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 24, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12528   open full text
• “Patriotism à la Carte”: Perceived Legitimacy of Collective Guilt and Collective Pride as Motivators for Political Behavior.
  Mark H. White II, Nyla R. Branscombe.
  Political Psychology. October 23, 2018
  --- - |2 Intergroup emotions motivate behavior, yet little is known about how people perceive these emotional experiences in others. In three experiments (Ns = 109, 179, 246), we show that U.S. citizens believe collective guilt is an illegitimate emotional motivator for ingroup political behavior, while collective pride is legitimate. This differential legitimacy is due to the perception that collective guilt violates the norm of group interest, while collective pride adheres to it; those who believe ingroup interests are more important than outgroups’ exhibited this illegitimacy gap. The perception that the intergroup emotion promoted ingroup entitativity mediated the relationship between emotion (pride vs. guilt) and legitimacy; this relationship was especially strong for those high in the belief in the norm of group interest. Collective guilt can have prosocial consequences, yet the perception that it is illegitimate may hinder such consequences from being realized. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 23, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12524   open full text
• Applying Moral Foundations Theory to Identify Terrorist Group Motivations.
  Lindsay Hahn, Ron Tamborini, Eric Novotny, Clare Grall, Brian Klebig.
  Political Psychology. October 22, 2018
  --- - |2 Previous research distinguishing terrorist groups has employed categorical schemes that are (1) ideologically broad and ambiguous (e.g., right‐wing versus left‐wing) or (2) focused on single‐issues (e.g., guns, abortion). Broad schemes often fail to clearly distinguish groups’ motivations, and single‐issue schemes provide no coherent theoretical structure for understanding terrorist behavior. To address these limitations, we applied the conceptual framework of moral foundations theory (MFT) to derive a content‐analytic scheme identifying universal instincts we term “moral motivations.” We then applied this scheme to classify descriptions found in the Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism in the United States, an open‐sourced dataset providing information on terrorist organizations that committed violence on U.S. soil. Analyses examined how terrorist‐group activities are associated with specific moral motivations in order to distinguish dominant motives among different groups. Results showed that extremist right‐wing, religious, and ethno‐nationalist/separatist ideologies were associated with the binding motivations of loyalty, authority, and purity. Extremist left‐wing and single‐issue ideologies were associated with the individualizing motivations of care and fairness. These findings are discussed regarding the value of using MFT’s motivations to distinguish terrorist groups and how describing their moral motivations might advance efforts to curtail their activities. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 22, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12525   open full text
• An Analysis of the Nature and Use of Promigrant Representations in an Antideportation Campaign.
  Caoimhe Ryan, Stephen Reicher.
  Political Psychology. October 19, 2018
  --- - |2 Opposition to immigration and the rejection of migrants have long been of concern to psychologists. While much is known about negative representations of migrants in politics and the media, far less is known about positive representations of migrants and immigration. In this article, we provide an examination of social representations promoting promigrant action in the context of a community campaign opposing the deportation of a woman and her young daughter. The woman, who had come to the United Kingdom from Malawi seven years prior had lost permission to remain following changes to personal circumstances and was facing deportation. Our analysis explores the ways in which the campaign’s mobilization arguments respond to and engage with antimigrant representations. It identifies the importance of categorical representations concerning the nature, norms, and interests of the local community, of the two migrants under threat of deportation, and of those seeking to deport them. Contrary to antimigrant representations, the migrants at the center of the campaign were presented as ingroup members and their potential deportation as a violation of ingroup norms and ingroup interests. Finally, we also identify points of ambivalence in the campaign’s mobilization strategy where arguments reject the ascription but not the nature of negative representations of migrants. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 19, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12526   open full text
• Fired Up by Morality: The Unique Physiological Response Tied to Moral Conviction in Politics.
  Kristin N. Garrett.
  Political Psychology. October 16, 2018
  --- - |2 Studies provide mounting evidence that morally convicted attitudes elicit passionate and unyielding political responses. Questions remain, however, whether these effects occur because moral conviction is another strong, versus a distinctly moral dimension of attitude strength. Building on work in moral psychology and neuroscience, I argue that moral conviction stems from a distinctive mode of mental processing that is tied to automatic affective reactions. Testing this idea using a lab experiment designed to capture self‐reported moral conviction and physiological arousal, I find that conviction about political objects positively predicts arousal evoked by the objects, while attitude extremity and importance do not. These findings suggest that moral conviction items do tap into moral processing, helping to validate the conviction measure. They also illustrate the value of using physiological indicators to study politics, help explain why morally convicted attitudes trigger such fervent responses, and raise normative questions about political conflict and compromise. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 16, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12527   open full text
• Effects of Humor on Intergroup Communication in Intractable Conflicts: Using Humor in an Intergroup Appeal Facilitates Stronger Agreement Between Groups and a Greater Willingness to Compromise.
  Nimrod Nir, Eran Halperin.
  Political Psychology. October 16, 2018
  --- - |2 Overcoming sociopsychological barriers within intergroup communications may bring forth new, practical methods for conflict resolution, particularly crucial for groups engulfed by intractable conflict. This article examines the use of humor—an extremely effective technique of persuasive communication—as one potential route whose potency in resolving intractable conflicts has thus far been neglected. In Study 1, Palestinians who read a message from an “Israeli representative” (conveying the Israeli narrative of the conflict) agreed more with the Israeli perspective once three short humorous asides were added to the original statement. When these humorous asides targeted Jewish‐Israelis, Palestinian‐Israeli participants were more willing to compromise on various aspects of the conflict. In Study 2, Jewish‐Israelis who read a message from a “Palestinian representative” were more agreeable to the Palestinian message (portraying the Palestinian narrative) once three short humorous asides were added to the original statement. When these humorous asides were general in nature (but not when they targeted Palestinian‐Israelis), Jewish‐Israeli participants were more willing to compromise on various aspects of this intractable conflict. These findings further demonstrate the power of psychological barriers in intractable conflicts and the potential of humor to overcome them. Implications and limitations of the current research are discussed. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 16, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12535   open full text
• Fear, Anger, and Voting for the Far Right: Evidence From the November 13, 2015 Paris Terror Attacks.
  Pavlos Vasilopoulos, George E. Marcus, Nicholas A. Valentino, Martial Foucault.
  Political Psychology. October 15, 2018
  --- - |2 The conjecture that negative emotions underpin support for far‐right politics is common among pundits and scholars. The conventional account holds that authoritarian populists catalyze public anxiety about the changing social order and/or deteriorating national economic conditions, and this anxiety subsequently drives up support for the far right. We propose that while emotions do indeed play an independent causal role in support for far‐right parties and policies, that support is more likely built upon the public’s anger rather than fear. This article explores the relative impact of fear and anger in reaction to the 2015 Paris terror attacks on the propensity to vote for the French far‐right party, the Front National, in the 2015 regional elections. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that anger is associated with voting for the Front National, while fear is associated with voting against the Front National. Moreover, anger boosts the Front National vote most powerfully among far‐right and authoritarian voters. On the other hand, fear reduces support for the far right among those same groups. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 15, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12513   open full text
• Narrative Intervention in Interethnic Conflict.
  Rauf Garagozov, Rana Gadirova.
  Political Psychology. October 12, 2018
  --- - |2 This article is rooted in a narrative approach to interethnic conflict which treats them principally as competing stories. On this basis, we examine experimental strategies for narrative intervention in interethnic conflict and potential tools for their reconciliation. Narrative intervention is understood here as a set of actions to identify and disseminate narratives that can reduce negative emotions and attitudes and promote reconciliation between members of conflicting groups. In terms of new solutions, we suggest a method of “Progressive Narrative Transformation” whose key element is the establishment of common points of contact between conflicting narratives and their gradual transformation such that they may converge into a new narrative accepted and shared by both sides. We present different kinds of narratives to evaluate attitudes and emotions among Azerbaijanis, including people displaced from their homes by conflict. Analyzing responses to a “common suffering” narrative, we registered that individuals and groups are able to keep sympathetic attitudes, even implicitly, toward their opponents. Results might enable scholars in conflict resolution and reconciliation to learn how to develop strategies that take advantage of these attributes of the human mind. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 12, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12531   open full text
• Linguistic Complexity, Information Processing, and Public Acceptance of Supreme Court Decisions.
  Thomas G. Hansford, Chelsea Coe.
  Political Psychology. October 10, 2018
  --- - |2 Scholars suggest that judges have an incentive to use complex language to increase support for their deisions. Research on the effects of processing fluency, however, points towards a different set of expectations. Using a survey experiment, we manipulate the complexity of the language conveying two Court decisions and two types of source cue. For the less polarizing of the two decisions, we find that by decreasing processing fluency, complex decision language can both decrease acceptance of the decision and diminish the importance of source cues in arriving at this judgment. Legalistic terminology, however, increases acceptance. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 10, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12497   open full text
• Procedural Fairness, the Economy, and Support for Political Authorities.
  Pedro C. Magalhães, Luís Aguiar‐Conraria.
  Political Psychology. October 05, 2018
  --- - |2 A vast literature in social and organizational psychology suggests that support for authorities is driven both by the outcomes they deliver to people and by the extent to which they employ fair decision making processes. Furthermore, some of that literature describes a process‐outcome interaction, through which the effect of outcome favorability is reduced as process fairness increases. However, very few studies have been conducted to determine whether such interaction is also present in the explanation of support for political authorities. Here, we start by analyzing whether individual perceptions of the political system’s procedural fairness moderate the well‐known individual‐level relationship between perceived economic performance and government approval. Then, we explore the implications of such process‐outcome interaction to the phenomenon of “economic voting,” testing whether impartiality in governance moderates the effect of objective economic performance on aggregate incumbent parties’ support. In both cases, we show that the interaction between processes and outcomes seems to extend beyond the organizational contexts where it has been previously observed, with important implications for the study of political support. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 05, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12500   open full text
• Neighborhood Identity Helps Residents Cope with Residential Diversification: Contact in Increasingly Mixed Neighborhoods of Northern Ireland.
  Clifford Stevenson, Matthew Easterbrook, Lydia Harkin, Niamh McNamara, Blerina Kellezi, Ian Shuttleworth.
  Political Psychology. October 05, 2018
  --- - |2 Research on residential diversification has mainly focused on its negative impacts upon community cohesion and positive effects on intergroup relations. However, these analyses ignore how neighborhood identity can shape the consequences of diversification among residents. Elsewhere, research using the Applied Social Identity Approach (ASIA) has demonstrated the potential for neighborhood identity to provide social and psychological resources to cope with challenges. The current article proposes a novel model whereby these “Social Cure” processes can enable residents to cope with the specific challenges of diversification. We present two studies in support of this model, each from the increasingly religiously desegregated society of postconflict Northern Ireland. Analysis of the 2012 “Northern Ireland Life and Times” survey shows that across Northern Ireland, neighborhood identity impacts positively upon both well‐being and intergroup attitudes via a reduction in intergroup anxiety. A second custom‐designed survey of residents in a newly mixed area of Belfast shows that neighborhood identification predicts increased well‐being, reduced intergroup anxiety, and reduced prejudice independently of group norms and experiences of contact. For political psychologists, our evidence suggests a reformulation of the fundamental question of “what effects do residential mixing have on neighborhoods?” to “how can neighborhood communities support residents to collectively cope with contact?” - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 05, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12510   open full text
• Sensitive Issues, Complex Categories, and Sharing Festivals: Malay Muslim Students’ Perspectives on Interfaith Engagement in Malaysia.
  Elaine F. Fernandez, Adrian Coyle.
  Political Psychology. October 05, 2018
  --- - |2 Within the religiously and ethnically diverse secular state of Malaysia, the ethnic and religious identities of the Malay Muslim majority group are constitutionalized. This, together with the official classification of religious issues as “sensitive,” provides a distinctive context for the political psychological analysis of Islam and interfaith relations. The qualitative study presented in this article examines how Malay Muslims who are students in the United Kingdom perceive and experience engagement with other religious groups in Malaysia. Four focus group interviews were undertaken with 18 participants. Interview transcripts were subjected to thematic analysis. Three themes were developed: “Perceived sociopolitical influences on interfaith engagement in Malaysia”; “Individual and group barriers to engagement with other religious traditions”; and “Potential pathways toward positive interfaith engagement.” These are elaborated and discussed in terms of the social categorization processes used to conceptualize and navigate interfaith relations. It is recommended that future research in the political psychology of religion should attend closely to the complexity of religious groups’ social identities and the implications this might have for recategorization efforts as a means of encouraging and facilitating interfaith contact. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 05, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12501   open full text
• Rousing the Partisan Combatant: Elite Incivility, Anger, and Antideliberative Attitudes.
  Bryan T. Gervais.
  Political Psychology. October 02, 2018
  --- - |2 The claim that elite political incivility can rouse partisan, antideliberative attitudes has many adherents, but the empirical record demonstrating a relationship is surprisingly limited. Yet the extant research suggests that incivility can stimulate aversive feelings, of the sort that discrete and dimensional theories of emotion predict should induce a partisan, antideliberative mode of citizenship among those exposed. Leveraging two online experiments, I address the questions of whether elite incivility provokes anger, rather than enthusiasm and anxiety, and whether the affective reactions induced by incivility yield the changes in deliberative attitudes that theories of emotion predict. I find that elite incivility, when counterattitudinal, rouses anger, which in turn can provoke an active and combative form of partisan citizenship. Despite claims to the contrary, the link between proattitudinal incivility, anger, and antideliberative attitudes is less clear. The results provide insight into the dynamics of discourse in the digital age, when affective polarization is the norm and elites commonly employ uncivil rhetoric. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 02, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12532   open full text
• How the “Northern Irish” National Identity Is Understood and Used by Young People and Politicians.
  Kevin McNicholl, Clifford Stevenson, John Garry.
  Political Psychology. October 02, 2018
  --- - "\nThe conventional understanding of the nation within social psychology is as a category of people or “imagined community.” However, work within the discursive tradition shows that citizens tend to discuss nationhood in a variety of modes, including the use of nonhuman categories such as references to the physical landscape of the country. This article aims to give a more comprehensive overview of how young people understand the Northern Irish identity, a new and potentially inclusive national category in a divided society, and how politicians articulate it in rhetoric. In Study 1, students (N = 286) discussed this identity in 44 peer‐led focus groups. Thematic analysis of their discussions shows four distinct ways in which it is constructed: as a distinctive people, as an identity claim, as a “hot” political project, and as a “cold” or banal indicator of place. In Study 2, Members of the Legislative Assembly at Stormont (N = 49) responded to open‐ended questions about the Northern Irish identity. Each of the parties used different conceptualizations for rhetorical effect. These results give a deeper understanding of the multifaceted nature of national identity and its ability to promote political agendas. \n" - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 02, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12523   open full text
• Political Attitudes and the Processing of Misinformation Corrections.
  Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Li Chang Ang.
  Political Psychology. October 01, 2018
  --- - |2 Abstract Misinformation often continues to influence people’s memory and inferential reasoning after it has been retracted; this is known as the continued influence effect (CIE). Previous research investigating the role of attitude‐based motivated reasoning in this context has found conflicting results: Some studies have found that worldview can have a strong impact on the magnitude of the CIE, such that retractions are less effective if the misinformation is congruent with a person’s relevant attitudes, in which case the retractions can even backfire. Other studies have failed to find evidence for an effect of attitudes on the processing of misinformation corrections. The present study used political misinformation—specifically fictional scenarios involving misconduct by politicians from left‐wing and right‐wing parties—and tested participants identifying with those political parties. Results showed that in this type of scenario, partisan attitudes have an impact on the processing of retractions, in particular (1) if the misinformation relates to a general assertion rather than just a specific singular event and (2) if the misinformation is congruent with a conservative partisanship. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  October 01, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12494   open full text
• How Quickly We Selectively Forget: Experimental Tests of Information Order on Memory and Candidate Evaluation.
  Stephen N. Goggin.
  Political Psychology. September 30, 2018
  --- - |2 Despite enormous variation in the order, positivity, and content of information that real‐world electoral campaigns present to voters, we know little about their interactive role in candidate evaluation. This study presents results from two multiwave experiments that varied the positivity of information, its order, and its personal or policy content and assessed its memorability and impact on evaluations over several days. Consistent with observational evidence, recent information is not only more memorable, but also more impactful, in candidate evaluation. However, these effects on evaluations are asymmetric by the positivity of the information, with negative information more impactful than positive information when it is recent, even though negative information fades more quickly in memory. Furthermore, positive and personal information is more memorable, and positive personal information can serve as a powerful anchor when presented first, diminishing recency effects. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 30, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12499   open full text
• Life History and System Justification: Higher Individual Fertility and Lower Provincial Life Expectancy Correlate With Stronger Progovernment Attitudes in China.
  Jinguang Zhang, Zhijin Zhong.
  Political Psychology. September 24, 2018
  --- - |2 System justification theory posits that people sometimes legitimize current social arrangements at their own cost. Indeed, research showed that lower socioeconomic status (SES) correlates with stronger progovernment attitudes, but this correlation does not appear reliable. This research proposes a different class of correlates of progovernment attitudes drawing on life history (LH) theory. People who pursue a faster LH strategy (e.g., reproducing earlier and in larger quantities) should be more progovernment because their lower resource‐accruing potential makes them more dependent on government support (e.g., public services and social welfare) to raise a large family. Supporting this hypothesis, Chinese respondents’ individual fertility positively correlated with confidence in government (Study 1) and partially mediated the negative correlation between provincial life expectancy and support of censoring government criticisms (Study 2). These findings suggest an alternative explanation to some of the correlations between SES and progovernment attitudes, provide a new mechanism of system justification, and add to the growing body of work on LH strategy and political psychology. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 24, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12498   open full text
• The Scope of Partisan Influence on Policy Opinion.
  Erik Peterson.
  Political Psychology. September 23, 2018
  --- - |2 Politicians often support policies that diverge from public preferences. How effectively can partisan cues lead public opinion in these settings? Using survey experiments that examine how partisan cues affect support for policies that diverge from the initial views of party supporters, I argue for two important limitations on the scope of partisan influence over public opinion. First, while cues from copartisan politicians produce modest increases in the support policy proposals receive, the effect of policy divergence outstrips the effect of cues, constraining elites’ ability to generate support for proposals at odds with public preferences. Second, while partisan cues increase mass partisans’ support for specific policy proposals, they fail to pull the underlying preferences of party supporters toward divergent elite‐endorsed positions. This offers new insight into the mechanisms behind party‐cues effects and demonstrates a check on the influence of partisan elites in a polarized era. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 23, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12495   open full text
• Playing the Woman Card: Ambivalent Sexism in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Race.
  Erin C. Cassese, Mirya R. Holman.
  Political Psychology. September 21, 2018
  --- - |2 Late in the 2016 U.S. Presidential primary, Donald Trump attacked Hillary Clinton for playing the “woman's card.” Theories of system justification suggest that attitudes about gender, particularly endorsement of hostile and benevolent sexism, likely shaped reactions to this campaign attack. Using a set of two studies, we find that hostile sexists exposed to the attack showed increased support for Trump and decreased support for Clinton. Benevolent sexists, however, reacted to Trump's statements with increased support for Clinton, consistent with benevolent sexism's focus on protecting women (Study 1). We further found that the woman card attack produced distinct emotional reactions among those with low and high levels of hostile and benevolent sexism. The attack also increased political participation among hostile sexists (Study 2). Our results offer new insights into the role of sexism in the 2016 presidential contest and further the discipline's understanding of the gendered dimension of negative campaigning. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 21, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12492   open full text
• Issue Information.
  
  Political Psychology. September 21, 2018
  --- - - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 993-994, October 2018.
  

  September 21, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12456   open full text
• Political Psychology, Foreign Policy, and International Politics.
  Robert Jervis, Eliot A. Cohen.
  Political Psychology. September 21, 2018
  --- - - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 1193-1204, October 2018.
  

  September 21, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12491   open full text
• Who Cares If They Need Help? The Deservingness Heuristic, Humanitarianism, and Welfare Opinions.
  Kristina Jessen Hansen.
  Political Psychology. September 19, 2018
  --- - |2 Citizens' welfare opinions are highly susceptible to cues about welfare recipients' deservingness. Extant research argues that this deservingness heuristic is a universal feature of human help‐giving psychology, implying that all citizens, regardless of their values, are evenly affected by deservingness cues. This article suggests that the deservingness heuristic is much more conditional than previously appreciated. Specifically, its influence on welfare opinions is conditioned by humanitarianism: the belief that others in need should be helped. The more people adhere to this value, the more they need information that signals whether others are genuinely needy. Citizens should thus rely more on the deservingness heuristic the stronger their humanitarian values are. I find support for this argument in three survey experiments (two nationally representative), where citizens are exposed to cues that welfare recipients are either lazy (undeserving) or unlucky (deserving). These findings have important implications for our understanding of citizens' welfare opinions. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 19, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12506   open full text
• The Janus of Diversity: May the Ideology of Individual Diversity Rationalize Social Inequalities?
  Tilemachos Iatridis.
  Political Psychology. September 19, 2018
  --- - |2 Some popular ideas about diversity today emphasize the uniqueness and potential in each individual and posit that all differences across individuals count the same as long as they are “true to themselves.” These ideas saturate current antidiscrimination discourses, but their impact on what might be perceived as discrimination has hardly been tested empirically. This article argues that the direction of that impact may not be taken for granted and advances two hypotheses. First, individual diversity (ID) ideology may direct attention to the alleged psychological attributes of minority group members, rather than to social inequalities and discrimination. Secondly, ID ideology may direct attention towards discrimination only if the target is seen as “authentically unique” (the prototype of ID). Both hypotheses were tested and supported in two studies addressing Greek participants' perceptions of immigrant children's difficulties. Study 2 further controlled for possible mediation effects. The discussion suggests that ID ideology might paradoxically rationalize inequalities and discrimination, as well as implicitly raise elitist expectations from minority group members. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 19, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12502   open full text
• Can We Identify with a Nation Low in Morality? The Heavy Weight of (Im)Morality in International Comparison.
  Silvia Moscatelli, Michela Menegatti, Flavia Albarello, Monica Rubini, Felicia Pratto.
  Political Psychology. September 19, 2018
  --- - |2 Research has shown that the perceived morality of the ingroup is a primary source of group pride and ingroup identification. The present research examined whether this is true even when a group has a poor reputation for morality in terms of dishonesty and corruption, such as in the case of Italians. To address this issue, two studies analyzed the role of the three fundamental dimensions of social judgment—morality, competence, and sociability—in predicting Italians’ identification with their nation when the salience of social comparison and the status of the comparison outgroup were varied. Findings showed that perceived morality predicted ingroup identification when participants did not engage in social comparison. Under salient social comparison, individuals based group identification on other dimensions: Perceived sociability was the main predictor of identification when respondents compared with a higher status outgroup (Germans; Study 1; N= 109), whereas perceived competence was the main predictor of identification when participants compared with a lower status outgroup (Romanians; Study 2; N= 121). Overall, findings showed compensation processes in social identification: When social comparison is salient, members of a low morality group base identification on the dimension which allows positive differentiation from the outgroup. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 19, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12504   open full text
• Moral Hazard: German Public Opinion on the Greek Debt Crisis.
  Brian C. Rathbun, Kathleen E. Powers, Therese Anders.
  Political Psychology. September 17, 2018
  --- - |2 The recent Eurozone crisis and negotiations over bailout packages to Greece are more than a simple controversy about financial resources. They have a decidedly moralistic overtone. Giving more funds is thought by some to be unfair to hard‐working taxpayers and does not teach Greece an important moral lesson. Yet much international political economy scholarship neglects such considerations. We build on moral psychology to understand the ethical drivers of both German support and opposition to the 2015 Greek government bailout package. We analyze original survey data to show how morality is an essential factor in Germany’s hard‐line approach. Our results show that caring and European attachment are associated with bailout support, while authority, national attachment, and retributive fairness drive opposition. Some morals also have boundaries: National attachment attenuates the effect of harm/care on support for foreign financial assistance but strengthens the effect of fairness on bailout opposition. Moral psychology helps us understand foreign policy but must be adapted to account for multiple potential ingroups. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 17, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12522   open full text
• Upper‐Body Strength and Political Egalitarianism: Twelve Conceptual Replications.
  Michael Bang Petersen, Lasse Laustsen.
  Political Psychology. September 17, 2018
  --- - |2 Animal models of conflict behavior predict that an organism's behavior in a conflict situation is influenced by physical characteristics related to abilities to impose costs on adversaries. Stronger and larger organisms should be more motivated to seek larger shares of resources and higher places in hierarchies. Previous studies of human males have suggested that measures of upper‐body strength are associated with measures of support for inequality including Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), a measure of individual differences in support for group‐based hierarchies. However, other studies have failed to replicate this association. In this article, we reexamine the link between upper‐body strength and support for inequality using 12 different samples from multiple countries in which relevant measures were available. These samples include student and locally representative samples with direct measures of physical strength and nationally representative samples with self‐reported measures related to muscularity. While the predicted correlation does not replicate for every single available measure of support for inequality, the overall data pattern strongly suggests that for males, but not females, upper‐body strength correlates positively with support for inequality. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 17, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12505   open full text
• How Emotional Frames Moralize and Polarize Political Attitudes.
  Scott Clifford.
  Political Psychology. September 14, 2018
  --- - |2 Moralized issues, such as abortion and same‐sex marriage, are some of the most polarizing and divisive issues in politics. These topics motivate political engagement but present a barrier to democratic resolution. Yet we know little about how some issues become “moral issues” and others do not. In this article, I argue that exposure to persuasive frames, particularly those eliciting anger and disgust, serves to moralize and polarize public opinion. I test these hypotheses across three experiments on emerging debates over food politics. The results consistently show that persuasive frames increase issue moralization and, in turn, facilitate polarization. A panel analysis demonstrates that the effect of a single exposure lasts at least two weeks. Mediation analyses suggest that feelings of disgust and anger help explain how persuasive frames moralize political attitudes, while anger alone seems to explain the polarizing effects of framing. Overall, the findings provide new insight into framing, emotion, and the development of moral issues. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 14, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12507   open full text
• National Identity, Collective Events, and Meaning: A Qualitative Study of Adolescents’ Autobiographical Narratives of Flag Ceremonies in Finland.
  Eerika Finell.
  Political Psychology. September 11, 2018
  --- - |2 Although collective events are central to group identity processes, little is known about how young people experience and remember national ceremonies in which they have participated. This qualitative study analyzes 80 autobiographical narratives written by upper secondary school students about flag ceremonies from their past in Finland. The analysis reveals that the narratives fall into three categories ((Dis)honored, Deserved and Loved Flag) according to how the social context, participants’ actions, narrator’s role, and emotions are described, all of which combine to create a dense web of meanings associated with this common national ceremony. The results also indicate that different group contexts—family and peer group networks and the national context—are inextricably linked in the narratives and that the meanings associated with these contexts tend to fuse. The findings highlight the importance of analyzing national collective events and related autobiographical memories to better understand the sources of national identity’s emotional power. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 11, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12512   open full text
• Encountering Dissimilar Views in Deliberation: Political Knowledge, Attitude Strength, and Opinion Change.
  Kaiping Zhang.
  Political Psychology. September 07, 2018
  --- - |2 Conversing with diverse points of view stands as the central tenet of deliberative democracy, yet empirical evidence has suggested mixed outcomes related to perspective change as a result of deliberative encounters. I propose a difference‐driven model that suggests individual predispositions moderate the processing of dissimilar views when changing policy preferences. My analysis is based on a random sample of over 400 voters at a California‐wide deliberative event, where participants discussed proposals for reforming the state politics. I find that encountering more and different arguments transforms policy attitudes. Yet it is more difficult for people to change their minds on issues about which they hold strong beliefs. Some evidence suggests that different psychologies are at play for people who enter deliberation with substantial or weak political knowledge and for those who deliberate while holding strong or moderate prior opinions. Well‐grounded strong opinions are resistant to change, while well‐grounded moderate opinions are persuadable in deliberative groups. Uninformed positions can become entrenched in like‐minded groups, yet they can be adjusted once participants deliberate with dissimilar views, especially opinions that are held strongly without good informational ground. The findings urge deliberative forums that introduce participants to diverse perspectives to foster a considered public opinion. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 07, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12514   open full text
• Emotion Dysregulation and Military Suicidality Since 2001: A Review of the Literature.
  Elizabeth A. Stanley, Kelsey L. Larsen.
  Political Psychology. September 03, 2018
  --- - |2 Abstract Policy makers and researchers have worked to explain the perplexing rise in U.S. military suicides since 2001, with little progress in explaining this widespread phenomenon. This article synthesizes several literatures to highlight the role of emotion dysregulation in military suicidality. After considering advances in suicidal ideation‐to‐action frameworks and the factors that contribute to the prevalence of emotion dysregulation in the modern U.S. military, it explores how military service provides for two distinct circumstances in which such emotion dysregulation may facilitate the transition from suicidal ideation to behavior. The first circumstance is high distress tolerance, wherein the effects of disproportionately high rates of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) among service‐members may increase vulnerability to suicidal behavior. The second circumstance is preexisting acquired capability with lethal means paired with executive functioning degradation. Empirically associated with military environments, such degradation may undermine the effectiveness of top‐down emotion regulation strategies—thereby allowing acquired familiarity with lethal means to assist the transition from suicidal ideation to action. Thus, emotion dysregulation’s unique relationship with the U.S. military may help to explain the powerful correlation between service and suicide since 2001—suggesting that enhancing emotion regulation skills may present a key leverage point for effectively addressing the issue. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  September 03, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12493   open full text
• History in the Service of Politics: Constructing Narratives of History During the European Refugee “Crisis”.
  Steve Kirkwood.
  Political Psychology. August 31, 2018
  --- - |2 It is common for politicians to refer to “our proud history of supporting refugees,” yet the historical record regarding responses to refugees is not straightforwardly positive. So how is history drawn upon in political debates regarding refugees? Applying discursive psychology, this article analyzes the use of history in five U.K. parliamentary debates that took place from September 2015 to January 2016 on the European refugee “crisis.” The analysis identifies six “functions” of the use of the history: resonance, continuity, reciprocity, posterity, responsibility, and redemption. It shows how references to historical events create narratives regarding the United Kingdom’s history of supporting refugees in order to construct the nation in particular ways, mobilize collective identities, and legitimize or criticize political actions. Specifically, references to the United Kingdom’s role in providing refuge to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany functions as a hegemonic narrative that reinforces the United Kingdom’s “heroic” position and constructs the Syrian conflict as involving an oppressive dictator and innocent refugees in need to help, thereby legitimizing support for Syrian refugees. The analysis demonstrates the flexibility of historical narratives, reformulates the distinction between “psychological” and “rhetorical” uses of historical analogies, and reflects on the social and political implications of such uses of history. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  August 31, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12511   open full text
• The Role of Political Practices in Moral Injury: A Study of Afghanistan Veterans.
  Tine Molendijk.
  Political Psychology. August 29, 2018
  --- - |2 While much research has been conducted on military trauma, conceptualizations of deployment‐related suffering have been predominantly approached through a medical, individual‐focused lens. Since the military is an instrument of the state, it is crucial to expand the conceptual scope to include political processes, particularly for the fast‐growing literature on “moral injury,” which refers to the emotional impact of perpetrating, witnessing, or falling victim to perceived wrongdoing. This article examines the role of political practices in the onset of moral injury as well as the micropolitical responses of morally injured veterans. A study of the Dutch mission in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, shows that decisions and frames at the political level helped create distressing quandaries on the ground and that in all the ways the political leadership acknowledged the problems that veterans subsequently developed, it also maintained a silence on its direct contribution to these problems, as such perpetuating them. Consequently, veterans tried to make the political leadership take a material and symbolic share in their burden. Clearly, moral conflict may exist both in the veteran and between the veteran and the political domain, and therefore, experiences of institutional betrayal and a resultant search for reparations should be included in theory on moral injury. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  August 29, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12503   open full text
• Devoutness to Islam and the Attitudinal Acceptance of Political Violence Among Young Muslims in Germany.
  Andreas Hadjar, David Schiefer, Klaus Boehnke, Wolfgang Frindte, Daniel Geschke.
  Political Psychology. August 24, 2018
  --- - |2 This article investigates the links between religious beliefs and capitalist mentalities—namely devoutness to Islam and hierarchic self‐interest (HSI)—and violence‐accepting attitudes among the young Muslim migrant population in Germany. Following a situational perspective, these links are analyzed under different individual conditions structured by (socioeconomic) precariousness and education. Based on framing approaches and concepts from socialization theory, we derive the following hypothesis: The links between religious beliefs and capitalist mentalities and the attitudinal acceptance of violence are stronger among individuals with low levels of education and a precarious economic status (compared to high education/nonprecarious status). The strongest link is expected for a negative status inconsistency (high education/precarious economic status). Structural equation models for data from a random probability sample of 350 Muslims (aged 14–32 years) in Germany indicate that attitudinal acceptance of violence among young Muslims is not predicted by devoutness to Islam but by economic precariousness and by acceptance of capitalist values of the HSI belief system. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  August 24, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12508   open full text
• Partisanship, Political Knowledge, and the Dunning‐Kruger Effect.
  Ian G. Anson.
  Political Psychology. April 02, 2018
  --- - |2 A widely cited finding in social psychology holds that individuals with low levels of competence will judge themselves to be higher achieving than they really are. In the present study, I examine how the so‐called “Dunning‐Kruger effect” conditions citizens' perceptions of political knowledgeability. While low performers on a political knowledge task are expected to engage in overconfident self‐placement and self‐assessment when reflecting on their performance, I also expect the increased salience of partisan identities to exacerbate this phenomenon due to the effects of directional motivated reasoning. Survey experimental results confirm the Dunning‐Kruger effect in the realm of political knowledge. They also show that individuals with moderately low political expertise rate themselves as increasingly politically knowledgeable when partisan identities are made salient. This below‐average group is also likely to rely on partisan source cues to evaluate the political knowledge of peers. In a concluding section, I comment on the meaning of these findings for contemporary debates about rational ignorance, motivated reasoning, and political polarization. - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 1173-1192, October 2018.
  

  April 02, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12490   open full text
• Is Political Conservatism Adaptive? Reinterpreting Right‐Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation as Evolved, Sociofunctional Strategies.
  Jeffrey S. Sinn, Matthew W. Hayes.
  Political Psychology. April 02, 2018
  --- - |2 The Dual Process Model (DPM) explains prejudice and political conservatism as functions of Right‐Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and a Social Dominance Orientation (SDO; Duckitt, 2001). From an evolutionary perspective, such orientations may represent specific adaptations to coalitional competition in the ancestral environment (Sinn & Hayes, 2016). Supporting this view, recent research suggests the two orientations represent divergent strategies, with RWA pursuing an honest‐cooperator strategy and SDO a deceptive, cooperation‐mimicking strategy (Heylen & Pauwels, 2015). In two studies, we examine additional evidence for an adaptationist interpretation of DPM. Utilizing life history theory, Study 1 finds that RWA reflects the predicted “slow” strategy by endorsing planning and control, investment in family relationships, altruism, and religiosity. In contrast, SDO reflects a “fast” strategy by devaluing planning and control, secure relationships, and altruism. Utilizing rank management theory, Study 2 finds that RWA reflects a prosocial orientation, endorsing coalition building and social networking while rejecting deception and manipulation. In contrast, SDO reflects an exploitive orientation, rejecting coalition building and networking but endorsing ruthless self‐advancement and deceptive tactics. These findings support an adaptationist revision of RWA to recognize its prosocial, honest‐cooperator dimension and of SDO to recognize proself, “dark” tactics seeking power within groups. - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 1123-1139, October 2018.
  

  April 02, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12475   open full text
• Republican Voters Prefer Candidates Who Have Conservative‐Looking Faces: New Evidence From Exit Polls.
  Christopher Y. Olivola, Dustin Tingley, Alexander Todorov.
  Political Psychology. March 25, 2018
  --- - |2 Research shows people share common political facial stereotypes: They associate faces with political ideologies. Moreover, given that many voters rely on party affiliation, political ideology, and appearances to select political candidates, we might expect that political facial stereotypes would sway voting preferences and, by extension, the share of votes going to each candidate in an election. And yet few studies have examined whether having a stereotypically conservative‐looking (or liberal‐looking) face predicts a candidate's vote shares. Using data from U.S. election exit polls, we show that the Republican voters within each state are more likely to vote for a candidate (even a Democrat) the more that person has a stereotypically Republican‐looking face. By contrast, the voting choices of the Democratic voters within each state are unrelated to political facial stereotypes. Moreover, we show that the relationship between political facial stereotypes and voting does not depend on state‐level ideology: Republican voters in both right‐leaning (“red”) and left‐leaning (“blue”) states are more likely to vote for candidates with conservative‐looking faces. These results have several important practical and theoretical implications concerning the nature and impact of political facial stereotypes, which we discuss. - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 1157-1171, October 2018.
  

  March 25, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12489   open full text
• Does the Awareness of Mortality Shape People's Openness to Violence and Conflict? An Examination of Terror Management Theory.
  Matteo Vergani, Kerry S. O'Brien, Peter Lentini, Greg Barton.
  Political Psychology. March 12, 2018
  --- - |2 Terror management theory (TMT) proposes that evoking death‐related thoughts (mortality salience; MS) in individuals or groups can lead to stronger worldview defence and greater support for extremist violence. In three experiments, we tested whether an MS manipulation, and associated moderators, increased support for extremist violence. In Australian university students, Study 1 found no statistically significant main or moderated effects for MS on measures of extremist violence. However, participants exposed to the MS manipulation reported increases in conservative religiosity (belief in divine power). In Study 2, the MS manipulation had no significant effect on support for extremist violence for Australian university students primed with an antiviolent extremism norm. And in young Australian Jewish people (Study 3), the MS manipulation did not increase support for violence against migrants. However, there was an increase in support for policies that act to fight against violent extremism in Iraq and Syria in those exposed to the MS manipulation. Across three studies, we find little support for the hypothesis that MS results in increased support for violent extremism. Larger more methodological sound studies are needed to address inconsistencies in the evidence surrounding TMT and the MS hypothesis, at least in regards to violence and extremism. - Political Psychology, EarlyView.
  

  March 12, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12488   open full text
• The Greek Referendum Vote of 2015 as a Paradoxical Communicative Practice: A Narrative, Future‐Making Approach.
  Anneke Sools, Sofia Triliva, Eva Fragkiadaki, Manolis Tzanakis, Theofilos Gkinopoulos.
  Political Psychology. March 12, 2018
  --- - |2 This article adopts a pragmatic‐communicative approach, derived from Gregory Bateson's cybernetic theory, to the Greek Referendum Vote of 2015. Applying this approach, we interpret the Referendum as a double‐bind situation. Our research question is twofold: (1) How do potential Greek voters discursively construct the Referendum? (2) How do they respond to the communicative situation posed? A total of 124 written narratives, “Letters from the Future,” written by 99 participants, were collected during the days prior to the vote. Their letters focused on a desired future situation after a YES or a NO vote outcome. Qualitative analysis showed how the letters were used to appropriate the Referendum query in a unique and deeply personalized manner. Moreover, we identified four types of responses to the ambivalent query: confirmation, rejection, disconfirmation, and meta‐communication. These responses are indicative of the psychological and emotional burden posed by the query and of ways people responded to the query. In conclusion, we reflect on the importance of recognizing the psychological dimension of the vote, the role of narratives from the future for personal and social transformation, and the wider relevance of the proposed future‐making, pragmatic approach to other Referendum situations. - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 1141-1156, October 2018.
  

  March 12, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12474   open full text
• Who Is Afraid of the Chinese State? Evidence Calling into Question Political Fear as an Explanation for Overreporting of Political Trust.
  Daniela Stockmann, Ashley Esarey, Jie Zhang.
  Political Psychology. February 06, 2018
  --- - |2 Public opinion polls show that political trust tends to be higher in authoritarian regimes compared to liberal democracies. Many scholars have argued that respondents may provide false answers out of fear about repercussions by the state, thereby skewing survey results in a positive direction. Using an unobtrusive measure based on affect transfer, we find that adult participants in experiments conducted in China transfer positive affect toward the state onto evaluations of television advertisements upon mere exposure to the name of a central party institution. Participants did not have incentives to lie because they did not associate the advertisements with the state. Furthermore, people who evaluated the ads more positively upon viewing the name of the state also reported more positive levels of trust in government. Together, these findings raise doubt that Chinese misrepresent political trust in surveys out of political fear. - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 1105-1121, October 2018.
  

  February 06, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12471   open full text
• Changing Identities to Change the World: Identity Motives in Lifestyle Politics and Its Link to Collective Action.
  Maria Fernandes‐Jesus, Maria Luísa Lima, José‐Manuel Sabucedo.
  Political Psychology. February 06, 2018
  --- - |2 In this article, we assume an interdisciplinary approach to the study of why and how people transpose political considerations to their lifestyles. Our aims are threefold: to understand the meanings and perceptions of people engaged in lifestyle politics and collective action; to examine the motives guiding individual change; and to explore the linkage processes between lifestyle politics and collective action. Identity process theory is considered as a lens to examine the processes and the motives of identity via a thematic analysis of 22 interviews. This study combined interviews with people seeking social change through their lifestyles with interviews with members of action groups and social movements. We found that each participant's identity is guided by identity motives such as distinctiveness, continuity, and psychological coherence. Besides, lifestyle politics is evaluated as an effective way to bring about social change, depending on the individual experience of perceived power to bring about change through collective action. Overall, lifestyle politics states the way in which the participants decided to live, to construct their identities, and to represent their beliefs about the right thing to do. Lifestyle politics complements collective action as a strategy to increase the potential of bringing about social change. The implications of this research are discussed in relation to the importance of understanding the processes of identity and lifestyle change in the context of social, environmental, and political change. - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 1031-1047, October 2018.
  

  February 06, 2018   doi: 10.1111/pops.12473   open full text
• Finding the Loch Ness Monster: Left‐Wing Authoritarianism in the United States.
  Lucian Gideon Conway, Shannon C. Houck, Laura Janelle Gornick, Meredith A. Repke.
  Political Psychology. December 21, 2017
  --- - |2 Although past research suggests authoritarianism may be a uniquely right‐wing phenomenon, the present two studies tested the hypothesis that authoritarianism exists in both right‐wing and left‐wing contexts in essentially equal degrees. Across two studies, university (n = 475) and Mechanical Turk (n = 298) participants completed either the RWA (right‐wing authoritarianism) scale or a newly developed (and parallel) LWA (left‐wing authoritarianism) scale. Participants further completed measurements of ideology and three domain‐specific scales: prejudice, dogmatism, and attitude strength. Findings from both studies lend support to an authoritarianism symmetry hypothesis: Significant positive correlations emerged between LWA and measurements of liberalism, prejudice, dogmatism, and attitude strength. These results largely paralleled those correlating RWA with identical conservative‐focused measurements, and an overall effect‐size measurement showed LWA was similarly related to those constructs (compared to RWA) in both Study 1 and Study 2. Taken together, these studies provide evidence that LWA may be a viable construct in ordinary U.S. samples. - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 1049-1067, October 2018.
  

  December 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12470   open full text
• Implementation Intentions, Information, and Voter Turnout: An Experimental Study.
  Cameron D. Anderson, Peter J. Loewen, R. Michael McGregor.
  Political Psychology. December 21, 2017
  --- - |2 Are citizens more likely to vote when they are asked to make plans about how they will cast their ballots? Such planning—typically described as “implementation intentions”—has been shown to increase many types of desirable behaviors, including exercising and healthy eating, receiving vaccinations, physical rehabilitation, and recycling. Important earlier work in political science suggests voter turnout can also be influenced by implementation intention interventions, whereby electors are prompted to “make a plan” to vote (Nickerson & Rogers, ), though this finding has gone largely unreplicated. At the same time, elections management bodies (EMBs) in many contexts regularly conduct informational campaigns in the period leading up to elections, though little is known about the effects of such efforts upon turnout. Using data from an online experiment conducted at the time of the 2015 Canadian Federal Election, we demonstrate that implementation intention interventions can improve voter turnout but that this effect is conditional upon electors being exposed to informational materials about how to vote in the election. When survey respondents were provided with information on voting requirements and methods, and then prompted with questions forcing them to contemplate the act of casting their ballots, we observe a sizable increase in turnout rates. - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 1089-1103, October 2018.
  

  December 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12467   open full text
• When Does Sexuality‐Based Discrimination Motivate Political Participation?
  Douglas Page.
  Political Psychology. December 13, 2017
  --- - |2 The established consensus in political behavior research is that discrimination by political institutions motivates marginalized groups to vote and protest their conditions. However, existing studies miss a comparison between states with high and low levels of political discrimination, and they miss a comparison between states before and after the development of opportunities for groups to mobilize. In particular, a growing body of research shows that sexual‐minority groups face discrimination to varying degrees across Europe. Sexual minorities in states with high levels of discrimination lack the support of other minority‐group members, which encourages political participation. The analysis is based on surveys of 30 European countries, conducted before and after the 2004 European Union enlargement, which provided a stronger political‐opportunity structure for sexual minorities in Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe and Western Europe provided contexts with relatively high and low levels of sexuality‐based discrimination, respectively. In Western Europe, those who report sexuality‐based discrimination exhibited higher levels of participation, in comparison to those who did not report discrimination. In Eastern Europe, those who report sexuality‐based discrimination exhibited lower levels of participation before the 2004 enlargement, but they did not exhibit these lower levels after the 2004 enlargement. - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 1013-1030, October 2018.
  

  December 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12468   open full text
• Narratives of Support and Resistance: A Political Psychological Analysis of the Implementation of UNSCR 1325 in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
  Elin Martine Doeland, Inger Skjelsbaek.
  Political Psychology. December 05, 2017
  --- - |2 This article presents an analysis of norm change, and, more specifically, how gender equality norms are negotiated in Bosnia. The immediate reason for asking these questions is the adoption of the United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 in 2000 on women, peace, and security and the massive global effort to change gender equality norms in order to improve peacebuilding efforts. We argue that implementation of the United Nations' Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda rests on localization of gender equality norms. Our contention is that this process takes place on different levels. Based on a series focus‐group interviews in Bosnia we offer depth to what a localization process can look like. We discuss what this means for the WPS agenda in Bosnia, for norm change, and for political psychological scholarship. - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 995-1011, October 2018.
  

  December 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12466   open full text
• Analytic Confidence and Political Decision‐Making: Theoretical Principles and Experimental Evidence From National Security Professionals.
  Jeffrey A. Friedman, Richard Zeckhauser.
  Political Psychology. November 29, 2017
  --- - |2 When making decisions under uncertainty, it is important to distinguish between the probability that a judgment is true and the confidence analysts possess in drawing their conclusions. Yet analysts and decision‐makers often struggle to define “confidence” in this context, and many ways that scholars use this term do not necessarily facilitate decision‐making under uncertainty. To help resolve this confusion, we argue for disaggregating analytic confidence along three dimensions: reliability of available evidence, range of reasonable opinion, and responsiveness to new information. After explaining how these attributes hold different implications for decision‐making in principle, we present survey experiments examining how analysts and decision‐makers employ these ideas in practice. Our first experiment found that each conception of confidence distinctively influenced national security professionals' evaluations of high‐stakes decisions. Our second experiment showed that inexperienced assessors of uncertainty could consistently discriminate among our conceptions of confidence when making political forecasts. We focus on national security, where debates about defining “confidence levels” have clear practical implications. But our theoretical framework generalizes to nearly any area of political decision‐making, and our empirical results provide encouraging evidence that analysts and decision‐makers can grasp these abstract elements of uncertainty. - Political Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 5, Page 1069-1087, October 2018.
  

  November 29, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12465   open full text
• Fighting the Past: Perceptions of Control, Historical Misperceptions, and Corrective Information in the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict.
  Brendan Nyhan, Thomas Zeitzoff.
  Political Psychology. October 09, 2017
  What makes people deny wrongdoing that their group has inflicted on others? Prior research argues that refusing to acknowledge past misbehavior contributes to intergroup conflict, making historical misinformation important to understand and address. In particular, feeling a lack of control may make people more vulnerable to these misperceptions—a claim we test in a preregistered survey experiment examining beliefs about the Palestinian exodus during the creation of the state of Israel. Consistent with expectations, Jewish Israelis who were asked to recall an event in which they lacked control were more vulnerable to arguments (incorrectly) denying any Jewish responsibility for the exodus. By contrast, corrective information successfully reduced misperceptions regardless of feelings of control. However, corrections had no effect on attitudes toward the outgroup or support for the peace process, which suggests that historical misperceptions may be more of a symptom of intergroup conflict than a cause of its persistence.

  October 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12449   open full text
• Need, Compassion, and Support for Social Welfare.
  Andrew W. Delton, Michael Bang Petersen, Peter DeScioli, Theresa E. Robertson.
  Political Psychology. September 29, 2017
  Funding for social welfare depends on citizen support. Drawing on evolutionary psychological approaches to politics, we study two types of need that might shape citizens' welfare support by regulating their feelings of compassion. One type of need is a recipient's absolute need. The other type is acute need created by sudden misfortune, such as sudden job loss. Across four studies, we find that absolute and acute needs independently affect compassion and welfare attitudes. This leads to potential inefficiencies in judgments: People who have fallen far are judged more deserving of compassion and access to welfare even when they are not in an absolute sense the most impoverished.

  September 29, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12450   open full text
• Expanding the Political Psychology Toolkit: The Potential of Discursive Psychology for Understanding Contentious Political Debate at a Grassroots Level.
  Shannon J. Clark, Linda Courtenay Botterill.
  Political Psychology. September 05, 2017
  In its location at the intersection of political science and psychology, political psychology draws on many of the research techniques of both disciplines in its exploration of power, voting behavior, leadership, attitudes, and values. One hitherto relatively underutilized approach for understanding public policy debate is discursive psychology (DP). Applying this perspective to a contentious policy issue in Australia, we seek to demonstrate that this approach can add richness and depth to our understanding of how ordinary citizens engage in public policy debates. We suggest that this type of analysis can augment insights obtained from more traditional methods—such as focus groups, experimental approaches, and opinion polling—by analyzing how debates are constructed and presented at the grassroots level. This research is innovative in two ways. First, it applies a rigorous, empirical research approach to an area in which it has not previously been used: the study of public policy issues. Second, rather than analyzing the communicative practices of political leaders, we consider the rhetorical arguments made by ordinary citizens in their engagement with political issues and how they negotiate what counts as evidence. This can provide insights into how public debate can be conducted more productively and respectfully.

  September 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12443   open full text
• Rethinking Compassion: Toward a Political Account of the Partisan Gender Gap in the United States.
  Scott Blinder, Meredith Rolfe.
  Political Psychology. September 05, 2017
  Scholarship on the political gender gap in the United States has attributed women's political views to their greater compassion, yet individual‐level measures of compassion have almost never been used to directly examine such claims. We address this issue using the only nationally representative survey to include psychometrically validated measures of compassion alongside appropriate political variables. We show that even though women are more compassionate in the aggregate than men in some respects, this added compassion does not explain the gender gap in partisanship. Female respondents report having more tender feelings towards the less fortunate, but these empathetic feelings are not associated with partisan identity. Women also show a slightly greater commitment to a principle of care, but this principle accounts for little of the partisan gap between men and women and has no significant relationship with partisanship after accounting for gender differences in egalitarian political values.

  September 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12447   open full text
• Identity Mediators: Leadership and Identity Construction in Campaign Speeches of American Presidential Candidates' Spouses.
  Ilka H. Gleibs, Kristen Hendricks, Tim Kurz.
  Political Psychology. September 05, 2017
  We explore the nature and evolution of the role of candidates' spouses in U.S. presidential election campaigns through a lens of social psychological theorizing that sees leadership as emerging from activities of identity construction of leaders and followers. Our discursive analysis examines how aspiring First Lady speeches at party national conventions construct both their husbands and the particular national identity construction most presently politically relevant in a way that strategically aligns the two. Building on previous social identity work on leadership, we show how it is not only the leader or their followers who are active participants in leadership construction but that there may also be a role for “third parties” who link prospective leaders with followers. We propose that, as “entrepreneurs” of identity, leaders may use others as “identity mediators” to co‐construct and mediate both the leader's identity and the identity of those they seek to lead.

  September 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12448   open full text
• Perceptions of Prolonged Occupation as Barriers to Conflict Resolution.
  Nimrod Rosler, Keren Sharvit, Daniel Bar‐Tal.
  Political Psychology. August 01, 2017
  The goal of this research was to examine whether a denial of a prolonged occupation by the occupying society constitutes a meaningful sociopsychological barrier to resolving the conflict peacefully. We hypothesized that this perception will be associated with objections both to conflict resolution processes and to specific compromises intended to end the occupation. Furthermore, we hypothesized that the association between denial of the occupation and compromises will be partially mediated by denial of its costs, low levels of moral emotions, and closure to new information about the conflict. Taking the prolonged Israeli occupation as our case study, we used three nationwide representative polls of Jewish Israelis to test our hypotheses. The studies supported our hypotheses, pointing to the distinct role that the perception of prolonged occupation by the occupying society plays in peacefully ending this situation, and the psychological mechanisms underlying occupation denial as a barrier to conflict resolution.

  August 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12444   open full text
• Do Subtle Linguistic Interventions Priming a Social Identity as a Voter Have Outsized Effects on Voter Turnout? Evidence From a New Replication Experiment.
  Alan Gerber, Gregory Huber, Albert Fang.
  Political Psychology. August 01, 2017
  An ongoing debate in political psychology is about whether small wording differences have outsized behavioral effects. A leading example is whether subtle linguistic cues embedded in voter mobilization messages dramatically increase turnout. An initial study analyzing two small‐scale field experiments argued that describing someone as a voter (noun) instead of one who votes (verb) increases turnout rates 11 to 14 points because the noun activates a person's social identity as a voter. A subsequent study analyzing a large‐scale field experiment challenged this claim and found no effect. But questions about the initial claim's domain of applicability persist. The subsequent study may not have reproduced the conditions necessary for the psychological phenomenon to occur, specifically the electoral contexts were not competitive or important enough for the social identity to matter. To address the first of these critiques, as well as other potential explanations for different results between the first two studies, we conduct a large‐scale replication field experiment. We find no evidence that this minor wording change increases turnout levels. This research provides new evidence that the strategy of invoking the self does not appear to consistently increase turnout and calls into question whether subtle linguistic cues have outsized behavioral effects.

  August 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12446   open full text
• Multiple and Counterstereotypic Categorization of Immigrants: The Moderating Role of Political Orientation on Interventions to Reduce Prejudice.
  Francesca Prati, Silvia Moscatelli, Felicia Pratto, Monica Rubini.
  Political Psychology. August 01, 2017
  Multiple and counterstereotypic categorization of outgroup members reduces prejudice towards them. The present research addresses, for the first time, the role of political orientation in moderating the impact of these strategies on prejudice reduction. Given that right‐wingers have very likely a higher need for cognitive closure compared to left‐wingers and thus may be less tolerant to social diversity, for them, increasing the complexity of outgroup members through counterstereotypic versus stereotypic or multiple versus simple categorizations should be a less effective strategy of prejudice reduction than it is for left‐wingers and moderate individuals. Results using Romanians and immigrants as outgroup targets for Italian participants supported our prediction. Further, we found that the effect of prejudice reduction was explained by the sequential mediation of increased individuation of immigrants and reduced sense of threat from them. Implications of the interplay between multiple categorization and political orientation are discussed.

  August 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12445   open full text
• Thawing Rivalries and Fading Friendships: An Experimental Approach to Rapprochement and Alienation.
  Rod Albuyeh, Mark Paradis.
  Political Psychology. July 17, 2017
  Although international relations (IR) theorists generally assume that actors update their beliefs about the intentions of adversaries and allies based on structure, costly signaling, and past actions, little is known about how the process of rapprochement between adversaries differs from the process of alienation between allies, particularly with respect to the nature and degree of costly signaling. Furthermore, until recently the role of the individual in these processes has only been engaged by a small number of scholars, and fewer still have integrated this perspective with conventional approaches to rapprochement and alienation. Drawing from findings in social psychology, We present results from an original survey experiment showing that (1) political belief systems are a powerful determinant of how individuals perceive the intentions of other states, more so than an observed state's signaling behavior; (2) there are diminishing returns in increasing the cost of a signal; and (3) hostile signals are more effective in signaling intent than reassuring signals.

  July 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12441   open full text
• Values Voters: The Conditional Effect of Income on the Relationship Between Core Values and Political Attitudes and Behavior.
  David J. Ciuk, Robert N. Lupton, Judd R. Thornton.
  Political Psychology. July 16, 2017
  The postmaterialism thesis contends that newer cultural and social justice issues will supplant traditional, class‐based economic concerns as societies become increasingly wealthy. Although macrolevel evidence broadly supports this prediction, individual‐level evidence for the theory in the United States has been sparse. Moreover, alternative theories predict that postmaterialism will not travel well to the American context because religious cleavages that divide the major parties will be most salient. We test the postmaterialism thesis at the individual level using unique data that enable us to evaluate citizens' value‐preference structures across income levels, as well as the conditional effect of income on the relationship between individuals' ranked value preferences and political attitudes and behavior. Consistent with the theory, greater income strengthens the association between egalitarianism and ideology, partisanship, evaluations of President Obama, and presidential vote choice, and weakens the relationship between moral traditionalism and these same variables. However, income does not moderate the association between economic security and individuals' identities, evaluations, or behavior. Additionally, value‐preference hierarchies are quite similar across income groups after controlling for partisanship and ideology. The results lend insight into the nature of value‐ and income‐based cleavages in American politics.

  July 16, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12442   open full text
• Not Simply in the Eye of the Beholder: Authenticity as a Product of Candidate Preference and Unfettered Speech.
  David R. Pillow, Meghan A. Crabtree, Manuel J. Galvan, Willie J. Hale.
  Political Psychology. June 30, 2017
  Authenticity has emerged over recent decades as a prominent theme in both the press and in political research—and peaked in the 2016 presidential contest that pitted Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. In this context, we attempted to answer the question: How do voters judge a presidential candidate's authenticity? Here we use motivated reasoning and correspondent inference theory as theoretical frameworks to examine how partisan preference combines with perceptions of unfettered speech and strategic impression management to influence voter judgments of a candidate's authenticity. An online survey of 525 respondents demonstrated that individuals' partisan preferences influenced both judgments of a candidate's authenticity and their perceptions of behaviors signifying authenticity (use of unfettered speech versus strategic impression management). These behavioral signals partially mediated the relation between candidate preferences and authenticity judgments. Moreover, voters, given their partisan preferences, differentially weighted candidates' use of unfettered speech and strategic impression management tactics in their judgments of authenticity. Finally, unfiltered/politically incorrect speech was found to have both positive and negative effects on authenticity judgments. Findings further elucidate the nature of authenticity as perceived in others and identify intermediary variables and boundary conditions that influence those perceptions.

  June 30, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12440   open full text
• Do Black Lives Matter? A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Racism and American Resistance to Reparations.
  Jeffrey Prager.
  Political Psychology. June 22, 2017
  Psychoanalysts assert that when wrongs have been done to others the impulse to apologize and forgive is natural, although in reality efforts toward interpersonal and social repair are often frustrated. This article assesses current debates on reparations for African Americans, applying psychoanalytic ideas to account for American resistance to engage in a process of reconciliation. Contemporary authors claim that racial repair requires a moral and ethical acknowledgment of and responsibility for harms committed to African Americans. This article demonstrates, in addition, reparations as a psychological necessity. Racism, however, emphasizing the reality of racial difference, continues, as always, to serve as a powerful defense thwarting the reparative impulse. The result has been the securing of physical separation between Whites and Blacks and the persistence of psychic enmeshment. Absent the implementation of a politics of reparations, African Americans will never achieve externality, or independence, from the White mind.

  June 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12436   open full text
• Is Psychoanalysis Universal? Politics, Desire, and Law in Colonial Contexts.
  Juliet B. Rogers.
  Political Psychology. June 21, 2017
  Psychoanalysis has long been used as a tool to analyze the symptomology of individuals and nation states. But can it universally be applied to all? This article argues that psychoanalysis was born in the wake of the French Revolution as the subject of rights came to understand that it could make choices, but that these choices would not always be the right ones. In Douzinas’ () terms “every desire is a potential right” (p. 8), and this idea links desire to rights in a way that psychoanalytic theory and practice must contend. But it also offers the possibility that it is rights‐bearing subjects who are specifically desiring in the manner that psychoanalysis proposes. In this article, I examine the symptoms of rights‐bearing subjects as they have emerged in a particular politico‐legal history. I argue that the symptoms of subjects must be understood in the context of their politico‐legal history, including its formation, and I examine how the neglect of this account of history—particularly in the context of Australia—can miss the colonial violences that are inherent in law (as a symptom) but also in psychoanalysis as itself a symptom of a particular historical scene.

  June 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12437   open full text
• The Symptoms of the Political Unconscious: Introduction to the Special Issue.
  Juliet B. Rogers, Andreja Zevnik.
  Political Psychology. June 21, 2017
  The political unconscious “speaks”; it displays itself in the symptoms of the political world, in the speech of policy, of decisions, of laws, of images, icons, and gestures, and in protest, resistance, and ordinary violences, and, insofar as it speaks, psychoanalysis can say something about it. In this article, we consider how psychoanalysis can speak to some of the symptoms of the political world as they emerge as a form of the political unconscious. We employ Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to elaborate the unconscious and discuss how some of the symptoms of this unconscious has emerged in the form of Brexit, Trump, and the rise of the right in Europe and the Antipodes. We then elaborate on the contributions to this special issue as well as mentioning how these contributions speak to these latest events.

  June 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12438   open full text
• Emotional Responses to the Charlie Hebdo Attacks: Addressing the Authoritarianism Puzzle.
  Pavlos Vasilopoulos, George E. Marcus, Martial Foucault.
  Political Psychology. June 14, 2017
  The finding that threat boosts the public's preferences for authoritarian policies has been well established in the research literature. Why this shift occurs remains open as the extant literature reports contradictory findings regarding the interaction of dispositions, such as conservatism and authoritarianism, with threat. One line of research argues that threat increases authoritarian preferences among those who are more prone to authoritarianism. Another argues that it is those with a nonauthoritarian ideology who switch in response to threat. By using a two‐wave panel study of the French population taken before and after the January 2015 twin attacks in Paris, we find that both trends occur simultaneously. Our results show that the factors that drive the impact of ideological dispositions on support for authoritarian policies are emotional reactions. On the one hand, anxiety led left‐wing respondents to move towards adopting authoritarian policy preferences following the attacks, yet produced no such change among right‐wing respondents. On the other hand, anger did not turn left‐wing voters more authoritarian but strengthened authoritarian policy preferences among right‐wing respondents.

  June 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12439   open full text
• The Mistreatment of My People: Victimization by Proxy and Behavioral Intentions to Commit Violence Among Muslims in Denmark.
  Milan Obaidi, Robin Bergh, Jim Sidanius, Lotte Thomsen.
  Political Psychology. June 09, 2017
  Islamist extremism is often explained by the suffering endured by Muslims in Islamic countries as a result of Western‐led wars. However, many terrorist attacks have been carried out by European Muslims with no personal experiences of war. Across two studies among Danish Muslims, we tested if what we call “victimization‐by‐proxy processes” motivate behavioral intentions to commit acts of violence. We used Muslim identification, perceived injustice of Western foreign policies, and group‐based anger to predict violent and nonviolent behavioral intentions. More importantly, we compared path models of Danish Muslims from conflict zones with those without direct personal experience of Western‐led occupation. We found similar effects among the participants in each category, that is, vicarious psychological responses mimicked those of personally experienced adversity. In fact, participants born in Western Europe were, on average, more strongly identified with Muslims, more likely to perceive Western foreign policy as more unjust, reported greater group‐based anger, and were more inclined to help Muslims both by nonviolent and violent means.

  June 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12435   open full text
• Support for Leader's Decisions in Conflict and Negotiation: Women Do Not Benefit From Relevant Expertise While Men Do.
  Moran Anisman‐Razin, Rami Rozen, Eran Halperin, Tamar Saguy.
  Political Psychology. June 02, 2017
  In the present research, we examined the role of leaders' domain‐specific expertise and gender as affecting individuals' evaluation of proposals related to intergroup conflict. Across three studies, conducted in two different conflict‐related contexts (Israeli‐Palestinian conflict and the refugee crisis in Europe), we showed that men and women do not equally benefit from domain‐specific expertise. Having high (compared to low) domain‐specific expertise positively affected participants' attitudes towards the proposal when its author was a man but not when she was a woman. We further demonstrate that specific characteristics of the proposal (i.e., security relevance) and of the participants (i.e., level of sexism) affect reactions to different negotiation proposals. Our findings suggest that even when women acquire relevant knowledge and experience, they do not benefit from them as much as men. One implication of these findings is that training and enhancing women's expertise may not be enough to eliminate gender bias.

  June 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12434   open full text
• The Real at the Origin of Sovereignty.
  J. Peter Burgess.
  Political Psychology. May 18, 2017
  This article revisits the concept of sovereignty in political theory by applying tools adapted from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It critically reviews the premises of political subjects assumed by sovereignty and formulates a widened concept of sovereignty based on a general understanding of the “self,” “self‐relation,” and “identity” as the fundamental components of sovereignty. With this concept in hand, the article then focuses on the concept of the “Sovereign Good” common to French histories of political thought and of particular interest to Jacques Lacan in his 1959–60 seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis and his 1963 article “Kant with Sade.” By reinterpreting the sovereignty of the Sovereign Good, Lacan points to a path according to which an idealized and universalized notion of the sovereign is made possible and energized through an identification of the real with the Sovereign Good. By understanding sovereignty as supported by the Lacanian real, we can better understand both the forces that drive it to self‐preservation and the insecurities that make its survival and longevity powerful hindrances to its dissolution

  May 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12422   open full text
• “Je suis en terrasse”: Political Violence, Civilizational Politics, and the Everyday Courage to Be.
  Christopher S. Browning.
  Political Psychology. May 18, 2017
  Following the attacks against the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and the subsequent acts of political violence in Paris the following November, a number of memes spread swiftly across social media. Most notable of these were proclamations of “Je suis Charlie,” “Je suis Paris,” “Je suis en terrasse,” and tricolorizing one's Facebook profile page. Although there are various ways by which this phenomenon might be explained, this article argues that, at least for some people, they seem to have operated as key mechanisms by which individuals/society sought to reestablish what Tillich calls “the courage to be,” and which in more contemporary terminology might be labeled a sense of ontological security—the ability to go on in the face of what would otherwise be debilitating anxieties of existential dread. The article argues the memes did this through a number of mechanisms. These included establishing a sense of vicarious identification with the victims; embracing increased levels of danger and seeking to confront the question of mortality head on; reasserting a sense of community and home via the reinstantiation of everyday routines now ascribed with enhanced political and existential significance; and reaffirming a new civilizationally inflected self‐narrative.

  May 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12432   open full text
• Measuring Political Thinking: Development and Validation of a Scale for “Deliberation Within”.
  Carina Weinmann.
  Political Psychology. May 17, 2017
  Compared to the concept of interpersonal deliberation, little is known about the underlying and preceding cognitive processes of citizens' deliberative discussions. The aim of this article is to develop a psychometric measurement for these processes, which—following an idea advanced by Goodin ()—may be called “deliberation within.” The measurement is constructed based on theoretical definitions of the concept and further normative criteria of citizen deliberation. In three empirical studies using independent samples, the psychometric properties of the measurement are assessed, and evidence for its reliability as well as structural and criterion validity is offered. The resulting scale may serve as a useful instrument not only for deliberation research, but also for further communication research related to political processes.

  May 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12423   open full text
• An Experimental Investigation of Election Promises.
  Andreas Born, Pieter van Eck, Magnus Johannesson.
  Political Psychology. May 17, 2017
  We analyze the effect of election promises on electoral behavior in a laboratory experiment. In the experiment, politicians can make nonbinding election promises about how to split an endowment between themselves and the group. We find that promises affect both voting and voter beliefs about how much the politician will contribute to the public fund. The relationship is inverted U‐shaped with decreasing credibility of higher promises. Contributions of politicians are correlated with their promises in a similar pattern. The election promises are generally credible unless particularly high. Politicians keep promises more often if a reelection is possible and if the politician came into power by vote rather than by random draw. Voters reward high contributions in the previous period and punish promise breaking even after controlling for the contribution in the previous period or voters' beliefs about future contributions. By controlling for voters' beliefs, we distinguish retrospective from prospective voting. Our results suggest that voters both use promises for prospective voting and retrospectively punish broken promises.

  May 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12429   open full text
• Party Support, Values, and Perceptions of Electoral Integrity.
  Anaïd Flesken, Jakob Hartl.
  Political Psychology. May 17, 2017
  The legitimacy of the electoral process is crucial for the consolidation of democracy. We here focus on individual perceptions of electoral integrity (IPEI) and seek to understand what factors can explain different degrees of IPEI. In particular, we use the sixth wave of the World Values Survey (2010–14) to examine how antiauthoritarian values affect individuals' directional bias, driven by political party support, in evaluating electoral integrity. The results show that IPEI do depend on an interaction of political party support and the strength of antiauthoritarian values. However, the addition of the latter does not lead to a convergence of integrity evaluations among winners and losers, as may be expected under the assumption that antiauthoritarian values drive voters to more carefully monitor and evaluate the electoral process. Instead, it leads to greater polarization between electoral winners and losers. We explain the result with reference to the motivated reasoning literature on biased information processing: While antiauthoritarian convictions lead people to obtain more information on the electoral process, their political leanings bias their reading of this information, which in effect leads to stronger polarization in perceptions.

  May 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12431   open full text
• The Consequences of Collective Discontent: A New Measure of Zeitgeist Predicts Voting for Extreme Parties.
  Anne Marthe van der Bles, Tom Postmes, Babet LeKander‐Kanis, Simon Otjes.
  Political Psychology. May 15, 2017
  In recent years, extreme right‐wing and left‐wing political parties and actors have gained popularity in many Western countries. What motivates people to vote for extreme right‐ or left‐wing parties? In previous research, we showed that a collectively shared sense of doom and gloom about society can exist among citizens who, individually, experience high well‐being. Previous research developed an operationalization of this collective societal discontent as an aspect of Zeitgeist, which can be compared to personal experiences (van der Bles, Postmes, & Meijer, ). In the present research, we investigated whether this Zeitgeist of societal discontent predicts voting for extreme parties. We conducted a field study during the 2015 Dutch provincial elections (N = 407). Results showed that collective societal discontent (Zeitgeist) predicted voting for extreme parties but that personal discontent did not. Results also showed that pessimistic Zeitgeist was associated with lower education levels and tabloid‐style media consumption. These findings advance our understanding of the discontents that fuel extreme voting outcomes: Global and abstract (negative) beliefs about society are more consequential than concrete personal experiences.

  May 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12424   open full text
• The Power of Forgetting: Ressentiment, Guilt, and Transformative Politics.
  Paul Muldoon.
  Political Psychology. May 12, 2017
  Though long regarded as an injustice in its own right, willed forgetting is currently enjoying something of a revival in politics. Concerned by the threat memory poses to both the peace and vitality of the state, critics have championed forgetting for its power to release us from ressentiment and begin anew. In this article, I take a closer look at Nietzsche's conception of willed forgetfulness, specifically as it is set out in On the Genealogy of Morals, to bring out what contemporary critics of the “surfeit of memory” seem happy to ignore: Namely, that a certain kind of cruelty, either against others or towards oneself, is the sine qua non of forgetting. Drawing on Freud as a supplement, I argue that many of the symptoms critics ascribe to the surfeit of memory—the culture of victimhood, the tyranny of guilt, the displacement of action, and the eclipse of visionary modes of imagining the future—may in actual fact be the product of forgetting.

  May 12, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12433   open full text
• Postracial Society as Social Fantasy: Black Communities Trapped Between Racism and a Struggle for Political Recognition.
  Andreja Zevnik.
  Political Psychology. May 12, 2017
  The article discusses postracial society as social fantasy. It opens with a discussion of the lived experience of Americans and their attitude towards racism and social and political inequality. Drawing on the studies of public attitude, the article points towards a persisting racism the postracial society aimed to overcome and to the effect recent Black activism had on dismantling the fantasy. The article shows how on the one hand, racism is grounded in the unconscious and in the way a subject becomes politicized, while on the other hand, racism already permeates political categories such as rights or citizenship, concluding that a Black subject cannot exist politically as a Black subject. There is always something that a Black subject has in the excess and that mis‐fits with White political categories. The article turns to Lacan's psychoanalysis and his ideas of identification to address the relationship between the subject and the form of authority. Further, the article draws on the postcolonial psychoanalytically inspired ideas of Franz Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois to frame the relationship between the White master and the Black subject and to present the impossibility the Black subject faces when met with the implicitly racially biased White political categories.

  May 12, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12430   open full text
• “Like Kings in Their Kingdoms”: Conservatism in Brazilian Psychoanalysis During the Dictatorship.
  Stephen Frosh, Belinda Mandelbaum.
  Political Psychology. May 09, 2017
  In this article, we examine some aspects of the fate of Brazilian psychoanalysis during the 1964–85 civil‐military dictatorship. Presenting data from interviews with Brazilian psychoanalysts and focusing on the activities of the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of São Paulo, we argue that the external political situation was paralleled by conservatism within the Society, with some dangerous consequences. We attend especially to tensions between right‐ and left‐wing psychoanalysts, denunciations and fear, and the impact of Bion's ideas. We conclude by suggesting that the “complicity” of the Society with the governing norms was coincident both with the self‐interests and attitudes of particular individuals and with normalizing institutional tendencies in psychoanalysis itself.

  May 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12427   open full text
• Deradicalizing Detained Terrorists.
  David Webber, Marina Chernikova, Arie W. Kruglanski, Michele J. Gelfand, Malkanthi Hettiarachchi, Rohan Gunaratna, Marc‐Andre Lafreniere, Jocelyn J. Belanger.
  Political Psychology. May 09, 2017
  Deradicalization of terrorists constitutes a critical component of the global “war on terror.” Unfortunately, little is known about deradicalization programs, and evidence for their effectiveness is derived solely from expert impressions and potentially flawed recidivism rates. We present the first empirical assessment of one such program: the Sri Lankan rehabilitation program for former members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (a terrorist organization that operated in Sri Lanka until their defeat in 2009). We offer evidence that deradicalization efforts that provided beneficiaries with sustained mechanisms for earning personal significance significantly reduced extremism after 1 year (Study 1). We also found that upon release, beneficiaries expressed lower levels of extremism than their counterparts in the community (Study 2). These findings highlight the critical role of personal significance in deradicalization efforts, offer insights into the workings of deradicalization, and suggest practical methods for improving deradicalization programs worldwide.

  May 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12428   open full text
• Language and Civilian Deaths: Denying Responsibility for Casualties in the Gaza Conflict 2014.
  W. M. L. Finlay.
  Political Psychology. May 09, 2017
  The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that 1,462 civilians were killed in Gaza, and six civilians were killed in Israel during the conflict of 2104. This article uses discursive psychology to examine how Israeli spokespeople described the conflict, and Israel's actions, in ways that denied responsibility for civilian deaths. They did this using a number of discursive strategies. These included: (1) using passive and noun constructions which minimized reference to civilian deaths and erased Israeli involvement in those deaths; (2) repeatedly naming and providing details of Hamas weapons and attacks while avoiding reference to Israeli weapons and violence; (3) presenting Israel as only trying to avoid civilian deaths; and (4) describing Hamas as responsible for all deaths. These types of linguistic constructions allow governments and potential supporters to avoid acknowledging the consequences of their military actions and is one way that the virtuous nature of the ingroup is reinforced in political discourse.

  May 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12426   open full text
• Evaluation Potential and Task Performance: Evidence From Two Randomized Field Experiments in Election Administration.
  Costas Panagopoulos.
  Political Psychology. May 09, 2017
  Individuals behave differently in the presence of others. Some scholars argue the mere presence of others has the capacity to improve task performance, while other researchers demonstrate individuals become “social loafers,” exerting less effort in group tasks unless they perceive potential for evaluation. I investigate these claims in the context of evaluating poll‐worker performance using two randomized field experiments conducted in New York City during a special election that took place in February 2009 and during the presidential primary conducted in April 2016. The results suggest that manipulating the presence of observers, or even poll workers’ perceptions of the potential for evaluation, likely enhances their performance overall, resulting, especially, in greater efficiency and potentially strengthening voters’ confidence that their ballots were accurately counted and diminishing perceptions of electoral fraud.

  May 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12425   open full text
• A Long Time Coming: Delays in Collective Apologies and Their Effects on Sincerity and Forgiveness.
  Michael Wenzel, Ellie Lawrence‐Wood, Tyler G. Okimoto, Matthew J. Hornsey.
  Political Psychology. April 21, 2017
  Political apologies by one group to another often occur a significant period of time after the original transgression. What effect does such a delay have on perceptions of sincerity and forgiveness? A delayed apology could reflect the offender group's reluctance to apologize, or, alternatively, it could represent time and consideration spent on developing an appropriate response. In the latter case, the delayed apology would represent a sincere acknowledgment of the harm done, whereas in the former case it would not. In two studies, we found that a verbal collective apology, when delayed, was perceived to be less sincere than when offered more immediately following a transgression, and this translated to less forgiveness. However, in Study 2, the negative effects of time delay on sincerity and forgiveness were mitigated or reversed when the apology was in the form of commemoration. The commemorative apology, in particular when delayed, gave rise to favorable attributions (including representativeness of apologizing group, commitment to remember, and giving voice to victims), which mediated the effects on sincerity. The results suggest that collective apologies that are offered with considerable delay appear less meaningful and less deserving of a forgiving response, unless the apologizing group is able to express consideration and thoughtfulness through the apology process.

  April 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12421   open full text
• Exposure to Violence and Attitudes Towards Transitional Justice.
  Jonathan Hall, Iosif Kovras, Djordje Stefanovic, Neophytos Loizides.
  Political Psychology. April 04, 2017
  Transitional justice has emerged to address victims' needs as a means of restoring relations broken by violence. Yet we know little about victims' attitudes towards different transitional justice mechanisms. Why do some victims prioritize retributive justice while others favor other forms of dealing with the violent past? What determines victims' attitudes towards transitional justice policies? To address these questions, we offer a new theoretical framework that draws upon recent insights from the field of evolutionary psychology and links both war exposure and postwar environments to transitional justice preferences. We argue that both past experiences of wartime violence and present‐day social interdependence with perpetrators impact transitional justice preferences, but in divergent ways (resulting in greater support for retributive vs. restorative justice measures, respectively). To test our framework, we rely upon a 2013 representative survey of 1,007 respondents focusing on general population attitudes towards transitional justice in Bosnia two decades after the implementation of the Dayton Accords. Specifically, we examine the impact of displacement, return to prewar homes, loss of property, loss of a loved one, physical injury, imprisonment, and torture on attitudes towards transitional justice. On the whole, our findings confirm our two main hypotheses: Exposure to direct violence and losses is associated with more support for retributive justice measures, while greater present‐day interdependence with perpetrators is associated with more support for restorative justice measures. While acknowledging the legacy of wartime violence, we highlight the importance of the postwar context and institutional mechanisms that support victims in reconstructing their lives.

  April 04, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12412   open full text
• Liberal and Conservative Values: What We Can Learn From Congressional Tweets.
  Kevin L. Jones, Sharareh Noorbaloochi, John T. Jost, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker.
  Political Psychology. March 29, 2017
  Past research using self‐report questionnaires administered to ordinary citizens demonstrates that value priorities differ as a function of one's political ideology, but it is unclear whether this conclusion applies to political elites, who are presumably seeking to appeal to very broad constituencies. We used quantitative methods of textual analysis to investigate value‐laden language in a collection of 577,555 messages sent from the public Twitter accounts of over 400 members of the U.S. Congress between 2012 and 2014. Consistent with theoretical expectations, we observed that Republican and conservative legislators stressed values of tradition, conformity, and national security (as well as self‐direction), whereas Democratic and liberal legislators stressed values of benevolence, universalism, hedonism, and social/economic security (as well as achievement). Implications for the large‐scale observational study of political psychology are explored.

  March 29, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12415   open full text
• Agents of Prosociality: Agency Affirmation Promotes Mutual Prosocial Tendencies and Behavior Among Conflicting Groups.
  Ilanit SimanTov‐Nachlieli, Nurit Shnabel, Anna Lisa Aydin, Johannes Ullrich.
  Political Psychology. March 24, 2017
  Members of conflicting groups are motivated to restore their ingroup's agency, leading to antisocial tendencies against the outgroup. The present research tested the hypothesis that affirming conflicting groups' agency would increase their members' mutual prosociality. The effectiveness of agency affirmation was demonstrated in three contexts of conflict between groups: Switzerland and the EU following the 2014 referendum (Study 1), Israelis and Palestinians (Study 2), and Israeli rightists and leftists (Study 3). Study 1 found that in a nonconflictual context Swiss participants prioritized their moral (prosocial) over agentic goals, yet in the context of conflict with the EU, they prioritized their agentic over moral goals. This “primacy‐of‐agency” effect, however, was eliminated once their ingroup's agency was affirmed. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated the positive effect of agency affirmation on prosociality among Israelis referring to Palestinians and Israeli rightists and leftists referring to the adversarial political camp. This effect was mediated by group members' readiness to relinquish some power for the sake of morality. Pointing to the importance of the affirmation's specific content, Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that morality affirmation failed to increase prosociality. As such, the present research puts forward a promising strategy to reduce hostility and promote prosociality between conflicting groups.

  March 24, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12418   open full text
• Western Anti‐Muslim Prejudice: Value Conflict or Discrimination of Persons Too?
  Jolanda Van der Noll, Vassilis Saroglou, David Latour, Nathalie Dolezal.
  Political Psychology. March 21, 2017
  Do Western anti‐Muslim attitudes reflect Islamophobia as a general, ethnoreligious prejudice that does not distinguish between persons and ideas, values, or behavior, or are they limited to issues perceived to be in conflict with Western liberal values? In two experiments, we measured discrimination as decreased willingness to help a Muslim versus non‐Muslim to undertake an action that was either neutral or possibly in conflict with Western liberal values. As opposed to general discrimination, the participants displayed conditional, anti‐Muslim discrimination: The two targets were treated equally when the cause was neutral, but there was less willingness to help the Muslim when the cause was conflicting (protesting against the headscarf ban and against gay rights). However, participants did demonstrate subtle discrimination by showing less willingness to help the protesting Muslim compared to the protesting non‐Muslim target. Individual differences moderated these effects with multiculturalism predicting conditional outgroup prosociality, ethnocentrism predicting global outgroup discrimination, and proatheism attitudes predicting both conditional outgroup prosociality and unprejudiced rejection of value‐conflicting behavior.

  March 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12416   open full text
• What Is “Enjoyment as a Political Factor”?
  Derek Hook.
  Political Psychology. March 21, 2017
  The notion of “enjoyment as a political factor” is a key motif in Lacanian psychoanalytic social theory. This article explores the notion of enjoyment/jouissance—a type of “negative pleasure” or intense libidinal arousal—as an instrument of political analysis. Crucial here are a series of qualifications that refine an understanding of the concept. The article clarifies that enjoyment is: sexual (or libidinal) in nature; bodily rather than unconscious; necessarily excessive (since it is “beyond the pleasure principle” and linked to the functioning of the death drive); and illicit, incurred in acts that apparently transgress laws or socially prescribed limits. A series of critical arguments are noted, such as the idea that jouissance cannot be extrapolated to the level of the social, and the contention that as “extradiscursive,” modes of enjoyment float free of the symbolic. Contrary to such contentions, I offer a series of examples—most typically of racism—to demonstrate how jouissance occurs within the symbolic, implies a dialectic of possession, involves the functioning of the law and superego, entails particular rules and contracts of enjoyment, and is structured by fantasy. Jouissance understood in these ways necessarily supports and extend social structure.

  March 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12417   open full text
• Does Exposure to Stereotype‐Disconfirming Politicians Reduce the Effect of Stereotypes on Voting? Evidence From Seven Plagiarism Scandals in Germany.
  Michael Herrmann, Markus Tepe.
  Political Psychology. March 20, 2017
  We examine whether exposure to several salient counterexamples reduces the effect of stereotypes on voting. By taking advantage of a series of seven plagiarism scandals in Germany—a country with high regard for academic credentials where academic titles (Dr. and Prof.) get printed on ballot papers—we test whether the tendency to vote for candidates with a doctor's title decreased in the wake of the scandals. Using cross‐sectional and longitudinal estimators and controlling for a large range of potential confounders, we find that the electoral advantage of candidates with a doctor's title shrinks from a good half of a percentage point before the scandals down to a third after the scandals. In line with a subtyping hypothesis, the reduction is stronger for candidates from traditional middle‐class parties (i.e., the parties of the politicians who were implicated in the scandals). Neither of these effects turns out to be strong enough to reach statistical significance, however. We conclude that seven negative examples in one legislative term had no noticeable effect on the tendency to select candidates based on academic titles. Our study provides a rare opportunity to test the effect of stereotype‐disconfirming information on electoral behavior. Our results contribute to a literature demonstrating the resilience of stereotypes to disconfirming information. They also suggest that plagiarism affairs are unlikely to reduce electoral incentives for politicians to obtain a fake doctorate.

  March 20, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12408   open full text
• Implicit Candidate‐Trait Associations in Political Campaigns.
  Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz, Joseph Vitriol, Christina Farhart.
  Political Psychology. March 09, 2017
  While the study of political attitudes has incorporated implicit processes in its theoretical models, the predominant approach to candidate‐trait perception focuses exclusively on explicit processes. Our novel, dual‐process approach to candidate perception sees voters as holding both conscious, explicit impressions of candidate traits and automatic, implicit candidate‐trait associations that cannot be measured using traditional self‐report techniques. We examine implicit candidate‐trait associations for the first time using data from a three‐wave online panel conducted in the last month of the 2012 U.S. presidential election. First, we demonstrate that implicit candidate‐trait associations exist. Second, we show that implicit associations of warmth and competence with the candidates predict explicit candidate evaluations, economic evaluations, and vote choice, above and beyond conventional political science controls and explicit trait perceptions. Finally, we find that these effects are strongest among nonpartisans and partisans with conflicted feelings about their party's nominee. We suggest future directions for implicit political cognition research, including trait perception.

  March 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12398   open full text
• Support for Anti‐Muslim Policies: The Role of Political Traits and Threat Perception.
  Philip T. Dunwoody, Sam G. McFarland.
  Political Psychology. March 09, 2017
  We explored how political beliefs and attitudes predict support for anti‐Muslim policies and extremist behavior in the United States following the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. A large sample completed measures of authoritarianism, social dominance orientation (SDO), generalized prejudice, identification with all humanity (IWAH), perceptions of Muslim threat, and support for anti‐Muslim policies and behaviors. These measures accounted for 73% of the variance in moderate anti‐Muslim policies and 55% of the variance in extreme anti‐Muslim policies. Authoritarianism and SDO directly and indirectly predicted support for anti‐Muslim policies, with their effects partially mediated by generalized prejudice, IWAH, and perceptions of Muslims as threatening. Threat both mediated and moderated the relationship between authoritarianism and anti‐Muslim policies. A negative interaction between authoritarianism and perceptions of Muslims as threatening predicted moderate anti‐Muslim policies, but a positive interaction predicted extreme anti‐Muslim policies. A tentative explanation is offered. Perceptions of Muslim threat was consistently a powerful predictor of anti‐Muslim policies and willingness to engage in extremist behaviors targeting Muslims. Programs to combat anti‐Muslim prejudice should consider the role of threat‐related stereotypes in expressions of anti‐Muslim prejudice.

  March 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12405   open full text
• Sorting Out Support for Democracy: A Q‐Method Study.
  Ryan E. Carlin.
  Political Psychology. March 09, 2017
  Support for democracy is crucial to democratic stability. Yet the nature and range of democratic belief systems, and whether these belief systems are idiosyncratic to specific individuals and polities or are more general, remain largely unknown. Such unknowns complicate an already daunting measurement task. Extant survey‐based measures are fraught with validity problems and say little about the democratic beliefs individuals most strongly hold or reject. To address these problems, this study blends focus groups, interviews, and Q‐sort methodology to examine patterns of subjective, behavioral renderings of democratic support profiles. It finds seven shared profiles of beliefs concerning democracy, alternative regimes, and political and civil freedoms across Chile and Argentina. Their resemblance to democratic belief systems found with other methods bolsters their validity and generalizability. The analyses reveal the relative weight of each orientation within each belief profile and their intensity across profiles. In so doing, they identify which items are crucial for within‐ and across‐case comparisons. Altogether, these insights should inform survey‐based approaches to detecting and describing the democratic support profiles latent in the polity.

  March 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12409   open full text
• Perceived Conflict and Leader Dominance: Individual and Contextual Factors Behind Preferences for Dominant Leaders.
  Lasse Laustsen, Michael Bang Petersen.
  Political Psychology. March 02, 2017
  Recent research finds that political candidates and leaders with dominant, masculine physical features are more preferred under conditions of conflict than of cooperation. Importantly, however, methodological limitations of past research have hindered the identification of whether this effect reflects that voters intuitively view (1) dominant leaders as more competent in solving problems of conflict, (2) nondominant leaders as more competent in solving problems of cooperation, or (3) both. In this article, we utilize recent advances in evolutionary psychology to form precise predictions on the nature of the underlying psychology and employ an unprecedented array of data types—including highly controlled experiments, natural experiments, and behavioral measures—to investigate the validity of these predictions. Using large approximately nationally representative surveys of 2,009 Poles and Ukrainians fielded during the Crimea crisis in 2014, we find that preferences for leader dominance are exclusively driven by the intuition that dominant leaders are better able to facilitate aggressive responses during social conflict and that these preferences are regulated by contextual conditions and individual predispositions related to such responses.

  March 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12403   open full text
• “Put Yourself in Their Shoes”: Testing Empathy's Ability to Motivate Cosmopolitan Behavior.
  Nicholas Faulkner.
  Political Psychology. March 02, 2017
  Political theorists have long contemplated the concept of cosmopolitanism, yet almost no empirical studies have investigated how individuals can be encouraged to act as ethical cosmopolitans in practice. This article reports the findings of an experiment designed to investigate the effect of empathy on cosmopolitan‐helping behavior. The extent to which empathy may be useful in motivating cosmopolitan behavior has been the subject of substantial debate among political theorists. Empathy was manipulated using a perspective‐taking technique adapted from social psychological research, and the extent to which individuals were willing to engage in cosmopolitan helping was measured. Results showed that perspective taking increased cosmopolitan helping and that empathy mediated that effect. Furthermore, empathy was found to predict cosmopolitan helping even after controlling for several related constructs. Overall, results indicate that increasing empathy by encouraging people to take the perspective of distant individuals is a promising way to foster cosmopolitan helping.

  March 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12411   open full text
• Evaluating the Character of People Who Insult the Nation: Implications for Immigrant Integration.
  Rahsaan Maxwell, Lucie House.
  Political Psychology. March 02, 2017
  We examine immigrant integration by analyzing how natives evaluate immigrants' character. Most literature examines how natives distinguish between immigrants with different levels of assimilation, which is best suited to identifying integration boundaries between different types of immigrants. We shift the analysis and examine the boundary between immigrants and natives, which measures integration by the extent to which immigrant status is relevant for character evaluations. We compare how natives respond to national insults that come from immigrants as opposed to natives. We focus on insulting the nation because it highlights the salience of national identity and clarifies the importance of group boundaries. We measure responses to national insults with vignette experiments from three original surveys in the United States. Our results are consistent with situationist theories of interpersonal interactions because they suggest that character evaluations are more dependent on the situational distinction between people who do and do not insult the nation than the demographic distinction between whether the insult comes from a native or immigrant. These findings have multiple implications for our understanding of national identity, immigrant integration, and immigrant‐native boundaries.

  March 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12414   open full text
• Blaming a Few Bad Apples to Save a Threatened Barrel: The System‐Justifying Function of Conspiracy Theories.
  Daniel Jolley, Karen M. Douglas, Robbie M. Sutton.
  Political Psychology. February 18, 2017
  This research demonstrates that conspiracy theories—often represented as subversive alternatives to establishment narratives—may bolster, rather than undermine, support for the social status quo when its legitimacy is under threat. A pilot study (N = 98) found a positive relationship between conspiracy belief and satisfaction with the status quo. In Study 1 (N = 120), threatening (vs. affirming) the status quo in British society caused participants to endorse conspiracy theories. In Study 2 (N = 159), exposure to conspiracy theories increased satisfaction with the British social system after this had been experimentally threatened. In Study 3 (N = 109), this effect was mediated by the tendency for participants exposed (vs. not exposed) to conspiracy theories to attribute societal problems relatively more strongly to small groups of people rather than systemic causes. By blaming tragedies, disasters, and social problems on the actions of a malign few, conspiracy theories can divert attention from the inherent limitations of social systems.

  February 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12404   open full text
• Ethnic Inequality and National Pride.
  Subhasish Ray.
  Political Psychology. February 18, 2017
  This article examines patterns in individual attachments towards the nation‐state in multiethnic countries. Specifically, we examine the effect of between‐ethnic‐group political and economic inequality on these attachments. Pairing attitudinal data from the sixth and most recent wave of the World Values Survey, administered between 2010 and 2012, with ethnicity measures from the Ethnic Power Relations dataset, we show that between‐ethnic‐group political inequality significantly weakens national pride and identity, but between‐ethnic‐group economic inequality does not have a similar effect. Our findings provide robust support for the view that ethnic‐group separatism in divided societies is motivated, not by the quest for economic power, but by considerations of lost status and dignity that can only be recovered through ownership in state institutions. Hence, the binding constraint on national integration in these settings is political, not economic, inequality.

  February 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12406   open full text
• The Transition Experiences of British Military Veterans.
  Eve Binks, Siobhan Cambridge.
  Political Psychology. February 15, 2017
  The aim of the current research was to investigate the transition experiences of British military veterans upon exiting the military and rejoining civilian society, asking the specific research question: What effect does the transition from military to civilian life have on the individual's identity? Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was employed and seven semistructured interviews were carried out with ex‐military personnel. Analysis of the data revealed three superordinate themes: (1) Several Selves: Identity; (2) Soldier and Society: Separation, and (3) Transition Time: Personal Perspective. Current findings suggest that transition from the military back to civilian life is often problematic, with identity complications, feelings of loss, and disconnection both from the military and from society in general. Individuals with a more salient military identity had more difficult transition experiences. Findings are discussed with reference to theories of identity formation, maintenance, and salience and recommendations for future research are made.

  February 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12399   open full text
• The Role of Implicit Attitudes in Populist Radical‐Right Support.
  Linda Bos, Penelope Sheets, Hajo G. Boomgaarden.
  Political Psychology. February 06, 2017
  Previous research on the populist radical right (PRR) has focused exclusively on explicit measures in explaining support for these contested political players. In this study, we explore the role of implicit attitudes in predicting vote likelihood for a PRR party. We use an online survey (n = 773) among Dutch respondents in which we measured implicit attitudes towards the Dutch PRR Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) with a Single‐Target Implicit Association Test (ST‐IAT). The results show that the implicit measure predicts vote likelihood in general, as well as in ways beyond that accounted for by traditional explanations of PRR party support. Importantly, the results also show that the impact of implicit attitudes on intended vote choice is greater for less extreme voters; in other words, those voters less likely to say they would vote for the PVV are more heavily influenced at an implicit level, beyond their awareness. This suggests that implicit attitudes of the PRR party may be quite useful for explaining support among voters who would not normally self‐report it.

  February 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12401   open full text
• Challenged Expectations: Mere Exposure Effects on Attitudes About Transgender People and Rights.
  Andrew R. Flores, Donald P. Haider‐Markel, Daniel C. Lewis, Patrick R. Miller, Barry L. Tadlock, Jami K. Taylor.
  Political Psychology. January 19, 2017
  Social categorization processes may be initiated by physical appearance, which have the potential to influence how people evaluate others. Categorizations ground what stereotypes and prejudices, if any, become activated. Gender is one of the first features people notice about others. Much less is known about individuals who may transgress gender expectations, including people who are transgender. Using an experiment, this study investigates whether the attitudes that people have about transgender people and rights are influenced by information and facial images. We hypothesize that mere exposure to transgender people, via information and images of faces, should be a source of prejudice reduction. We randomly provide participants with vignettes defining transgender and also randomize whether these vignettes come with facial images, varying the physical features of gendered individuals. We find our treatments have lower levels of discomfort and transphobia but have little effect on transgender rights attitudes. We further find that the impacts are stronger among Democrats than among Republicans. Our findings support the argument that people are in general unfamiliar with transgender people, and the mere exposure to outgroups can be a source of prejudice reduction.

  January 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12402   open full text
• “Unpacking” the Identity‐to‐Politics Link: The Effects of Social Identification on Voting Among Muslim Immigrants in Western Europe.
  Maria Kranendonk, Floris Vermeulen, Anja van Heelsum.
  Political Psychology. January 18, 2017
  The identity‐to‐politics link assumes that individuals who share a certain demographic feature also share common political pursuits. This article critically examines that presumed relationship by analyzing how voting probability is affected by social identification in combination with other elements—namely, perception of shared grievances and group resources. Tallying responses from Muslim immigrants in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom via surveys conducted for the European research project EURISLAM, this study supports the assumption that social identification affects voting in specific circumstances. The results show that identifying with the origin country decreases voting probability among Muslim immigrants in Europe. Another finding was the context‐specific effect of social identification. That is, origin‐country identification's effect is contingent on an individual's perception of shared grievances and national identification; and origin country and religious identifications' effects are contingent on an individual's perception of shared grievances, national identification, and group differences.

  January 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12397   open full text
• Actor‐Partner Interdependence Models (APIM) and Voting Behavior: Methodology and Applications.
  Moreno Mancosu, Cristiano Vezzoni.
  Political Psychology. January 17, 2017
  Recently, the social sciences have witnessed a rising interest in dyadic design, as an efficient way to disentangle mechanisms of interpersonal influence. Despite the relevance of this design to political research, few efforts have been made to collect and efficiently analyze dyadic data. In this article, we suggest the Actor‐Partner Interdependence Model as a useful tool to test bidirectional effects in dyadic data on political attitudes and behaviors. The model explicitly assumes that members of a dyad (reciprocally identified as actor and partner) involved in political communication are interdependent and influence each other. We apply the model to estimate the effect of partner's party identification on actor's vote choice, using 1996 Indianapolis–St. Louis dyadic data. Results show that partner's party identification is significantly associated with vote choice. Moreover, we show that influence between dyad members is moderated by their intimacy and that an increased difference in socioeconomic status between dyad members tips the balance of the effect in favor of the individual with more resources. Our conclusions point to the effectiveness of APIM in modeling interdependent asymmetric relations and call for increasing efforts in collecting dyadic data and in developing proper tools for their analysis.

  January 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12400   open full text
• Successfully Contesting the Policy Sphere: Examining Through the Press a Case of Local Protests Changing New Ecological Laws.
  Paula Castro, Eunice Seixas, Patrícia Neca, Leonor Bettencourt.
  Political Psychology. January 13, 2017
  It is crucial to gain better insights into how psychosocial processes can limit the power of the political/legislative sphere for promoting social change through new laws. One form of accomplishing this is by illuminating the arguments and the content and value of social representations at play in cases in which the public sphere succeeds in contesting new laws. In this article, we explore a case of successful resistance to new ecological laws in a Portuguese Natura site. The laws, restricting recreational fishing, were made less stringent after meeting with local opposition. Content analysis of 122 articles published from 2006 to 2014 in regional and national newspapers reveals that protestors (fishermen, local authorities) received higher visibility and support and had more direct voice than the political sphere in both presses. Dialogical analysis of direct quotations of protestors shows how they seek legitimacy by establishing common ground with valued representations, vividly invoking people‐place bonds and tradition, and also how they attempt to undermine the law's legitimacy by linking local and national concerns, avoiding (potentially devalued) “Nimby” (“not in my backyard”) arguments. The discussion highlights what can be learned from using the press to investigate policy struggles that successfully organized their argumentation to contest new laws.

  January 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12388   open full text
• The Effects of Moral and Pragmatic Arguments Against Torture on Demands for Judicial Reform.
  Bernhard Leidner, Peter Kardos, Emanuele Castano.
  Political Psychology. January 13, 2017
  Torture can be opposed on the basis of pragmatic (e.g., torture does not work) or moral arguments (e.g., torture violates human rights). Three studies investigated how these arguments affect U.S. citizens' attitudes toward U.S.‐committed torture. In Study 1, participants expressed stronger demands for redressing the injustice of torture when presented with moral rather than pragmatic or no arguments against torture. Study 2 replicated this finding with an extended justice measure and also showed the moderating role of ingroup glorification and attachment. Moral arguments increased justice demands among those who typically react most defensively to ingroup‐committed wrongdoings: the highly attached and glorifying. Study 3 showed that the effect of moral arguments against torture on justice demands and support for torture among high glorifiers is mediated by moral outrage and empathy but not guilt.

  January 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12386   open full text
• Collective Trauma From the Lab to the Real World: The Effects of the Holocaust on Contemporary Israeli Political Cognitions.
  Daphna Canetti, Gilad Hirschberger, Carmit Rapaport, Julia Elad‐Strenger, Tsachi Ein‐Dor, Shifra Rosenzveig, Tom Pyszczynski, Stevan E. Hobfoll.
  Political Psychology. January 11, 2017
  This research tested whether chronic or contextually activated Holocaust exposure is associated with more extreme political attitudes among Israeli Jews. Study 1 (N = 57), and Study 2 (N = 61) found that Holocaust primes increased support for aggressive policies against a current adversary and decreased support for political compromise via an amplified sense of identification with Zionist ideology. These effects, however, were obtained only under an exclusive but not an inclusive framing of the Holocaust. Study 3 (N = 152) replicated these findings in a field study conducted around Holocaust Remembrance Day and showed that the link between Holocaust exposure, ideological identification, and militancy also occurs in real‐life settings. Study 4 (N = 867) demonstrated in a nationally representative survey that Holocaust survivors and their descendants exhibited amplified existential threat responses to contemporary political violence, which were associated with militancy and opposition to peaceful compromises. Together, these studies illustrate the Holocaustization of Israeli political cognitions 70 years later.

  January 11, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12384   open full text
• Our Followers Are Lions, Theirs Are Sheep: How Social Identity Shapes Theories About Followership and Social Influence.
  Niklas K. Steffens, S. Alexander Haslam, Jolanda Jetten, Frank Mols.
  Political Psychology. January 07, 2017
  Two studies examine how self‐categorization theory can be used to refine our understanding of people's implicit theories about followership and social influence. Results from Study 1 show that perceivers regard followers of a group they themselves identify strongly with (rather than not at all) to be more representative of the prototype of effective followers (displaying enthusiasm, industry, good citizenship) and to be less representative of the antiprototype of effective followers (displaying conformity, incompetence, and insubordination). Results are replicated in a second experiment in which we compare the views of those self‐categorizing as either Republican or Democrat responding to followers of the Republican and Democratic Party. Results of Study 2 replicate those of Study 1 and also reveal qualitative differences in the preferred influence strategy for dealing with followers. Specifically, respondents seek to engage in persuasion when trying to change the behavior of ingroup followers, while resorting to coercion when trying to change the behavior of outgroup followers. Our results are the first to provide evidence that perceivers' theories about what followers are like and how they are influenced most effectively are structured by perceivers' identification (and dis‐identification) with the particular groups that leaders are championing.

  January 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/pops.12387   open full text
• The “Hero‐Protector Narrative”: Manufacturing Emotional Consent for the Use of Force.
  Maéva Clément, Thomas Lindemann, Eric Sangar.
  Political Psychology. December 21, 2016
  How do political leaders manufacture collective emotions to justify the use of force? This article introduces the “hero‐protector narrative” as a conceptual model to analyze how political leaders try to manufacture specific collective emotions to encourage their audience to perceive violence as the only morally acceptable course of action. In our model, we formalize a set of distinctive narrative structures (roles and sequences), which are combined to activate compassion and moral anger as well as identification with “heroic” behavior. Furthermore, we argue that the resonance of this narrative draws on values of hyper‐masculinity in patriarchal societies. As such this narrative is to be found across different types of actors (state/nonstate) and culturally diverse settings. To test our model, we use a computer‐assisted QDA approach. We compare systematically discourses produced by political actors legitimizing the use of force versus actors opposing the use of force. We find that discourses supporting the use of force, such as those produced by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden in the context of the Iraq war, share the structural characteristics of the hero‐protector narrative. In this regard, they differ remarkably from violence‐opposing discourses, regardless of their cultural background.

  December 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12385   open full text
• Identity Hierarchy Within the Sudanese Superordinate Identity: Political Leadership Promoting and Demoting Subordinate Groups.
  Sigrun Marie Moss.
  Political Psychology. December 07, 2016
  Social psychology often emphasizes the link between superordinate identities and intergroup harmony. Other research, however, has illuminated the possible pitfalls of such approaches, pointing at the potentially hierarchical nature of superordinate identities. Yet the research largely ignores who invokes and mobilizes specific definitions of superordinate identities. Using interviews with political leaders and participants from the general population, this article explores a non‐Western conflict case with a hierarchical government‐defined superordinate identity: Sudan. Focus is on the government demoting and promoting different subordinate identities within the superordinate. The criteria for the highest‐level subordinate category within the superordinate identity are discussed as pertaining to three factors—Muslim, Arabic speaking and Arab. Most participants discuss this superordinate identity as yielding an identity hierarchy and strengthening subordinate identities, thereby demonstrating the potential detrimental nature of superordinate identities. The article highlights the context dependency of the link between superordinate identity and intergroup harmony and adds to the void in research on the role of leadership in constructing superordinate identities.

  December 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12378   open full text
• Negative Affectivity, Political Contention, and Turnout: A Genopolitics Field Experiment.
  Jaime E. Settle, Christopher T. Dawes, Peter John Loewen, Costas Panagopoulos.
  Political Psychology. December 05, 2016
  Recent genopolitics and political psychology research suggests individuals' biological differences influence political participation. The interaction between individual differences and environments has received less attention, not least because of the confound of self‐selection into environments. To test the interaction between innate predispositions and an exogenous environmental influence, we conducted a field experiment during the 2010 California midterm elections. We randomly assigned subjects to receive a postcard mobilization treatment designed to induce an emotional response to the degree of political contention in the election. We tested the possibility that subjects who are genetically predisposed toward negative affectivity will be less likely to vote after treatment exposure. To our knowledge, this is the first field experiment in political science to measure genetic moderation of a treatment, and it suggests experimental approaches can benefit from the inclusion of genetically and other biologically informative covariates.

  December 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12379   open full text
• Opportunities for Immigrants’ Acculturation and Identification Varieties.
  Christoph Daniel Schaefer, Bernd Simon.
  Political Psychology. November 30, 2016
  This article elucidates how members of the two largest immigration groups living in Germany (i.e., immigrants with a Russian or Turkish background) deal with and integrate values and practices deriving from their ethnocultural minority group and the larger society. A special emphasis of this article is on how context conditions form opportunities for varieties of acculturation and identification. The pattern of results suggests a taxonomy of immigrants’ acculturation, consisting of Blended Integration, Alternating Integration, Separation, and Dis‐Integration. This taxonomy is based on immigrants’ integration of cultural aspects, while it proved to be analytically useful to conceptualize their national self‐allocation as an additional dimension. Immigrants’ development of these different varieties was found to be linked to their perceptions of compatibility and acceptance by the larger society. Relative to immigrants with a Turkish background, immigrants with a Russian background experience less deep incompatibilities between values and practices deriving from the cultural groups, thus having more latitude for acculturation and integration. In contrast, immigrants with a Turkish background experience more challenges to acculturation and integration as a result of being confronted more frequently with incompatibilities and experience less societal acceptance. Further conceptual and societal implications are discussed.

  November 30, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12381   open full text
• Quest for Significance and Violent Extremism: The Case of Domestic Radicalization.
  Katarzyna Jasko, Gary LaFree, Arie Kruglanski.
  Political Psychology. November 28, 2016
  In the present study, we applied the quest for significance model of radicalization to explain the use of political violence. According to the model, when people experience loss of personal significance (e.g., due to social rejection, achievement failures, or abuse) the motivation to restore significance may push them toward the use of extreme means. We tested this prediction in a sample of individuals who have committed ideologically motivated crimes in the United States (n = 1496). We found that experiences of economic and social loss of significance were separate and positive predictors related to the use of violence by perpetrators of ideologically motivated crimes. We also found evidence that the presence of radicalized others (friends but not family members) in the individuals' social network increased their likelihood of using violence.

  November 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12376   open full text
• From Equality‐Based Respect to Environmental Activism: Antecedents and Consequences of Global Identity.
  Daniela Renger, Gerhard Reese.
  Political Psychology. November 22, 2016
  Global identity reflects social identification with the world and the largest, most inclusive human ingroup and is generally associated with behavior that serves the world and all humans, such as transnational cooperation or proenvironmental engagement. While the outcomes of being globally identified are well‐established, the antecedents of global identity are only partially explored. Drawing from research suggesting that respect fosters identification in small groups, we argue that the general experience of being respected as an equal by others increases global identification. In an online study with 469 Germans (students and nonstudents), we tested the relation between equality‐based respect and global identification in a structural equation model, with proenvironmental intentions and donation behavior as outcome variables. As expected, equality‐based respect, but not other forms of social recognition (need‐based care and achievement‐based social esteem), predicted global identity while higher global identity, in turn, predicted proenvironmental activism. These effects were substantial beyond known predictors of proenvironmental behavior and thus suggest that equality‐based respect represents an important facet of responses to global challenges.

  November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12382   open full text
• The “Islamized Stranger”: On “Chronic” Versus “Contextual” Salience in the Measurement of Anti‐Muslim Prejudice.
  Bram Spruyt, Jolanda van der Noll.
  Political Psychology. November 14, 2016
  There is an ongoing debate whether anti‐Muslim prejudice in Western countries is more widespread than prejudice towards other ethno‐cultural groups or general ethnic prejudice. Previous research used different methodologies and yielded contradictory results. In this article, we combine a population‐based split‐sample survey experiment (N = 1,323), where half of the respondents judged items about Muslims and the other half statements about strangers, with an open question probing which groups respondents thought of when thinking about “strangers.” We furthermore extend previous research by not only focusing on general ethnic prejudice, but to differentiate between perceived trustworthiness, economic, cultural, and security threat. Our results strongly support the idea that the difference between the “chronic” and “contextual” salience of the target of prejudice should be taken into account.

  November 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12383   open full text
• Do Disagreeable Political Discussion Networks Undermine Attitude Strength?
  Joshua Robison, Thomas J. Leeper, James N. Druckman.
  Political Psychology. October 31, 2016
  How attitudes change and affect behavior depends, in large part, on their strength. Strong attitudes are more resistant to persuasion and are more likely to produce attitude‐consistent behavior. But what influences attitude strength? In this article, we explore a widely discussed, but rarely investigated, factor: an individual's political discussion network. What prior work exists offers a somewhat mixed picture, finding sometimes that disagreeable networks weaken attitudes and other times that they strengthen attitudes. We use a novel national representative dataset to explore the relationship between disagreeable networks and attitude strength. We find, perhaps surprisingly, no evidence that disagreements in networks affect political attitude strength. We conclude by discussing likely reasons for our findings, which, in turn, provide a research agenda for the study of networks and attitude strength.

  October 31, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12374   open full text
• Between Remembering and Forgetting the Years of Political Violence: Psychosocial Impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru.
  Agustín Espinosa, Darío Páez, Tesania Velázquez, Rosa María Cueto, Evelyn Seminario, Salvador Sandoval, Félix Reátegui, Iris Jave.
  Political Psychology. September 29, 2016
  This article analyzes the association between knowledge of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), evaluation of TRC's achievements, experience of victimization, attitudes toward remembering and forgetting past political violence, perceptions of socioemotional climate (SEC), belief in forgiveness and attitudes toward violence in Peru based on a study conducted in three Peruvian cities with different rates of victimization due to political violence during 1980–2000 (n = 1200). Results showed that a positive attitude toward remembering the past of political violence was predominant and related to a positive evaluation of TRC's achievements. Attitude toward remembering also has an ambivalent collective effect increasing both positive and negative SECs, and it is less accepted by victims of political violence. On the other hand, attitude toward forgetting is less accepted by participants, and it also has an ambivalent effect by increasing positive and negative SECs. Attitude toward forgetting has more societal costs, since it is related to attitudes toward violence and decreased knowledge and a positive evaluation of TRC. In general, findings suggest that remembering traumatic events has an emotional cost, but also it is shown that remembering seems to be more beneficial for society in the long‐term than forgetting.

  September 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12364   open full text
• Ratio Bias and Policy Preferences: How Equivalency Framing of Numbers Can Affect Attitudes.
  Rasmus T. Pedersen.
  Political Psychology. September 25, 2016
  Numbers permeate modern political communication. While current scholarship on framing effects has focused on the persuasive effects of words and arguments, this article shows that framing of numbers can also substantially affect policy preferences. Such effects are caused by ratio bias, which is a general tendency to focus on numerators and pay insufficient attention to denominators in ratios. Using a population‐based survey experiment, I demonstrate how differently framed but logically equivalent representations of the exact same numerical value can have large effects on citizens' preferences regarding salient political issues such as education and taxes. Furthermore, the effects of numerical framing are found across most groups of the population, largely regardless of their political predisposition and their general ability to understand and use numerical information. These findings have significant implications for our understanding of framing effects and the role played by numbers in public opinion formation.

  September 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12362   open full text
• The Politics of Trauma Studies: What Can We Learn From Women Combatants' Experiences of Traumatic Events in Conflict Zones?
  Shir Daphna‐Tekoah, Ayelet Harel‐Shalev.
  Political Psychology. September 25, 2016
  Wars, combat, and political developments triggered the study of trauma. Knowledge about trauma initially emerged from the experiences of men combatants in the battlefield. At a later stage, the study of trauma focused on women and children subject to violence and abuse. The current research suggests that additional aspects of trauma can be understood through the study of competent women exposed to traumatic events and not merely as victims of war or abuse. The study offers an analysis of women combatants' narratives of their exposure to traumatic events in conflict zones. Data were obtained from two focus groups and a series of 30 personal interviews of women veterans who served in the IDF. Interviewing women combat soldiers revealed a variety of narratives of their war experiences, including the intertwining of the emotional and the physical. The window to understanding the trauma was opened by analysis of the responses of the women combatants to potentially traumatic events rather than by focusing on post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) per se. We emphasize the need for a critical perspective in the study of trauma and combat trauma and propose that there is value in engaging with and listening to diverse narratives of trauma.

  September 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12373   open full text
• Lone‐Actor Terrorists’ Emotions and Cognition: An Evaluation Beyond Stereotypes.
  Stephane J. Baele.
  Political Psychology. September 21, 2016
  Lone‐actor terrorists are very often presented as emotionally and/or cognitively impaired—yet is it really the case? The present article provides the first rigorous assessment of the hypotheses according to which a high level of negative emotions, especially anger, and a lack of cognitive flexibility and complexity play a role in lone‐actor terrorists’ violent actions. Using a sample of lone‐actor terrorists’ writings, we use the LIWC (a fully automated language use analysis software) to compare terrorists’ cognition and emotion with those of other control groups, most notably nonviolent radical activists. Results strongly support the first hypothesis but clearly refute the second one, suggesting that lone‐actor terrorists are in fact characterized by a specific combination of high‐anger and high‐cognitive complexity. These method and results lay the groundwork for a more systematic and nuanced analysis of the psychology of terrorists, which is currently in a deadlock.

  September 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12365   open full text
• The Roots of Patriotism Across Political Contexts.
  Jennifer Wolak, Ryan Dawkins.
  Political Psychology. September 20, 2016
  Why do some Americans feel more patriotic than others? We argue that feelings of national pride are reinforced by cues from people's political and social environments. When Americans reside in contexts that align with their values, traits, and civic orientations, they are more likely to express pride in their country. We consider both civic and ethnic pathways to patriotism. We expect that minorities and those who particularly value political equality will feel increasingly patriotic as the racial and ethnic diversity of their state climbs. For those who see politics through a partisan lens, we expect that environments defined by political competition will enhance feelings of national pride. We test our theory using data from the 2012 American National Election Studies (ANES). We find that Americans are more likely to say that they feel love for their country when they reside in political contexts congruent with their values and approach to citizenship.

  September 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12363   open full text
• The Mobilizing Effect of Right‐Wing Ideological Climates: Cross‐Level Interaction Effects on Different Types of Outgroup Attitudes.
  Jasper Van Assche, Arne Roets, Jonas De keersmaecker, Alain Van Hiel.
  Political Psychology. September 11, 2016
  The present research investigated a multilevel person‐context interactionist framework for the relationship between right‐wing ideologies and prejudice across two large, representative samples (Study 1: European Social Survey: N = 56,752; Study 2: World Values Survey: N = 74,042). Across three different operationalizations of right‐wing ideology, two contextual levels (regional and national) of right‐wing climate, and three types of outgroup attitudes (i.e., age‐, ethnicity‐, and gender‐based), the analyses consistently revealed cross‐level interactions, showing a strong association between right‐wing attitudes and negative outgroup attitudes at the individual level in contexts with a low right‐wing climate, whereas this relationship is weaker and often even absent in contexts with a high right‐wing climate. These cross‐level interactions remained significant after controlling for statistical artefacts (i.e., restriction of range and outliers). The authors propose norm setting as the mobilizing mechanism through which a right‐wing climate develops and curbs the influence of individual right‐wing social‐ideological attitudes on outgroup attitudes.

  September 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12359   open full text
• Social Norms and Egalitarian Values Mitigate Authoritarian Intolerance Toward Sexual Minorities.
  Clifton M. Oyamot, Melinda S. Jackson, Emily L. Fisher, Grace Deason, Eugene Borgida.
  Political Psychology. September 07, 2016
  In the United States, acceptance of sexual minorities (e.g., gay men and lesbians) has increased substantially since the early 1990s. This study examined whether authoritarians' attitudes have been influenced by the societal shift toward greater acceptance of sexual minorities. Using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) collected between 1992 and 2012, we tested a model in which authoritarianism, endorsement of egalitarian values, and social norms shifting in the direction of tolerance predict individual attitudes toward sexual minorities and LGBT rights issues. Results indicated that (1) there was a subset of authoritarians who endorsed egalitarian values, (2) authoritarians in general became more tolerant (i.e., held less negative attitudes) toward sexual minorities between 1992 and 2012, and (3) “egalitarian authoritarians” held more positive attitudes toward sexual minorities than other authoritarians. The findings contribute to contemporary theory and research on authoritarianism, which is moving from a monolithic view of authoritarianism to one in which culture and core values activate and shape manifestations of authoritarian tendencies.

  September 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12360   open full text
• Replacing the Moral Foundations: An Evolutionary‐Coalitional Theory of Liberal‐Conservative Differences.
  Jeffrey S. Sinn, Matthew W. Hayes.
  Political Psychology. September 05, 2016
  Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) explains liberal‐conservative differences as arising from different moral intuitions, with liberals endorsing “individualizing” foundations (Harm and Fairness) and conservatives also endorsing “binding” foundations (Authority, Respect, and Purity). We argue these labels misconstrue ideological differences and propose Evolutionary‐Coalitional Theory (ECT) as an alternative, explaining how competitive dynamics in the ancestral social environment could produce the observed ideological differences. We test ECT against MFT across three studies. Study 1 shows the so‐called “binding” orientation entails the threat‐sensitivity and outgroup antagonism predicted by ECT; that is, an authoritarian motive. Similarly, Study 2 shows the so‐called “individualizing” orientation is better described as a universalizing motive, one reflecting a broader set of moral commitments (e.g., to nature) and a broader sociality than the egocentrism implied by MFT. Study 3 provides a factor analysis reducing “binding” to authoritarianism and “individualizing” to universalism, with the latter loading against social dominance orientation (SDO). A hierarchical regression then provides additional evidence for ECT, showing this dominating motive (SDO) accounts for variance in conservatism that MFT leaves unexplained. Collectively, these three studies suggest that ECT offers a more accurate and precise explanation of the key psychological differences between liberals and conservatives.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12361   open full text
• Evaluating Political Acculturation Strategies: The Perspective of the Majority and Other Minority Groups.
  Paul Hindriks, Maykel Verkuyten, Marcel Coenders.
  Political Psychology. August 08, 2016
  Applying the acculturation framework to the political domain, this research examines how Dutch majority members and members of different minority groups evaluate the political acculturation strategies of an immigrant‐origin group. Using an experimental vignette design (N = 664), the results show that the strategy of political assimilation (only advance the interests of society) was evaluated most positively, followed by integration (advance the interest of society and of the minority group), and then separation (only advance the interest of the minority group). This was found for the native Dutch as well as the immigrant‐origin groups. This suggest that minority members do not view minority outgroups as potential allies to counter the dominance of the majority group, but rather as competitors for political influence. Furthermore, the role of dual identification for the evaluation of ingroup political acculturation depended on the type of political acculturation strategy.

  August 08, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12356   open full text
• “One Nation Under God”: The System‐Justifying Function of Symbolically Aligning God and Government.
  Steven Shepherd, Richard P. Eibach, Aaron C. Kay.
  Political Psychology. July 29, 2016
  Do references to God in political discourse increase confidence in the U.S. sociopolitical system? Using a system justification framework (Jost & Banaji, ), five studies provide evidence that, (1) increasingly governments symbolically associate the nation with God when public confidence in the social system may be threatened and (2) associating the nation with God serves a system‐justifying function by increasing public confidence in the system. In an analysis of U.S. presidential speeches, presidents were more likely to symbolically associate the nation with God during threatening times (Study 1). Among religious individuals, referencing God in political rhetoric increased the perceived trustworthiness of politicians, compared to patriotic secular rhetoric (Study 2) or simply priming the concept of God (Study 3). These effects were also unique to politicians from one's own sociopolitical system (Study 4). Finally, believing God has a plan for the United States attenuates the deleterious effect that perceptions of national decline have on system confidence (Study 5). Implications for the system‐justifying function of religion are discussed.

  July 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12353   open full text
• Explaining White Opposition to Black Political Leadership: The Role of Fear of Racial Favoritism.
  Seth K. Goldman.
  Political Psychology. July 26, 2016
  Despite the election of America's first Black president, most non‐Hispanic Whites continue to oppose Black political leadership. The conventional explanation for White opposition is sheer racial prejudice, yet the available empirical evidence for this theory is inconsistent. I test an alternative theory that Whites perceive Black political leaders as a threat to their group's interests. Using a new survey measure and nationally representative panel data covering the 2008, 2010, and 2012 U.S. elections, I find that a majority of Whites perceive Black elected officials as likely to favor Blacks over Whites. Moreover, fear of racial favoritism predicts support for Barack Obama in both cross‐sectional models and fixed‐effects models of within‐person change, controlling for negative racial stereotypes. I replicate these findings using a separate cross‐sectional survey fielded after the 2014 election that controls for racial resentment. Collectively, these results suggest that perceptions of conflicting group interests—and not just prejudice—drive White opposition to Black political leadership.

  July 26, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12355   open full text
• Fear of Infection or Justification of Social Exclusion? The Symbolic Exploitation of the Ebola Epidemic.
  Stefan Stürmer, Anette Rohmann, Agostino Mazziotta, Birte Siem, Maria‐Luisa Barbarino.
  Political Psychology. July 14, 2016
  Public discourse in Western countries on the 2014 Ebola epidemic provided a unique natural opportunity to study the relationship between a disease's sociocultural representation and health policy support. Our main prediction stated that among Western citizens, support for restrictive health policies (e.g., mandatory quarantining) would be determined more through preexisting prejudice towards African immigrants than fears of Ebola infection. A questionnaire study with time‐lagged measurement of predictor and criterion variables employing a German sample (N = 218) that was heterogeneous in terms of gender, age, profession, political orientation, and income level provided clear support for this assumption. Although variables related to fear‐of‐infection were significant predictors, prejudice‐related variables explained several times more variance in participants’ support for restrictive policies. Moreover, the degree to which participants adopted prevalent beliefs regarding the sociocultural origins of Ebola (e.g., eating bushmeat) further intensified the impact of prejudice‐related variables.

  July 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12354   open full text
• The Social Causes and Political Consequences of Group Empathy.
  Cigdem V. Sirin, Nicholas A. Valentino, José D. Villalobos.
  Political Psychology. July 05, 2016
  Recent scholarship has discovered significant racial/ethnic group variation in response to political threats such as immigration and terrorism. Surprisingly, minority groups often simultaneously perceive themselves to be at greater risk from such threats and yet still prefer more open immigration policies and civil liberties protections. We suggest a group‐level empathy process may explain this puzzle: Due to their higher levels of empathy for other disadvantaged groups, many minority group members support protections for others even when their own interests are threatened. Little is known, however, about the unique properties of group empathy or its role in policy opinion formation. In this study, we examine the reliability and validity of our new measure of group empathy, the Group Empathy Index (GEI), demonstrating that it is distinct from other social and political predispositions such as ethnocentrism, social dominance orientation, authoritarianism, ideology, and partisanship. We then propose a theory about the development of group empathy in reaction to life experiences based on one's race/ethnicity, gender, age, and education. Finally, we examine the power of group empathy to predict policy attitudes and political behavior.

  July 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12352   open full text
• Political Action in Conflict and Nonconflict Regions in Indonesia: The Role of Religious and National Identifications.
  Agnieszka Kanas, Borja Martinovic.
  Political Psychology. June 27, 2016
  This study examined the relationship between group identification and political action in Indonesia. We made four contributions to the literature. First, we studied political action on behalf of religious groups and examined the role of religious identification alone and in combination with national identification. Second, we analyzed political action in a non‐Western country where social cleavages occur primarily along religious lines and where a conflict and nonconflict region can be studied. Third, we compared Muslims and Christians, whose majority and minority status varies across the two regions, and fourth, we investigated both normative and nonnormative forms of political action (protest and violence). In line with the dual‐identification model of politicization, we found that religious identification increased support for protest (but not violence) in the conflict region only and particularly among high national identifiers. In the nonconflict region, religious identification was not related to violence, and it was related to lower support for protest among high national identifiers. The patterns were largely similar for Muslims and Christians, but some differences were found depending on the majority‐minority status. We conclude that particularities of the intergroup context should be taken into consideration when studying politicization.

  June 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12345   open full text
• Personality Traits, Income, and Economic Ideology.
  Bert N. Bakker.
  Political Psychology. June 27, 2016
  While the psychological underpinnings of social ideology are well established, less is known about the psychological underpinnings of economic ideology. In this study, I assess whether Big Five personality traits are associated with economic ideology and when personality traits are more strongly or more weakly associated with economic ideology. I hypothesize that low income attenuates the association between the Big Five traits and economic ideology. Studies conducted in Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States show that Conscientiousness is positively correlated with economic conservatism, while Agreeableness and Neuroticism are negatively correlated with economic conservatism. Moreover, low income attenuates the association between personality traits and economic ideology. I report a weaker association between Agreeableness and economic ideology among poor people compared to wealthier people in all three countries. Low income also attenuates the association between economic ideology and the traits Openness (Denmark), Extraversion (United Kingdom), and Neuroticism (United States). I contribute to the literature addressing the psychological correlates of economic ideology by showing that (1) economic ideology has a distinct set of personality correlates and (2) low income attenuates the association between some personality traits and economic ideology.

  June 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12349   open full text
• The Effects of Counterstereotypic Gender Strategies on Candidate Evaluations.
  Nichole M. Bauer.
  Political Psychology. June 27, 2016
  Voters do not associate female candidates with feminine stereotypes, but voters also do not associate female candidates with the qualities most valued in political leaders such as experience and knowledge. Current research offers conflicting conclusions on whether female candidates benefit from breaking with feminine norms or face a backlash for being too aggressive and not likable enough. Using a series of experiments, I show how counterstereotypic gender strategies, including women emphasizing masculine trait competencies, improve evaluations of female candidates along both masculine and feminine leadership dimensions. These results offer novel insights into how female candidates can overcome perceptual deficits among voters that they lack critical masculine leadership qualities. I also show that female candidates can overcome these biases without losing on traditional feminine strengths such as warmth and likability. However, counterstereotypic female candidates can face a “likability” backlash from out‐partisan voters. These findings suggest counterstereotypes may be more beneficial for female candidates in a primary election context when voters are copartisans rather than general elections where candidates often need cross‐partisan support.

  June 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12351   open full text
• Explaining the Inexplicable: Differences in Attributions for the Holocaust in Germany, Israel, and Poland.
  Roland Imhoff, Michał Bilewicz, Katja Hanke, Dennis T. Kahn, Naomi Henkel‐Guembel, Slieman Halabi, Tal Shani‐Sherman, Gilad Hirschberger.
  Political Psychology. May 25, 2016
  Seventy years have passed since the Holocaust, but this cataclysmic event continues to reverberate in the present. In this research, we examine attributions about the causes of the Holocaust and the influence of such attributions on intergroup relations. Three representative surveys were conducted among Germans, Poles, and Israeli Jews to examine inter‐ and intragroup variations in attributions for the Holocaust and how these attributions influence intergroup attitudes. Results indicated that Germans made more external than internal attributions and were especially low in attributing an evil essence to their ancestors. Israelis and Poles mainly endorsed the obedient essence attribution and were lowest on attribution to coercion. These attributions, however, were related to attitudes towards contemporary Germany primarily among Israeli Jews. The more they endorsed situationist explanations, and the less they endorsed the evil essence explanation, the more positive their attitude to Germany. Among Germans, attributions were related to a higher motivation for historical closure, except for the obedience attribution that was related to low desire for closure. Israelis exhibited a low desire for historical closure especially when attribution for evil essence was high. These findings suggest that lay perceptions of history are essential to understanding contemporary intergroup processes.

  May 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12348   open full text
• Personality Traits and Political Ideology: A First Global Assessment.
  Matthias Fatke.
  Political Psychology. May 25, 2016
  This article presents the first assessment of how the five‐factor model of personality and political ideology are associated across the world. Personality traits become more and more important in the study of political behavior. And the relationship with ideology virtually parallels the history of this line of research. Yet, many existing studies are limited to single, highly developed countries and mostly draw on nonrandom or nonrepresentative samples. Our study, in contrasts, makes use of the most recent wave of the World Value Survey and analyzes the relationship comparatively in 21 countries from all continents. Results corroborate the most prominent findings about personality and ideology. However, effects of personality traits cannot be generalized easily across the world as effects vary considerably from country to country. Therefore, we additionally analyze specific preferences concerning social and economic policies on the one side. On the other, we theorize as well as model the moderating role of the country context by introducing cross‐level interaction effects.

  May 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12347   open full text
• Support for Self‐Censorship Among Israelis as a Barrier to Resolving the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict.
  Boaz Hameiri, Keren Sharvit, Daniel Bar‐Tal, Eldad Shahar, Eran Halperin.
  Political Psychology. May 15, 2016
  Self‐censorship, defined as an “act of intentionally and voluntarily withholding information from others in the absence of formal obstacles” often serves as a barrier to resolving intractable conflicts. Specifically, in order to protect the group, and in absence of objective constraints such as institutionalized censorship, individuals practice self‐censorship and support its practice by other society members. This prevents free flow and transparency of information, within a society, regarding the conflict and the adversary. In an attempt to investigate the factors that contribute to the functioning of self‐censorship as a sociopsychological barrier to conflict resolution, a longitudinal study was conducted among a large sample of Jews in Israel. The survey was administered in three waves: a few months before, during, and a few months after Israel's Operation Pillar of Defense in the Gaza Strip. The findings showed that armed confrontation can increase support for self‐censorship. In addition, the findings revealed that personal characteristics (e.g., authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, siege mentality) predicted support for self‐censorship, which, in turn, mediated the effect of personal characteristics on support for negotiations and for providing humanitarian aid. The theoretical as well as the applied implications of the findings are discussed.

  May 15, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12346   open full text
• The Social Structure of Political Echo Chambers: Variation in Ideological Homophily in Online Networks.
  Andrei Boutyline, Robb Willer.
  Political Psychology. May 05, 2016
  We predict that people with different political orientations will exhibit systematically different levels of political homophily, the tendency to associate with others similar to oneself in political ideology. Research on personality differences across the political spectrum finds that both more conservative and more politically extreme individuals tend to exhibit greater orientations towards cognitive stability, clarity, and familiarity. We reason that such a “preference for certainty” may make these individuals more inclined to seek out the company of those who reaffirm, rather than challenge, their views. Since survey studies of political homophily face well‐documented methodological challenges, we instead test this proposition on a large sample of politically engaged users of the social‐networking platform Twitter, whose ideologies we infer from the politicians and policy nonprofits they follow. As predicted, we find that both more extreme and more conservative individuals tend to be more homophilous than more liberal and more moderate ones.

  May 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12337   open full text
• Working for the Hierarchical System: The Role of Meritocratic Ideology in the Endorsement of Corruption.
  Xuyun Tan, Li Liu, Zhenwei Huang, Wenwen Zheng.
  Political Psychology. May 03, 2016
  Corruption has a wide range of corrosive effects on societies, but it is widespread throughout the world. There is a question, however, as to whether corruption is endorsed as an outcome of a legitimate hierarchy and meritocracy. To address this issue, the present study examines the associations between meritocratic ideology and the indicators of corruption by performing two empirical studies with correlational and experimental designs. In Study 1, all variables were measured with scales, and the results demonstrated that meritocratic ideologies were negatively associated with corruption perception but positively associated with corrupt intention. In Study 2, meritocratic ideology was manipulated, and the results demonstrated that compared with the low meritocratic‐ideology condition, the participants primed by the high meritocratic‐ideology condition reported a lower corruption perception but higher corrupt intention. In both studies, the findings suggest that the meritocratic ideology that motivates people to maintain and bolster the current hierarchical structure and meritocracy leads to the endorsement of corruption. The present study explores the roles of meritocratic ideology in the perception and intention of corruption, extends the scope of the predictive power of system justification theory to corruption beyond mere injustice‐related aspects of disadvantage, and also provides suggestions for interpreting and fighting against corruption.

  May 03, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12341   open full text
• Polarized Opinions on Racial Progress and Inequality: Measurement and Application to Affirmative Action Preferences.
  Matthew DeBell.
  Political Psychology. April 29, 2016
  This study presents new measures of opinion about progress toward racial equality and provides a multifaceted rationale for preferring the new measures to the old ones. To reduce several sources of measurement error and improve analytic bite by breaking progress into its constituent elements, surveys should ask about past, present, and ideal conditions, not “progress.” These questions reveal racially polarized opinions: Black and White Americans agree on the goal of equality and agree that conditions were worse in the past, but Blacks think conditions were much worse than Whites do. They especially differ in opinions on current conditions and thus in how much change is required to achieve the goal of equality. Blacks see much more current inequality than Whites do. These opinions help explain preferences for affirmative action (AA). Contrary to previously published findings, reactions to AA do not depend on opinions on progress but depend strongly on something related but distinct: how much current racial conditions differ from the ideal. Implications for theories of policy preferences, racial attitudes, progress, and equality are discussed.

  April 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12342   open full text
• Reciprocity and Discrimination: An Experiment of Hindu‐Muslim Cooperation in Indian Slums.
  Andrej Tusicisny.
  Political Psychology. April 27, 2016
  This article shows that indirect positive reciprocity triggered by experiencing short and superficial cooperation with outgroups' individual members reduces discrimination of other members of the same group. The field research combined a lab‐in‐the‐field experiment and a survey conducted in the slums of Mumbai, an Indian city notorious for Hindu‐Muslim violence. After the treatment manipulated expectations of cooperative behavior, ethnically heterogeneous groups produced as much public goods in a public goods game as homogeneous groups. This positive experience radically reduced Hindu subjects' discriminatory attitudes towards the Muslim minority after the experiment. The effect was equally strong among voters of two extremist parties implicated in ethnic riots. The survey compared reciprocity with alternative explanations of why people discriminate against some, but not other ethnic groups. Indirect positive reciprocity and intergroup contact are associated with less, and relative size of the outgroup with more discriminatory attitudes.

  April 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12340   open full text
• Education and Social Trust: Testing a Causal Hypothesis Using the Discordant Twin Design.
  Sven Oskarsson, Peter Thisted Dinesen, Christopher T. Dawes, Magnus Johannesson, Patrik K. E. Magnusson.
  Political Psychology. April 27, 2016
  One of the clearest results in previous studies on social trust is the robust positive relationship with educational attainment. The most common interpretation is that education has a causal effect on social trust. The theoretical argument and empirical results in this article suggest a different interpretation. We argue that common preadult factors such as cognitive abilities and personality traits rooted in genes and early‐life family environment may confound the relationship between educational attainment and social trust. We provide new evidence on this question by utilizing the quasi‐experiment of twinning. By looking at the relationship between education and social trust within monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs, we are able to avoid potential confounders rooted in genetic factors and common environmental influences because the monozygotic twins share both. The results suggest that when controlling for such familial factors the estimated effects of education on social trust are close to zero and far from reaching statistical significance. Further analyses show that the relationship between education and social trust largely is driven by common genetic factors.

  April 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12343   open full text
• The Differential Effects of Stress on Voter Turnout.
  Hans J. G. Hassell, Jaime E. Settle.
  Political Psychology. April 27, 2016
  While everyone deals with stressful situations on a daily basis, individuals have different behavioral reactions to that stress. We argue that life stress also affects individuals’ political behavior, but this effect is contingent on their past political involvement. While individuals familiar with and engaged in the political process are unaffected when confronted with stress in life, individuals who are not routinely involved in the electoral process are more likely to disengage from politics. To test the differential effects of stress on the likelihood of political involvement, we fielded two experiments, one preceding the U.S. presidential election of 2012 and the second preceding the 2013 municipal election in a small Midwestern American town. We find that when triggered to consider life stressors unrelated to politics, individuals without a history of past participation in politics are less likely to vote while individuals who are habitual voters are unaffected.

  April 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12344   open full text
• Locus of Control and Anti‐Immigrant Sentiment in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
  Allison Harell, Stuart Soroka, Shanto Iyengar.
  Political Psychology. April 12, 2016
  Using data collected in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, this article examines the determinants of attitudes toward immigrants. In particular, we draw on the literature in social psychology to explore the role of locus of control in promoting more ethnocentric and restrictive attitudes towards immigration. We conceptualize control at three levels: (1) perceptions of individual locus of control (i.e., feeling that one can control one's own circumstances), (2) perceptions of societal control (i.e., feeling that one's country has control over immigration), and (3) perceptions of an outgroup's locus of control (i.e., feeling that an outgroup's social circumstances are attributable to dispositional rather than external factors). Results show that all three measures of control are important predictors of negative attitudes toward immigrants: Those who feel in control (personally or as a society) are less hostile towards immigrants, while those who attribute negative outcomes to immigrants' predispositions are also more hostile. Results also suggest that measures of control are related to, but distinct from, both partisanship and racial prejudice.

  April 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12338   open full text
• Finding the Right Value: Framing Effects on Domain Experts.
  Amelia C. Andrews, Rosalee A. Clawson, Benjamin M. Gramig, Leigh Raymond.
  Political Psychology. April 12, 2016
  By defining the essence of a policy problem, an issue frame shapes how individuals think about a political issue. In this research, we investigate framing effects among domain experts, an understudied yet increasingly important set of individuals in the policymaking process. Because domain experts have extensive and highly structured knowledge on a particular topic, they are likely to actively process issue frames to which they are exposed. Consequently, we hypothesize that frames consistent with experts' values will be particularly influential, whereas frames inconsistent with their values will lead to contrast effects. We test our hypotheses on a unique set of domain experts by examining professional farmers' attitudes toward no‐till agriculture. Using an experimental design, we find evidence that environmental values interact with frames to influence farmers' interest in no‐till, especially when farmers are exposed to a novel frame.

  April 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12339   open full text
• Ontological Security and Public (Mis)Recognition of International Crises: Uncertainty, Political Imagining, and the Self.
  Dmitry Chernobrov.
  Political Psychology. March 10, 2016
  Public narratives of unexpected international events frequently help (re)imagine uncertainty as something familiar or predictable. This process underlies social and political responses and is deeply significant in relation to identity and boundary security. I propose to read early perceptions of international crises through a reformulation of ontological security principles that find motivation for behavior in self‐identity needs. Political imagining is shown to seek continuous self‐concepts and to routinize new encounters within familiar and self‐affirming frames. This article suggests a new approach to ontological continuity: instead of an unchanging narrative, its security may rest in a continuously positive version of the self, with narratives of others balancing and securing the relationship. In the second half of the article, I draw on interviews about the “Arab Spring” to show how illusions of recognizing unexpected events and the political imagining this produces can be motivated by self‐concepts in need of security.

  March 10, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12334   open full text
• Anxiety, Sophistication, and Resistance to Persuasion: Evidence from a Quasi‐Experimental Survey on Global Climate Change.
  Alessandro Nai, Yves Schemeil, Jean‐Louis Marie.
  Political Psychology. March 09, 2016
  Our contribution deals with the emotional and cognitive foundations of resistance to persuasive information. We rely on an original quasi‐experimental protocol that simulates the flow of information and the respondents' reactions to persuasive arguments on global climate change. Respondents in a representative sample (N = 604) were asked if they supported reduction of economic activity to reduce climate warming and were then provided, based on their support or disapproval for this first argument, with counterattitudinal arguments to test their resistance to persuasion. This article highlights that sophistication strengthens resistance to persuasion, whereas anxiety has a double effect: directly, it decreases resistance; indirectly, it interacts with political sophistication and makes sophisticates less likely to resist persuasion when facing arguments inconsistent with their previous beliefs. Nonanxious citizens, in turn, are more likely to resist persuasion when their political sophistication increases. We also provide evidence that the joint effect of anxiety and sophistication is moderated by the ideological identification of respondents.

  March 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12331   open full text
• The Family and Partisan Socialization in Red and Blue America.
  Jeffrey Lyons.
  Political Psychology. March 09, 2016
  How do competing social influences shape individual partisanship over the course of the life cycle? People enter and exit a host of environments over the course of the lifespan, and these environments provide social pressures that can conflict or reinforce early socialized attitudes. Socialization could be an agent for either opinion change or opinion stability. Using the Youth‐Parent Socialization Study and constructing partisan environmental measures at the county level, I explore this question. The findings demonstrate that environments exert significant socializing influence over the lifespan, moderating the persistence of early forces. This helps us understand when early socialized pressures persist and when they do not. When environments throughout life provide reinforcing social pressures, parental influence endures over time. However, when early socialized influence is challenged over time by the political environment that citizens reside in, the influence of early parental socialization is offset and nullified.

  March 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12336   open full text
• Do Politicians Take Risks Like the Rest of Us? An Experimental Test of Prospect Theory Under MPs.
  Jona Linde, Barbara Vis.
  Political Psychology. February 26, 2016
  Political psychologists have been quick to use prospect theory in their work, realizing its potential for explaining decisions under risk. Applying prospect theory to political decision‐making is not without problems, though, and here we address two of these: (1) Does prospect theory actually apply to political decision‐makers, or are politicians unlike the rest of us? (2) Which dimension do politicians use as their reference point when there are multiple dimensions (e.g., votes and policy)? We address both problems in an experiment with a unique sample of Dutch members of parliament as participants. We use well‐known (incentivized) decision situations and newly developed hypothetical political decision‐making scenarios. Our results indicate that politicians’ deviate from expected utility theory in the direction predicted by prospect theory but that these deviations are somewhat smaller than those of other people. Votes appear to be a more important determinant of politicians’ reference point than is policy.

  February 26, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12335   open full text
• Personality or Role? Comparisons of Turkish Leaders Across Different Institutional Positions.
  Esra Cuhadar, Juliet Kaarbo, Baris Kesgin, Binnur Ozkececi‐Taner.
  Political Psychology. February 16, 2016
  Personality approaches to politics are often criticized for not examining the effect that institutional role constraints have on individual beliefs and preferences. When leaders appear to change their stance when they change roles, it is assumed that roles have a determining influence. Modern personality theory and contemporary sociological role theory, however, view the effects of roles as interacting with agents’ personalities. In this article, we investigate this question by comparing personality profiles of three Turkish leaders (Özal, Demirel, and Gül) during their tenure as prime minister and during their subsequent time as president. For Gül, we perform an additional comparison during his time as foreign minister. The personality profiles are in the form of quantitative scores generated from machine‐coded content analysis of leaders’ words using the Leadership Trait Analysis method. We hypothesize that different leaders will be more susceptible to changing role contexts, depending on core personality traits, and that different traits are more likely to change with new roles. Overall, our results suggest that leaders’ traits are fairly resistant to changes across roles and that task orientation is the most likely trait to change as leaders adapt to different role demands and expectations. This study makes a contribution to our understanding of the interaction between personality and political contexts by offering specific theoretically derived hypotheses and by empirically and statistically examining a preliminary set of expectations that could be applied more broadly to other leaders.

  February 16, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12333   open full text
• Why the Sky Didn't Fall: Mobilizing Anger in Reaction to Voter ID Laws.
  Nicholas A. Valentino, Fabian G. Neuner.
  Political Psychology. February 08, 2016
  Since 2002, 26 U.S. states have passed laws that enhance restrictions on voters who intend to register and vote. Most have been sponsored by Republican legislators and passed by states with large Republican majorities. Proponents of such identification requirements argue that they are necessary to ensure the integrity of the electoral system by reducing voter fraud. Many Democrats have cried foul, arguing these laws are motivated by crass partisanship at best, and racial bias at worst, because they disproportionately disenfranchise minorities. Surprisingly, empirical evidence for significant demobilization, either in the aggregate or among Democrats specifically, has thus far failed to materialize. We suspect strong emotional reactions to the public debate about these laws may mobilize Democrats, counterbalancing the disenfranchising effect. We find support for this conjecture in a nationally representative survey and an experiment where news frames about voter identification (ID) laws are carefully manipulated.

  February 08, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12332   open full text
• Who Is to Blame? Official Discourse and Ethnic Diversity Attitudes During the 2011 Riots in England.
  Nicole Fasel, Oriane Sarrasin, Eva G. T. Green, Eric Mayor.
  Political Psychology. February 02, 2016
  In 2011, the killing of a Black man by a police officer triggered violent riots across England. In a context where ethnic minorities are rarely openly blamed, we examined the lens through which the events were interpreted in the official discourses of the British Prime Minister. A thematic content analysis (Study 1) revealed that, without explicitly blaming ethnic minorities, the discourses built on antagonistic normative references opposing a virtuous majority to threatening minorities. Then, based on online survey data of self‐declared Londoners (N = 223) during the riots, we analyzed (Study 2) how agreement with the discourses related to individuals’ ethnocentrism and their understanding of the causes underlying the events. Results of regression analyses showed how agreement with the discourses related to blaming ethnic diversity for the riots and to higher ethnocentrism, especially among individuals least likely to discriminate against minorities (i.e., low in social dominance orientation). Agreement with the discourses was also linked to reduced blame of authorities. To conclude, we discuss the mobilization potential of political discourses on ingroup virtue and outgroup threat.

  February 02, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12328   open full text
• Nostalgia for Communist Times and Autobiographical Memory: Negative Present or Positive Past?
  Monika Prusik, Maria Lewicka.
  Political Psychology. January 28, 2016
  Twenty‐five years after the fall of communism in Poland, a considerable number of citizens manifest nostalgia for the communist times. In this article, we approach this phenomenon within the framework of autobiographical memory and decide between two sets of hypotheses, one predicting that postcommunist nostalgia is experienced mostly by people who are dissatisfied with the present time (transformation “losers”) and the other predicting that it is the memory of the happy and most recollected past, and memories of particular decades of communism, that mostly trigger nostalgia. The study, carried out on a representative sample of Poles who remembered communism, provided stronger confirmation of the “negative present” hypothesis, but the positive past is also shown to matter. The decade of communism whose memory turned out to predict nostalgia the best was the 1980s and not, as predicted, the 1970s.

  January 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12330   open full text
• On the Grammar of Politics—or Why Conservatives Prefer Nouns.
  Aleksandra Cichocka, Michał Bilewicz, John T. Jost, Natasza Marrouch, Marta Witkowska.
  Political Psychology. January 26, 2016
  Previous research indicates that political conservatism is associated with epistemic needs for structure and certainty (Jost et al., 2003) and that nouns elicit clearer and more definite perceptions of reality than other parts of speech (Carnaghi et al., 2008). We therefore hypothesized that conservatives would exhibit preferences for nouns (vs. verbs and adjectives), insofar as nouns are better suited to satisfy epistemic needs. In Study 1, we observed that social conservatism was associated with noun preferences in Polish and that personal need for structure accounted for the association between ideology and grammatical preferences. In Study 2, conducted in Arabic, social conservatism was associated with a preference for the use of nominal sentences (composed of nouns only) over verbal sentences (which included verbs and adjectives). In Study 3, we found that more conservative U.S. presidents used greater proportions of nouns in major speeches, and this effect was related to integrative complexity. We discuss the possibility that conservative ideology is linked to grammatical preferences that foster feelings of stability and predictability.

  January 26, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12327   open full text
• The Effect of Perspective‐Giving on Postconflict Reconciliation. An Experimental Approach.
  Juan E. Ugarriza, Enzo Nussio.
  Political Psychology. January 20, 2016
  Discussion groups are a promising tool for bridging the divide between former conflict antagonists. However, such groups do not always produce the desired outcome of improved attitudes, even when they meet the conditions generally seen as favoring positive interaction. In this article, we examine specific discussion protocols that mitigate polarization risks while fostering reconciliation. Using a randomized, controlled design, we formed a pool of 429 ex‐combatants and members of conflict‐affected communities in Colombia. Participants were asked to join heterogeneous groups and discuss their proposals for the future of Colombia. Overall, community members improved their attitudes towards ex‐combatants significantly, while ex‐combatants’ attitudes toward community members do not tend to polarize. Those participants who were randomly assigned to a perspective‐giving treatment protocol (where they were asked to refer to their personal experience and perspective) consistently improved their intergroup attitudes towards ex‐combatants, and by a proportionally higher percentage than those taking part under argumentation and no‐treatment control conditions.

  January 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12324   open full text
• The Role of Cognitive Style in the Link Between Genes and Political Ideology.
  Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz, Steven Ludeke, Robert Krueger.
  Political Psychology. January 12, 2016
  There is growing interest in how genes affect political beliefs. To better understand the role of genes in politics, we examine the relationship between cognitive style (the need for cognition, the need for cognitive closure) and various measures of political attitudes (issue‐based ideology, identity‐based ideology, social ideology, economic ideology, authoritarianism, and egalitarianism). We show, for the first time, that the need for cognition and the need for cognitive closure are heritable and are linked to political ideology primarily, perhaps solely, because of shared genetic influences; these links are stronger for social than economic ideology. Although prior research demonstrated that Openness to Experience shares genetic variance with political ideology, we find that these measures of cognitive style account for distinct genetic variance in political ideology. Moreover, the genetic Openness‐ideology link is fully accounted for by the need for cognition. This combination of findings provides a clearer understanding of the role of genes in political beliefs and suggests new directions for research on Big Five personality traits and ideology.

  January 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12318   open full text
• Explaining Normative Versus Nonnormative Action: The Role of Implicit Theories.
  Eric Shuman, Smadar Cohen‐Chen, Sivan Hirsch‐Hoefler, Eran Halperin.
  Political Psychology. January 12, 2016
  The current research investigates what motivates people to engage in normative versus nonnormative action. Prior research has shown that different emotions lead to different types of action. We argue that these differing emotions are determined by a more basic characteristic, namely, implicit theories about whether groups and the world in general can change. We hypothesized that incremental theories (beliefs that groups/the world can change) would predict normative action, and entity theories (beliefs that groups/the world cannot change) as well as group identification would predict nonnormative action. We conducted a pilot in the context of protests against a government plan to relocate Bedouin villages in Israel and a main study during the Israeli social protests of the middle class. Results revealed three distinct pathways to collective action. First, incremental theories about the world predicted hope, which predicted normative action. Second, incremental theories about groups and group identification predicted anger, which also predicted normative collective action. Lastly, entity theories about groups predicted nonnormative collective action through hatred, but only for participants who were highly identified with the group. In sum, people who believed in the possibility of change supported normative action, whereas those who believed change was not possible supported nonnormative action.

  January 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/pops.12325   open full text
• The Backyard Politics of Attitudes Toward Immigration.
  Mara Ostfeld.
  Political Psychology. December 18, 2015
  Using two survey experiments, I reconsider the role that the racialized physical traits and level of assimilation of salient immigrants play in shaping attitudes toward immigration. In the first experiment, a nationwide sample of 767 White, non‐Latino adults was exposed to a story about a family of undocumented immigrants living in the Unites States who were at risk of deportation. Subjects were randomly assigned to view a version of the story in which the immigrants were depicted with light skin and stereotypically Eurocentric features, or dark skin and stereotypically Afrocentric features, and their level of assimilation to mainstream American culture was suggested to be high or low. Similar to previous research, the study's results show that assimilation has a direct effect on attitudes toward immigration. Yet in contrast to previous studies, the racialized physical traits proved to be a much more important factor in shaping attitudes toward immigration than previously demonstrated. The role of an immigrant's racialized physical traits was replicated in a second survey experiment of 902 White, non‐Latino adults. Overall, the findings shed new light on how media depictions of immigrants are affecting immigration attitudes, as well as the nuanced ways that race continues to shape public opinion in the United States today.

  December 18, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12314   open full text
• Racial Attitudes Predicted Changes in Ostensibly Race‐Neutral Political Attitudes Under the Obama Administration.
  Kristjen B. Lundberg, B. Keith Payne, Josh Pasek, Jon A. Krosnick.
  Political Psychology. December 08, 2015
  Past research demonstrated that racial prejudice played a significant role in the 2008 presidential election, but relatively less is known about the relationship between prejudice and public opinion throughout the Obama administration. In the present research, we examined not only whether racial attitudes were associated with evaluations of Mr. Obama and his administration, but also whether they may have influenced the development of more general political attitudes during the early years of the Obama administration. We investigated this question using panel data from a nationally representative sample of Americans interviewed between September 2008 and July 2010. Racial attitudes measured prior to the election predicted early disapproval of President Obama's handling of important issues. Early disapproval of President Obama's performance, in turn, predicted later perceptions of whether the state of the nation was improving. Further, the divergence between high‐prejudice and low‐prejudice individuals in their perceptions of the state of the nation became greater over time, consistent with the idea that racial attitudes were more powerfully expressed in political judgments as time passed.

  December 08, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12315   open full text
• Consequences of Politicians’ Disrespectful Communication Depend on Social Judgment Dimensions and Voters’ Moral Identity.
  Christina Mölders, Niels Van Quaquebeke, Maria Paola Paladino.
  Political Psychology. December 01, 2015
  The present study investigates the consequences of respectful versus disrespectful communication in political debates on voters’ social judgments and voting decisions. Reconciling previously mixed results, we argue that the consequences of disrespect vary with the judgment dimension (communion vs. agency) and voters’ moral identity. An initial study (N = 197) finds that a political candidate's disrespect towards his or her opponent affects voting decision through voting intention. A second study (N = 327) shows that disrespect influences voting intention through communion but not through agency ratings. Qualifying the previous finding, a third study (N = 329) shows that both communion and agency judgments act as mediators, but in different ways depending on the level of moral identity. Overall, communion judgments played a more prominent part in explaining the consequences of disrespectful communication. Our findings thus present a nuanced picture of respect and disrespect in political communication and shed light on their ramifications.

  December 01, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12311   open full text
• Mapping Lay Perceptions of Contemporary Global Culture and Its Ideological and Political Correlates.
  Amir Rosenmann.
  Political Psychology. November 23, 2015
  Despite growing interest, the content and political correlates of contemporary global culture remain to be systematically explicated. Global culture is argued to be an extension of American‐Western culture, and thus, to propagate an economically conservative agenda alongside a liberal‐progressive social agenda. These conflicting emphases require the decomposition of conservatism into its economic and social facets, as suggested by the dual‐process motivational (DPM) model. The current studies tested lay perceptions of this global culture and its political correlates, within a Jewish Israeli context. Studies demonstrated that the global culture cluster together with Western culture (Preliminary Study and Study 1) to form a globalized‐Western culture (GWC). Endorsement of GWC was found to positively associate with economic conservatism and through its mediation with SDO (Studies 1 and 2). Contrarily, social conservatism, best indexed by RWA (Study 1), and negative evaluations of gender unorthodoxy (Study 2), was demonstrated to link with lower endorsement of GWC. The results are discussed in the context of Jewish‐Israeli society, and future directions for a political psychology of globalization are suggested.

  November 23, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12316   open full text
• Anti‐Immigrant Prejudice in Rising East Asia: A Stereotype Content and Integrated Threat Analysis.
  Jonathan E. Ramsay, Joyce S. Pang.
  Political Psychology. November 17, 2015
  Immigration is a global phenomenon, yet comparatively few psychological investigations of anti‐immigrant prejudice have been conducted in East Asia, a region of high economic growth that is set to become a leading destination for international migrants. Over two studies, we examined Singaporean attitudes towards four prominent immigrant groups: Chinese, Filipino, South Asian, and Western immigrants. Each immigrant group was found to be associated with a unique attitudinal profile. Chinese immigrants, who are culturally the most closely related to most Singaporeans, were viewed the most negatively in terms of prejudice, stereotyped warmth, and realistic and symbolic threat. Westerners were viewed the most positively despite higher ratings of perceived competence, possibly due to Western cultural influence, whereas South Asians and Filipinos were viewed as being relatively unthreatening, possibly due to their occupation of undesirable social roles. Perceived threat—both realistic and symbolic—proved to be stronger predictors of anti‐immigrant prejudice than stereotypes. Implications for immigration policy in the region are discussed.

  November 17, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12312   open full text
• When Authoritarians Confront Prejudice. Differential Effects of SDO and RWA on Support for Hate‐Speech Prohibition.
  Michal Bilewicz, Wiktor Soral, Marta Marchlewska, Mikołaj Winiewski.
  Political Psychology. November 12, 2015
  Two nationwide representative studies (N = 653 adolescents; N = 1007 adults) investigated the psychological correlates of the intention to penalize public expressions of prejudice in the form of support for hate‐speech prohibition. We presented participants with preselected examples of hate speech from the Internet and other mass media and assessed their willingness to support the prohibition of public expressions of such remarks. Both studies found that social dominance orientation and right‐wing authoritarianism are positively correlated with outgroup prejudice, but they have differential effects on hate‐speech prohibition. Social dominance orientation was positively related to the acceptance of hate speech, whereas right‐wing authoritarianism was positively related to hate‐speech prohibition. In discussing this counterintuitive finding, we suggest that right‐wing authoritarians are particularly vigilant toward norm violations—and this makes them more punitive toward counternormative expressions of prejudice, such as hate speech.

  November 12, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12313   open full text
• Different Ways of Being Authoritarian: The Distinct Effects of Authoritarian Dimensions on Values and Prejudice.
  Stefano Passini.
  Political Psychology. October 27, 2015
  The traditional and still dominant approach to authoritarianism measures it as a unidimensional construct. However, in the past few years some studies have assessed the three hypothesized authoritarianism components (i.e., authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism) separately. The aims of this study are to verify that the three‐correlated‐factor structure fits the data better than the one‐factor model and to analyze the distinct effects of the three dimensions of authoritarianism on values and prejudice. A total of 169 Italian citizens responded to a questionnaire. As hypothesized, a structural equation model shows that the dimension of authoritarian submission is mainly related to the openness to change vs. conservation values opposition; the dimension of authoritarian aggression is more characterized on the self‐transcendence vs. self‐enhancement values opposition; conventionalism is mainly linked to traditional values. As concerns prejudice, this variable is predicted just by authoritarian aggression. Theoretical implications as concerns the conceptualization of authoritarianism are discussed.

  October 27, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12309   open full text
• Cueing Patriotism, Prejudice, and Partisanship in the Age of Obama: Experimental Tests of U.S. Flag Imagery Effects in Presidential Elections.
  Nathan P. Kalmoe, Kimberly Gross.
  Political Psychology. October 21, 2015
  The American flag is a powerful symbol that campaigns seek to harness for electoral gain. But the flag's benefits may be more elusive than they appear. We begin by presenting content analysis of the flag's prevalence in 2012 U.S. presidential campaign ads, which suggests both candidates saw flags as advantageous. Then, in two experiments set during the 2012 campaign and a later study with prospective 2016 candidates, we find flag exposure provides modest but consistent benefits for Republican candidates among voters high in symbolic patriotism, racial prejudice, and Republican identification. These effects arise regardless of which candidate appears with the flag. Taken together, our results speak to both the power and limitations of the American flag in electioneering. Beyond practical implications for campaigns, these studies emphasize the heterogeneity of citizens’ reactions to visual political symbols and highlight potent links between symbolic attitudes and a nation's flag.

  October 21, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12305   open full text
• How Politicians’ Reelection Efforts Can Reduce Public Trust, Electoral Support, and Policy Approval.
  Troels Bøggild.
  Political Psychology. October 21, 2015
  Politicians’ desire for reelection motivates them to be responsive to voters’ policy preferences. In the traditional view, voters choose between candidates based on their delivery of favorable outcomes such as ideologically appealing policies or a prospering economy. However, research in psychology shows that, in addition to outcomes, people care about procedural fairness and, particularly, impartial decision‐makers who make decisions without personal motives and interests. This, I argue, confronts politicians with a delicate task: politicians must present voters with favorable policy outcomes but without appearing as if they pursue these policies based on a personal, vote‐maximizing motive for reelection. In four survey experiments, I find support for this argument. Participants were significantly less inclined to trust and vote for politicians and support their policies when political decisions were described as motivated by reelection considerations than when no such motive was present. The findings advance our understanding of how citizens view political representation and have important implications for research on public opinion, legislative behavior, and democratic theory.

  October 21, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12303   open full text
• Discursive Construction of Political Categories and Moral Fields: God Versus Rights and Access in a Reproductive Health Legislative Debate.
  Cristina Jayme Montiel, Audris Umel, Marlene de Leon.
  Political Psychology. October 16, 2015
  Using a discursive lens, we argue that politicians rhetorically construct categories, storylines, and moral fields. We further claim that such discursive products are action‐oriented toward gaining popular support in a public sphere that is politically fault lined along similar moral orders. As a case in point, we analyze speeches delivered during congressional voting on a Reproductive Health bill (RH bill). Employing a mixed methods strategy, we first implement a quantitative lexical analysis of frequently used words, followed by a qualitative detection of cohering storylines on both sides of the debate. Results show that oppositionists mark their speeches with a deployment of the word God, while bill supporters use the word access conspicuously. One storyline claims that The RH bill stands against God, while the other purports that The RH bill advocates rights and access. Although both storylines assert moral righteousness, they invoke two different moral orders backed by power blocs and the public at large. The God story appeals to a Catholic discourse and the moral order loudly supported by the politically powerful Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. The rights/access narrative references a liberal morality frame maintained by social liberals and Philippine President Aquino. We end our paper by introducing the idea of an intrastate discursive lens to analyze moral fields constructed by politicians, oriented toward winning support from the public at large.

  October 16, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12308   open full text
• Are Conservatives Really More Simple‐Minded than Liberals? The Domain Specificity of Complex Thinking.
  Lucian Gideon Conway, Laura Janelle Gornick, Shannon C. Houck, Christopher Anderson, Jennifer Stockert, Diana Sessoms, Kevin McCue.
  Political Psychology. October 16, 2015
  Prior research suggests that liberals are more complex than conservatives. However, it may be that liberals are not more complex in general, but rather only more complex on certain topic domains (while conservatives are more complex in other domains). Four studies (comprised of over 2,500 participants) evaluated this idea. Study 1 involves the domain specificity of a self‐report questionnaire related to complexity (dogmatism). By making only small adjustments to a popularly used dogmatism scale, results show that liberals can be significantly more dogmatic if a liberal domain is made salient. Studies 2–4 involve the domain specificity of integrative complexity. A large number of open‐ended responses from college students (Studies 2 and 3) and candidates in the 2004 Presidential election (Study 4) across an array of topic domains reveals little or no main effect of political ideology on integrative complexity, but rather topic domain by ideology interactions. Liberals are higher in complexity on some topics, but conservatives are higher on others. Overall, this large dataset calls into question the typical interpretation that conservatives are less complex than liberals in a domain‐general way.

  October 16, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12304   open full text
• Differences in Media Preference Mediate the Link Between Personality and Political Orientation.
  Xiaowen Xu, Jordan B. Peterson.
  Political Psychology. October 06, 2015
  Research has consistently demonstrated that political liberalism is predicted by the personality trait Openness to Experience and conservatism by trait Conscientiousness. Less well studied, however, is how trait personality influences political orientation. The present study investigated whether differences in media preference might mediate the links between personality and political orientation. Participants completed measures of Big Five personality, media preferences, and political orientation. Results revealed that increased preferences for Dark/Alternative and Aesthetic/Musical media genres, as well as decreased preferences for Communal/Popular media genres, mediated the association between Openness to Experience and liberalism. In contrast, greater preferences for Communal/Popular and Thrilling/Action genres, as well as lower preferences for Dark/Alternative and Aesthetic/Musical genres mediated the link between Conscientiousness and conservatism.

  October 06, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12307   open full text
• Children Cover Your Eyes: Masculine Honor and the Role of Blind Patriotism in Teaching National Allegiance to Posterity.
  Collin D. Barnes, Aaron Pomerantz, Larissa Yashko.
  Political Psychology. September 18, 2015
  Identifying strongly with the nation could entail a willingness to criticize the country or a refusal to do so. The studies reported here examine the extent to which masculine honor inspires the latter and, in turn, motivates teaching allegiance to youth in a manner that could discourage national criticism. Whereas Study 1 provides an initial test of this idea by evaluating blind patriotism's ability to mediate the link between honor endorsement and general support for allegiance education (e.g., singing the National Anthem at school functions), Studies 2 and 3 do so more decisively by focusing on more severe outcomes such as punishing students who refuse to pledge loyalty to the United States. The predicted pattern of mediation occurred in every case, even when honor endorsers were experimentally induced to feel anger toward the country (Study 3). Explanations for this latter finding are discussed and include the role of identity fusion in honor endorsers’ commitment to the nation and the potential for real and enduring governmental threats to weaken or eliminate the pattern of mediation observed.

  September 18, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12291   open full text
• From Stigmatized Immigrants to Radical Right Voting: A Multilevel Study on the Role of Threat and Contact.
  Eva G. T. Green, Oriane Sarrasin, Robert Baur, Nicole Fasel.
  Political Psychology. September 15, 2015
  This study examines the interplay between presence of stigmatized immigrants, threat, and intergroup contact that underlies radical right voting (voting propensity and actual district‐level vote results). On the one hand, low‐status immigrants are often stigmatized and depicted as threats. Thus, presence of stigmatized immigrants should heighten threat perceptions, thereby increasing radical right voting. On the other hand, as positive contact with stigmatized immigrants is known to reduce anti‐immigrant prejudice, it should also attenuate radical right voting. As predicted, multilevel path analyses with the Swiss Election Studies 2011 data (N = 1,736 respondents in 136 districts) revealed that the proportion of stigmatized immigrants (from former Yugoslavia and Albania) in districts heightened perceived threat. Threat perceptions, in turn, increased propensity to vote for the Swiss People's Party, the major radical right party. In contrast, experiencing positive, everyday contact with former Yugoslav and Albanian immigrants reduced voting propensity through attenuated threat perceptions. Contact and threat perceptions were also related to the actual vote through voting propensity.

  September 15, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12290   open full text
• Direct Democracy and Institutional Trust: Relationships and Differences Across Personality Traits.
  Markus Freitag, Kathrin Ackermann.
  Political Psychology. September 01, 2015
  Direct democracy plays a prominent role in the explanation of institutional trust. To date, however, empirical findings on the effects of direct democracy remain inconclusive. In this article, we argue that this inconclusiveness can be partly ascribed to the diverse effects direct democracy has on individuals. In other words, direct democracy influences institutional trust, but how and to what degree depends on individuals’ personality traits. Running hierarchical analyses of unique survey data from a random sample of eligible Swiss voters, we document three findings: First, we show that the number of ballot measures is not directly associated with institutional trust. Second, we demonstrate that the Big Five personality traits affect the propensity to trust. Third, some of these traits also alter the relationship between direct democracy and institutional trust, suggesting that certain personality types are more likely to be sensitive to popular votes than others and that not everyone is equally likely to respond to political stimuli, even in highly democratic environments.

  September 01, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12293   open full text
• Fear and Implicit Racism: Whites’ Support for Voter ID laws.
  Antoine J. Banks, Heather M. Hicks.
  Political Psychology. September 01, 2015
  Oftentimes, Whites are unaware that they may have slighted Blacks. Although researchers have spent a considerable amount of attention disentangling this form of implicit (unconscious) racial bias from explicit (conscious) racial bias, we are less clear about the conditions that cause implicit racism to matter in American politics. In this article, we offer a theory of how fear and Whites' unconscious racial bias are tightly linked in memory, and triggering this emotion can make these implicit attitudes more salient in public opinion. To test our theory, we focus on Whites’ opinions toward voter ID laws. Our expectation is that inducing fear should cause implicit racism to play an important role in Whites’ evaluation of the policy. Using an adult national experiment over two waves, we induced several emotions to elicit fear, anger, or relaxation. The findings show that the fear condition causes Whites high in implicit racism to be more supportive of voter ID laws than similar individuals in the anger and control conditions. On the other hand, fear does not cause Whites high in explicit racism to be more supportive of voter ID laws.

  September 01, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12292   open full text
• Patriotism's Impact on Cooperation with the State: An Experimental Study on Tax Compliance.
  Katharina Gangl, Benno Torgler, Erich Kirchler.
  Political Psychology. August 28, 2015
  Although it seems reasonable to assume that activating patriotism might motivate citizens to cooperate with the state in reaching societal goals, the empirical evidence supporting this contention is based mostly on correlational rather than experimental studies. In addition, little is known on whether patriotism can be manipulated without simultaneously triggering nationalism and on the psychological processes which determine the patriotism‐cooperation relation. This current article reports results of one survey and three experiments that manipulate patriotism by displaying either a national flag or national landscapes or by priming national achievements. The outcomes indicate that reported and manipulated patriotism indirectly increase tax compliance, although the national flag also increases nationalism. National achievements, on the other hand, seemingly increases trust in national public institutions and the voluntary motivation to cooperate, whereas national landscapes only increase the voluntary motivation to cooperate. Hence, it is possible to increase social capital in the form of trust and cooperation through patriotism without fostering nationalism as well.

  August 28, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12294   open full text
• Contact and Community: The Role of Social Interactions for a Political Identity.
  Florian Stoeckel.
  Political Psychology. August 26, 2015
  Can social interaction contribute to a sense of community that transcends national borders? This question was initially raised by Deutsch (1953) and revived by Fligstein (2008). My analysis makes two contributions to this literature. First, insights from social psychology are applied to specify the microfoundations for why contact across group boundaries can be related to a collective identity. Second, a new three‐wave panel data set is used to examine the relationship empirically. The sample includes almost 1,500 students at 38 German universities. The results show that social interaction contributes to a European identity, but that it is in particular contact with other international students rather than contact with hosts that fosters it most effectively. The data also reveal that contact has a more profound impact on individuals with a weak European identity to begin with. Finally, the change I find is stable after students return to their home institutions.

  August 26, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12295   open full text
• Some Dare Call It Conspiracy: Labeling Something a Conspiracy Theory Does Not Reduce Belief in It.
  Michael J. Wood.
  Political Psychology. August 06, 2015
  “Conspiracy theory” is widely acknowledged to be a loaded term. Politicians use it to mock and dismiss allegations against them, while philosophers and political scientists warn that it could be used as a rhetorical weapon to pathologize dissent. In two empirical studies conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, I present an initial examination of whether this concern is justified. In Experiment 1, 150 participants judged a list of historical and speculative theories to be no less likely when they were labeled “conspiracy theories” than when they were labeled “ideas.” In Experiment 2 (N = 802), participants who read a news article about fictitious “corruption allegations” endorsed those allegations no more than participants who saw them labeled “conspiracy theories.” The lack of an effect of the conspiracy‐theory label in both experiments was unexpected and may be due to a romanticized image of conspiracy theories in popular media or a dilution of the term to include mundane speculation regarding corruption and political intrigue.

  August 06, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12285   open full text
• From Theorizing Radicalization to Surveillance Practices: Muslims in the Cross Hairs of Scrutiny.
  Leda Blackwood, Nick Hopkins, Stephen Reicher.
  Political Psychology. July 30, 2015
  There are several psychological analyses of the processes of radicalization resulting in terrorism. However, we know little about how those in authority (e.g., the police) conceptualize the psychological dynamics to radicalization. Accordingly, we present a detailed account of an official U.K. counterterrorism intervention, the Workshop to Raise Awareness of Prevent, designed to enlist frontline professionals in identifying and referring those at risk of radicalization. Specifically, we report data gathered during an observation of this intervention delivered by the police in Scotland. This provides insight into the psychological model of radicalization being disseminated in the United Kingdom, and we evaluate the merits of this model in the light of current psychological theory. First, we consider how this model may overlook certain social dynamics relevant to understanding radicalization. Second, we discuss how this neglect limits consideration of how the surveillance warranted by the official model may lead Muslims to disengage from majority group members. Our analysis points to how political psychology's analysis of social identities and citizenship can inform public policy and practice.

  July 30, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12284   open full text
• Problem Representation, Option Generation, and Poliheuristic Theory: An Experimental Analysis.
  Jonathan Keller, Yi Edward Yang.
  Political Psychology. July 16, 2015
  Poliheuristic (PH) theory has received strong empirical support for its depiction of the option selection process: it explains how leaders evaluate, weigh, and ultimately choose among a set of policy options. But PH theory does not explain how this initial set of options is generated. Foreign policy problem representation (PR) research has shown that the way in which leaders mentally represent decision problems determines which options are generated for consideration. In this article, we develop a hybrid PR‐PH framework in which leaders’ problem representations drive an unconscious screening process that occurs prior to the conscious screening of PH stage 1. We test hypotheses drawn from this framework experimentally and find that key elements of PR (most notably, perceived threat) determine which options consciously occur to decision makers and which options are not generated during a simulated foreign policy crisis.

  July 16, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12283   open full text
• How Discrimination Impacts Sociopolitical Behavior: A Multidimensional Perspective.
  Kassra AR Oskooii.
  Political Psychology. July 14, 2015
  The conventional wisdom regarding the impact of discrimination on political behavior is that the perception of prejudiced treatment motivates individuals to take political action. This study challenges this common conception by demonstrating that the source of discrimination can play a significant role in whether perceived or experienced injustice leads to activism or withdrawal from sociopolitical life. Drawing from political science and social psychology literature, this study provides a new perspective on the potential effects of discrimination on a relatively new marginalized group in the United States. Specifically, an important distinction is drawn between political (systematic) and societal (interpersonal) discrimination in analyzing the sociopolitical behavior of American Muslims in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The results will hopefully encourage scholars to take a deeper look at the nexus between discrimination and democratic engagement, which is an important, complex, multidimensional, and understudied topic.

  July 14, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12279   open full text
• Candidate Voice Pitch Influences Election Outcomes.
  Casey A. Klofstad.
  Political Psychology. July 03, 2015
  A growing literature in psychology shows that human voice pitch—perceived “highness” or “lowness” as determined by the physiology of the throat—influences how speakers are perceived. This leads to the prediction that candidate voice pitch influences voters. Here this question is addressed with two studies. The first is an experiment conducted with a large national sample of U.S. adults. The results show that men and women prefer to vote for male and female candidates with lower pitched voices. The second study examines the outcomes of the 2012 U.S. House elections. When facing male opponents, candidates with lower voices won a larger vote share. However, when facing female opponents, candidates with higher voices were more successful and particularly so in the case of male candidates. In synthesizing research on the human voice and voter behavior and triangulating evidence from a controlled experiment and a large observational study of actual elections, this article illustrates that candidate voice pitch influences election outcomes.

  July 03, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12280   open full text
• “Nobody Wants to Be an Outsider”: From Diversity Management to Diversity Engagement.
  Caroline Howarth, Eleni Andreouli.
  Political Psychology. June 28, 2015
  This article develops an analysis of diversity in two ways. We start with a theoretical discussion of the ways in which diversity has been approached within psychology, showing the competing arguments that have been developed that connect diversity, community, and multiculturalism. We show that not only are there psychological consequences to contemporary experiences of increased diversity but also that fundamental psychological capacities—such as self‐consciousness, identity, and dialogue—actually stem from the experience of diversity. This has important implications for diversity management policies. The second part of the article gives an empirical illustration of how diversity is experienced in schools across England drawing on 13 interviews with senior staff and 11 focus groups with pupils aged between 12 and 14 years old. We discuss three themes related to experiences of diversity: (1) from difference to diversity, (2) real and imagined mobility across communities, and (3) collaborative practices, projects, and knowledge. What the empirical examples show is that critically engaging with diversity can be a more productive project than practices which construct diversity in terms of distinct groups that need respect and tolerance. Hence we argue approaches that promote engaging with diversity rather than traditional diversity management are more in line with foundational psychological insights as well as empirical research findings.

  June 28, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12276   open full text
• These Eyes: A Rejoinder to Panagopoulos on Eyespots and Voter Mobilization.
  Richard E. Matland, Gregg R. Murray.
  Political Psychology. June 28, 2015
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 28, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12282   open full text
• A Closer Look at Eyespot Effects on Voter Turnout: Reply to Matland and Murray.
  Costas Panagopoulos.
  Political Psychology. June 28, 2015
  Implicit social pressure, applied via exposure to eyespots in nonpartisan, direct‐mail blandishments to vote, has been shown using randomized field experiments to raise turnout in elections. Similar eyespot effects have been observed across a wide range of prosocial behaviors. A series of recent replications conducted by Matland and Murray (2015) have failed to consistently produce statistically significant eyespot effects on voter turnout, however, leading the authors to conclude the effects observed in previous research were likely illusory. In this article, I rebut this claim, arguing that an alternative, more circumspect interpretation of the authors’ key results points to a different conclusion that supports the notion that eyespots likely stimulate voting, especially when taken together with previous findings.

  June 28, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12281   open full text
• Race and Nation: How Racial Hierarchy Shapes National Attachments.
  Niambi M. Carter, Efrén O. Pérez.
  Political Psychology. June 24, 2015
  We contend that the boundaries and nature of national attachments are shaped by the position of one's group within America's racial order, with higher status yielding more racially exclusive forms of identity. We test our claims in the realm of xenophobia. Using an original survey of African Americans (n = 1,000) and Whites (n = 1,000), we assess national pride, nationalism, nativism, and racial identity, plus affect toward various immigrant groups. We establish that national attachments have racially varied meanings, thereby producing sharp differences in each racial group's response to foreigners. Although national pride is unrelated to White antipathy toward outsiders, nationalism and nativism increase White hostility to immigrants—except when they are White. In contrast, national pride diminishes African American hostility to Black and non‐Black immigrants, while nativism is generally unrelated to Black antipathy to outsiders. Finally, while nationalism heightens xenophobia among Blacks, this sentiment envelops all foreigners—including African immigrants. We discuss our results' implications for theories of national attachment in intergroup settings.

  June 24, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12270   open full text
• Essentialism in Social Representations of Citizenship: An Analysis of Greeks' and Migrants' Discourse.
  Irini Kadianaki, Eleni Andreouli.
  Political Psychology. June 24, 2015
  Following a Social Representations approach, the article examines the representations of citizenship held by both migrants and Greek citizens in Greece after the announcement of a heavily debated citizenship legislation. Essentialism, a way of representing social categories as holding an underlying essence that determines their characteristics, was used as an analytical tool to understand the inclusive or exclusive function of representations of citizenship towards migrants. Findings showed that Greeks construct representations based on ethnic, civic, and cultural ideas, while migrants construct representation of citizenship based on civic and cultural ideas. Essentialism was a way of constructing ethnic and cultural representations of citizenship and functioned in both exclusive and inclusive ways, but assimilatory terms accordingly. Civic and cultural representations of citizenship were constructed in nonessentialist ways and functioned in inclusive ways. However, from Greeks' perspective, civic inclusion was conditioned upon an often‐questioned legality of migrants and upon cultural assimilation terms. Studying both the content and the essentialist/nonessentialist formulation of representations of citizenship is an important tool in understanding the politics of inclusion and exclusion of citizens in the social arena.

  June 24, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12271   open full text
• No Postmaterialists in Foxholes: Postmaterialist Values, Nationalism, and National Threat in the People's Republic of China.
  Jonathan Joseph Reilly.
  Political Psychology. June 24, 2015
  In this article, I present findings from a survey experiment in which Chinese university students exposed to a treatment designed to increase feelings of national threat were—based on their responses to the four‐item postmaterialism values‐priority battery—significantly more likely to be classified as “pure materialists.” These findings are presented in support of the proposition that perception of a hostile international environment may tend to exaggerate citizens' authoritarian and nationalistic sentiments at the expense of more democratically favorable value orientations. Media and political figures in the West who rail against the evils of China's authoritarian leadership might believe that they are championing and encouraging democratic aspirations among the Chinese people, but might instead be inciting impulses and attitudes that are far less “democracy‐friendly.”

  June 24, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12273   open full text
• Power, Conflict, and Community: How Gendered Views of Political Power Influence Women's Political Ambition.
  Monica C. Schneider, Mirya R. Holman, Amanda B. Diekman, Thomas McAndrew.
  Political Psychology. June 17, 2015
  We provide a novel approach to understanding the political ambition gap between men and women by examining perceptions of the role of politician. Across three studies, we find that political careers are viewed as fulfilling power‐related goals, such as self‐promotion and competition. We connect these goals to a tolerance for interpersonal conflict and both of these factors to political ambition. Women's lack of interest in conflict and power‐related activities mediates the relationship between gender and political ambition. In an experiment, we show that framing a political career as fulfilling communal goals—and not power‐related goals—reduces the ambition gap.

  June 17, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12268   open full text
• I Only Have Eyes for You: Does Implicit Social Pressure Increase Voter Turnout?
  Richard E. Matland, Gregg R. Murray.
  Political Psychology. June 17, 2015
  Get‐out‐the‐vote mailers using explicit social pressure consistently increase electoral turnout; however, they often generate a negative reaction or backlash. One approach to increase turnout, yet alleviate backlash, may be to use implicit social pressure. An implicit social pressure technique that has shown promise is to display a set of eyes. Researchers contend eyes generate a feeling of being watched, which cues subjects to act in more prosocial ways to demonstrate compliance with social norms. Several studies support this argument, including two voter mobilization studies. The technique has not been widely tested, however, in the political context. In five randomized field experiments, we test the impact on turnout of mobilization mailers using eye displays. We extend previous research by testing for differences in effects between male and female eyes and across political cultures. The effects are substantively and statistically weak at best and inconsistent with previous findings.

  June 17, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12275   open full text
• Identity Conflict or Compatibility: A Comparison of Muslim Minorities in Five European Cities.
  Fenella Fleischmann, Karen Phalet.
  Political Psychology. June 16, 2015
  Drawing on large‐scale comparative surveys across nine sociopolitical contexts, we address the question when and why ethno‐religious and city or national identities of European‐born Muslims are in conflict. We argue that the sociopolitical context makes the difference between identity compatibility or conflict and that conflict arises from perceived discrimination and related negative feelings towards the national majority. Using multigroup structural equation modelling, we examine how Turkish and Moroccan Muslims in five European cities combine their civic membership of the city and country of residence—as common identities shared with the national majority—with distinct ethnic and religious identities. In all sociopolitical contexts, participants combined significant city and national identities with strong ethnic and religious identifications. Yet, identification patterns varied between contexts from conflict (negatively correlated minority and civic identities) over compartmentalization (zero correlations) to compatibility (positive correlations). Muslims who perceived more personal discrimination were more committed to their ethnic and religious identities while simultaneously dis‐identifying from their country and city. Across cities, discrimination experiences and negative majority‐group evaluations explained away identity conflict.

  June 16, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12278   open full text
• Stay Loyal or Exit the Party? How Openness to Experience and Extroversion Explain Vote Switching.
  Bert N. Bakker, Robert Klemmensen, Asbjørn Sonne Nørgaard, Gijs Schumacher.
  Political Psychology. May 04, 2015
  Following Hirschman, voters who are discontent with the party they voted for have two options: exit the party and vote for another or stay loyal. The inclination to exit or stay loyal is rooted in the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality. We test our argument in two panel studies in Denmark and the United Kingdom. We find that citizens open to experience are more likely to switch parties since they are more likely to think about alternatives and take risks. Extroverts identify and commit themselves to organizations and stay loyal in Denmark, but we do not confirm this pattern in the United Kingdom. Our findings demonstrate that electoral volatility is, at least partly, rooted in personality.

  May 04, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12257   open full text
• Can Patriots Be Critical after a Nationalist War? The Struggle Between Recognition and Marginalization of Dissenting Voices.
  Sandra Penic, Guy Elcheroth, Stephen Reicher.
  Political Psychology. April 19, 2015
  Previous research suggests that the relationship between ingroup identification and reactions to moral violations perpetrated by ingroup members depends on the mode of identification: while glorification lowers group‐based guilt, critical attachment enhances it. In our first study, based on comparative survey research, this pattern was replicated in Serbia, but not in Croatia. In Croatia, highly attached respondents tended to reject criticism of the past war irrespective of their mode of identification. In a second study, we sought to explain the Croatian results by examining how critical attachment is denied legitimacy. We analyzed the rhetorical structure of a parliamentary debate around regime‐critical media coverage. The analyses show how the marginalization of critics is anchored in (1) a monolithic construction of the nation, which sacralizes particular elements and places them beyond discussion, and (2) a construction of the international context as too threatening to permit any dissent. Overall, the results of this mixed‐method study highlight that the opportunity to be recognized as a critical patriot depends on a nation's sociopolitical climate.

  April 19, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12262   open full text
• Reaching Across the DMZ: Identity Uncertainty and Reunification on the Korean Peninsula.
  Jiin Jung, Michael A. Hogg, Hoon‐Seok Choi.
  Political Psychology. April 07, 2015
  Drawing on uncertainty‐identity theory (Hogg, 2012), we explore the effects of uncertainty concerning a specific social identity on group identification and attitudes toward subgroup integration and separation in South Koreans' nested identity context (N = 148). All variables were measured. Path analysis revealed, as predicted, that superordinate identity uncertainty weakened superordinate identification and subgroup identity uncertainty weakened subgroup identification. We also found that subgroup identity uncertainty strengthened superordinate identification. This effect was stronger for those who perceived their superordinate group prototype and subgroup prototype to be distinct and nonoverlapping. Furthermore, superordinate identity uncertainty decreased reunification intentions by weakening superordinate identification. Subgroup identity uncertainty increased reunification intentions by strengthening superordinate identification only for those who perceived their superordinate group prototype and subgroup prototype to be distinct and nonoverlapping. Implications for uncertainty identity theory and intergroup relations are discussed.

  April 07, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12252   open full text
• Accuracy Motivations, Predispositions, and Social Information in Political Discussion Networks.
  Matthew T. Pietryka.
  Political Psychology. March 31, 2015
  This analysis studies how variation in individuals' motivation to form accurate judgments affects the process of political discussion. I use a small‐group experiment in which participants compete to elect the simulated candidate who best represents their true preferences. I manipulate economic incentives to control participants' accuracy motivations. The results show that accuracy‐motivated participants, compared to those with weaker accuracy goals, seek discussants with more expertise and a more diverse set of viewpoints, place greater emphasis on socially provided messages, and reduce emphasis on political predispositions. As a result of these differences, however, accuracy‐motivated participants rely more heavily on biased information. Hence, accuracy motivations do not produce more accurate judgments or better decisions. Although previous work on political discussion has largely ignored the role of motivations, these results suggest that accuracy motivations play an important but nuanced role in this process. Strengthened accuracy motivations increase individuals' exposure to political expertise and ideological diversity but also increase their potential to be misled.

  March 31, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12255   open full text
• National Images as Integrated Schemas: Subliminal Primes of Image Attributes Shape Foreign Policy Preferences.
  Emanuele Castano, Alain Bonacossa, Peter Gries.
  Political Psychology. March 31, 2015
  International Image Theory (IIT) suggests that individuals maintain holistic images of other countries that are akin to schemas, or stereotypes, and that these national images shape both attitudes and foreign policy preferences. Previous research has manipulated national images via explicit descriptions of fictitious countries and found initial evidence for such effects. Here we extend this research and investigate whether (1) priming subliminal associations of a real country with image‐specific adjectives leads individuals to endorse such an image for that country, and whether (2) the endorsement of national images mediates observed effects on foreign policy preferences. We first demonstrate that the perception of a nation's power can be experimentally manipulated via associative implicit priming (pilot study). In Experiment 1, we then found that participants who were subliminally primed with adjectives pertinent to the ally, enemy, or dependent image of a country evaluated the country on the National Image scale (Alexander, Brewer, & Hermann, 1999) in a manner consistent with the prime. Experiment 2 further showed that induced national images mediate priming effects on foreign policy preferences.

  March 31, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12259   open full text
• Anxiety as a Barrier to Information Processing in the Event of a Cyberattack.
  Violet Cheung‐Blunden, Jiarun Ju.
  Political Psychology. March 26, 2015
  As postindustrial societies become more dependent on technology, they also become encumbered by greater risk. With the mounting news reports of cyberattacks, a common reaction to these technology‐based hazards is anxiety. Whether anxiety enhances or erodes information processing is a topic of debate in previous literature, and equally uncertain is whether mass anxiety facilitates or hobbles the public's ability to contemplate current events. In light of three theoretical models in the basic research of anxiety, we hypothesized that (1) anxious participants are less able to recall the information in a news report of cyberattack than their nonanxious counterparts, (2) they become increasingly inept at recalling the details as the storyline unfolds, and (3) this impairment is unique to anxiety. Participants in Study 1 (130 college students) and Study 2 (392 American adults) viewed a news story of a cyberattack and then reported their emotional states and their levels of understanding of the various parts of the report—except that the anxiety in Study 1 was naturalistic, and in Study 2, experimentally manipulated. Results from both studies showed that anxiety undermined recall performance. In addition, Study 1 found that the recall was worse towards the middle and the end of the news story and that other emotions were not significantly associated with memory deficit. Anxiety is discussed as a barrier for the public to stay informed about cyberattacks.

  March 26, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12264   open full text
• How Collective Participation Impacts Social Identity: A Longitudinal Study from India.
  Sammyh S. Khan, Nick Hopkins, Stephen Reicher, Shruti Tewari, Narayanan Srinivasan, Clifford Stevenson.
  Political Psychology. March 26, 2015
  A key issue for political psychology concerns the processes whereby people come to invest psychologically in socially and politically significant group identities. Since Durkheim, it has been assumed that participation in group‐relevant collective events increases one's investment in such group identities. However, little empirical research explicitly addresses this or the processes involved. We investigated these issues in a longitudinal questionnaire study conducted at one of the world's largest collective events—a month‐long Hindu festival in north India (the Magh Mela). Data gathered from pilgrims and comparable others who did not attend the event show that one month after the event, those who had participated (but not the controls) exhibited heightened social identification as a Hindu and increased frequency of prayer rituals. Data gathered from pilgrims during the festival predicted these outcomes. Specifically, perceptions of sharing a common identity with other pilgrims and of being able to enact one's social identity in this event helped predict changes in participants' identification and behavior. The wider significance of these data for political psychology is discussed.

  March 26, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12260   open full text
• Attractiveness and Facial Competence Bias Face‐Based Inferences of Candidate Ideology.
  Michael Herrmann, Susumu Shikano.
  Political Psychology. March 24, 2015
  Can voters infer candidates' political orientations from their faces? We report evidence that observers make systematic judgment errors, ascribing their own political views to attractive or competent‐looking candidates. Subjects judged headshot images of student candidates running in university elections (Experiment 1), as well as professional politicians from state election races in Germany (Experiment 2), according to whether the person(s) displayed held ideologically leftist or rightist views. While prediction accuracy was above chance level in both experiments, candidate attractiveness (Experiment 1) and perceived competence (Experiment 2) increased a subject's likelihood of attributing her political views to a candidate. These findings suggest that the value of face‐based inferences in choosing the candidate who best represents one's views is more limited than previously assumed. They also suggest that good looks may help extremist candidates in presenting themselves as more moderate.

  March 24, 2015   doi: 10.1111/pops.12256   open full text
• Distributive Justice for Others, Collective Angst, and Support for Exclusion of Immigrants.
  Todd Lucas, Cort Rudolph, Ludmila Zhdanova, Evone Barkho, Nathan Weidner.
  Political Psychology. May 15, 2014
  Harsh treatment of others can reflect an underlying motivation to view the world as fair and just and also a dispositional tendency to believe in justice. However, there is a critical need to refine and expand existing knowledge, not only to identify underlying psychological processes but also to better understand how justice may be implicated in support for exclusionary policies. Across two studies, we show that support for policies that restrict immigrants is exclusively associated with thoughts about fair outcomes for other people (distributive justice for others). In Study 1, Americans' dispositional tendency to believe in distributive justice for others was associated with greater support for a policy proposing to further restrict immigrant job seekers' capacity to gain employment in the United States. In Study 2, we experimentally primed thoughts about justice in a sample of U.S. police officers. Support for a policy that mandated stricter policing of illegal immigration was strongest among officers who first thought about fair outcomes for other people, relative to other unique justice primes. Across both studies, distributive justice for others was associated with greater collective angst—perceived threat towards the future existence of Americans. Moreover, collective angst mediated the link between distributive justice for others and support for restrictive policies. Overall, this research suggests that thoughts about distributive justice for others can especially diminish compassion towards immigrants and other underprivileged groups via support for exclusionary policies. In addition, merely thinking about distributive justice for others may be sufficient to amplify social callousness.

  May 15, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12204   open full text
• Attitudes Toward Immigration: The Role of Personal Predispositions.
  Peter Thisted Dinesen, Robert Klemmensen, Asbjørn Sonne Nørgaard.
  Political Psychology. May 15, 2014
  This article examines if deep‐seated psychological differences add to the explanation of attitudes toward immigration. We explore whether the Big Five personality traits matter for immigration attitudes beyond the traditional situational factors of economic and cultural threat and analyze how individuals with different personalities react when confronted with the same situational triggers. Using a Danish survey experiment, we show that different personality traits have different effects on opposition toward immigration. We find that Openness has an unconditional effect on attitudes toward immigration: scoring higher on this trait implies a greater willingness to admit immigrants. Moreover, individuals react differently to economic threat depending on their score on the traits Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Specifically, individuals scoring low on Agreeableness and individuals scoring high on Conscientiousness are more sensitive to the skill level of immigrants. The results imply that personality is important for attitudes toward immigration, and in the conclusion, we further discuss how the observed conditional and unconditional effects of personality make sense theoretically.

  May 15, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12220   open full text
• Not as Different as We Want to Be: Attitudinally Consistent Trait Desirability Leads to Exaggerated Associations Between Personality and Sociopolitical Attitudes.
  Steven Ludeke, Michal Reifen Tagar, Colin G. DeYoung.
  Political Psychology. May 15, 2014
  Research connecting sociopolitical attitudes to personality typically relies exclusively on self‐report measures of personality. A recently discovered mechanism of bias in self‐reports highlights a particular challenge for this approach. Specifically, individuals tend to report exaggerated levels of a trait to the extent that they view that trait as desirable. In a community sample of 443 participants, differences in sociopolitical attitudes were associated with differences in the extent to which individuals provided biased self‐reports for a given trait (relative to trait levels indicated by peer‐report or an objective measure) as well as differences in views of the desirability that trait. Further, the tendency to misrepresent traits in a manner consistent with one's sociopolitical attitudes was mediated by differences in views of trait desirability. Thus, although meaningful personality differences exist among those with differing sociopolitical attitudes, those differences may not be as large as people with opposing sociopolitical attitudes might like them to be.

  May 15, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12221   open full text
• The “Deliberative Digital Divide:” Opinion Leadership and Integrative Complexity in the U.S. Political Blogosphere.
  Jennifer Brundidge, Scott A. Reid, Sujin Choi, Ashley Muddiman.
  Political Psychology. May 09, 2014
  This study examined the association between political ideology and linguistic indicators of integrative complexity and opinion leadership in U.S. political blog posts (N = 519). Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis, we found that the posts of conservative bloggers were more integratively simple than those of liberal bloggers. Furthermore, in support of a proposed opinion leadership model of integrative complexity, the relationship between ideology and integrative complexity was mediated by psychological distancing (an indicator of a hierarchical communication style). These findings demonstrate an ideological divide in the extent to which the blogosphere reflects deliberative democratic ideals.

  May 09, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12201   open full text
• Checking for Systematic Value Preferences Using the Method of Triads.
  David J. Ciuk, William G. Jacoby.
  Political Psychology. May 09, 2014
  Value preferences have long been central to research in political science and psychology. Despite their well‐established theoretical importance, however, their measurement is still an open question. Early research on values relied heavily on ranking instruments for data collection, but more recent work calls this measurement technique into question. Specifically, it is argued that traditional ranking instruments are (1) too long, (2) too complex, and (3) may force respondents to make ad hoc differentiations between values of similar importance, behind which there is no systematic preference. As a result, the reliability of the measure is called into question, and measurement error remains a concern. In this article, we discuss the method of triads—a technique used to gather rankings data that affords the researcher the opportunity to assess the extent to which random error affects preference rankings. Using the method of triads to collect preference data on five values central to American political culture, we find that Americans' value preferences are clearly structured and driven by systematic preferences, even when psychological theory suggests they may not. We also compare the predictive validity of the data collected with the method of triads against that of the data collected with traditional importance ratings. We show that models of ideology, party identification, presidential approval, and vote‐choice fit to “triads” data explain more variance than models fit to ratings data.

  May 09, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12202   open full text
• Fight and Flight: Evidence of Aggressive Capitulation in the Face of Fear Messages from Terrorists.
  Aarti Iyer, Matthew J. Hornsey, Eric J. Vanman, Sarah Esposo, Shalini Ale.
  Political Psychology. April 23, 2014
  In an era of digital technology and the Internet, terrorists can communicate their threats directly to citizens of Western countries. Yet no research has examined whether these messages change individuals' attitudes and behavior or the psychological processes underlying these effects. Two studies (conducted in 2008 and 2010) examined how American, Australian, and British participants responded to messages from Osama bin Laden that threatened violence if troops were not withdrawn from Afghanistan. Heightened fear in response to the message resulted in what we call “aggressive capitulation,” characterized by two different group‐protection responses: (1) submission to terrorist demands in the face of threats made against one's country and (2) support for increased efforts to combat the source of the threat but expressed in abstract terms that do not leave one's country vulnerable. Fear predicted influence over and above other variables relevant to persuasion. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

  April 23, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12182   open full text
• A Sense of Powerlessness Fosters System Justification: Implications for the Legitimation of Authority, Hierarchy, and Government.
  Jojanneke Toorn, Matthew Feinberg, John T. Jost, Aaron C. Kay, Tom R. Tyler, Robb Willer, Caroline Wilmuth.
  Political Psychology. April 22, 2014
  In an attempt to explain the stability of hierarchy, we focus on the perspective of the powerless and how a subjective sense of dependence leads them to imbue the system and its authorities with legitimacy. In Study 1, we found in a nationally representative sample of U.S. employees that financial dependence on one's job was positively associated with the perceived legitimacy of one's supervisor. In Study 2, we observed that a general sense of powerlessness was positively correlated with the perceived legitimacy of the economic system. In Studies 3 and 4, priming experimental participants with feelings of powerlessness increased their justification of the social system, even when they were presented with system‐challenging explanations for race, class, and gender disparities. In Study 5, we demonstrated that the experience of powerlessness increased legitimation of governmental authorities (relative to baseline conditions). The processes we identify are likely to perpetuate inequality insofar as the powerless justify rather than strive to change the hierarchical structures that disadvantage them.

  April 22, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12183   open full text
• “Yesterday Redeemed and Tomorrow Made More Beautiful”: Historical Injustice and Possible Collective Selves.
  Ronni Michelle Greenwood.
  Political Psychology. April 22, 2014
  This research examines the ways in which talk about reparations for historical injustice demonstrates individuals' ambitions for future collective identities. Interviews with White Tulsans (n = 25) illustrate how discursive temporal constructions justify support for or opposition to reparations for the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. It is argued that White Tulsans strategically employed these constructions to either transform or maintain collective identities. These findings bring a discursive approach to theories of collective continuity (Sani, Bowe, & Herrera, 2008) and possible selves (Cinnirella, 1998; Markus & Nurius, 1986; McAdams, 2006; Vignoles, 2008). From this perspective, reckoning with the past is as much about who we can be tomorrow as it is guilt for who we were yesterday.

  April 22, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12184   open full text
• When Suspicious Minds Go Political: Distrusting and Justifying the System at the Same Time.
  Dmitrij Agroskin, Eva Jonas, Eva Traut‐Mattausch.
  Political Psychology. April 08, 2014
  Drawing on the sensitivity to mean intentions model, we hypothesized that sensitivity to injustice from a victim's perspective (victim sensitivity) is negatively related to the acceptance of political reforms due to an inclination to attribute ulterior motives to policy makers. In Study 1 with a Canadian sample, initial evidence for this mediational model was obtained, as victim sensitivity uniquely predicted distrust of policy makers through general trait suspiciousness. In Study 2, victim‐sensitive Austrians and Germans ascribed sinister motives to initiators of an economic reform when contextual cues of initiators' untrustworthiness were given. This situational suspiciousness led them to subsequently oppose this particular reform, and it even generalized to the whole economic system by reducing economic‐system justification. However, in both studies, mutually suppressive tendencies toward both opposing and justifying the system occurred. This suggests that victim‐sensitive individuals may be torn between distrusting and endorsing the system because it can not only victimize but also promote a sense of security from victimization by conferring order.

  April 08, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12185   open full text
• Emotional, Sensitive, and Unfit for Office? Gender Stereotype Activation and Support Female Candidates.
  Nichole M. Bauer.
  Political Psychology. April 08, 2014
  Women are underrepresented at all levels of elected office. It is suspected that gender stereotypes hinder the electoral success of female candidates, but empirical evidence is inconclusive on whether stereotypes have a direct effect on voting decisions. This empirical conflict stems, in part, from the assumption that voters automatically rely on gender stereotypes when evaluating female candidates. This study explicitly tests the assumption of automatic stereotype activation. I suggest that stereotype reliance depends on whether stereotypes have been activated during a campaign, and it is only when stereotypes are activated that they influence evaluations of female candidates. These hypotheses are tested with a survey experiment and observational analysis. The results show that campaign communication activates stereotypes when they otherwise might not be activated, thereby diminishing support for female candidates.

  April 08, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12186   open full text
• Extreme‐Right Voting in Western Europe: The Role of Social‐Cultural and Antiegalitarian Attitudes.
  Ilse Cornelis, Alain Van Hiel.
  Political Psychology. April 01, 2014
  The joint impact of antiegalitarian attitudes and social‐cultural attitudes on citizens’ tendency to vote for extreme right‐wing political parties was investigated. In the first study, we explored these attitudes in representative samples of seven Western European countries. In a follow‐up study, we predicted respondents’ likelihood of voting for a Dutch right‐wing party on the basis of the measures of social‐dominance orientation (as an indicator of antiegalitarian attitudes) and right‐wing authoritarianism (as an indicator of social‐cultural attitudes). Our findings demonstrated that voting for extreme right‐wing parties was associated more consistently with antiegalitarian attitudes than with social‐cultural attitudes. Moreover, the effect of antiegalitarian attitudes was partly mediated by migration attitudes (Study 1) and ethnic prejudice (Study 2). We discuss the finding that antiegalitarian attitudes are more strongly related to extreme right‐wing voting than social‐cultural attitudes.

  April 01, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12187   open full text
• Boundaries of American Identity: Relations Between Ethnic Group Prototypicality and Policy Attitudes.
  Que‐Lam Huynh, Thierry Devos, Hannah R. Altman.
  Political Psychology. April 01, 2014
  We sought to document that the extent to which different ethnic groups are perceived as embodying the American identity is more strongly linked to antiminority policy attitudes and acculturation ideologies among majority‐group members (European Americans) than among minority‐group members (Asian Americans or Latino/as). Participants rated 13 attributes of the American identity as they pertain to different ethnic groups and reported their endorsement of policy attitudes and acculturation ideologies. We found a relative consensus across ethnic groups regarding defining components of the American identity. However, European Americans were perceived as more prototypical of this American identity than ethnic minorities, especially by European American raters. Moreover, for European Americans but not for ethnic minorities, relative ingroup prototypicality was related to antiminority policy attitudes and acculturation ideologies. These findings suggest that for European Americans, perceptions of ethnic group prototypicality fulfill an instrumental function linked to preserving their group interests and limiting the rights afforded to ethnic minorities.

  April 01, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12189   open full text
• Terrorist Suspect Religious Identity and Public Support for Harsh Interrogation and Detention Practices.
  James A. Piazza.
  Political Psychology. April 01, 2014
  Does the U.S. public's support for the use of harsh interrogation and detention practices against terrorism suspects depend upon the religious identity of the alleged perpetrators? Some scholarly research indicates greater public acceptance for abridging the rights of Muslims after 9/11. This is consistent with literature suggesting that heightened perception of threat decreases popular tolerance for racial, ethnic, and religious outgroups. This study executes a survey experiment and finds respondents to be more permissive of the use of extraordinary detention practices, such as indefinite detention and denying suspects access to legal counsel and civilian criminal courts, against terror suspects identified as Muslims. Furthermore, the study reveals that respondents are significantly less likely to treat domestic, right‐wing terrorist suspects with extraordinary detention, suggesting ingroup leniency.

  April 01, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12190   open full text
• Moderators of Candidate Name‐Order Effects in Elections: An Experiment.
  Nuri Kim, Jon Krosnick, Daniel Casasanto.
  Political Psychology. March 13, 2014
  Past studies of elections have shown that candidates whose names were listed at the beginning of a list on a ballot often received more votes by virtue of their position. This article tests speculations about the cognitive mechanisms that might be responsible for producing the effect. In an experiment embedded in a large national Internet survey, participants read about the issue positions of two hypothetical candidates and voted for one of them in a simulated election in which candidate name order was varied. The expected effect of position appeared and was strongest (1) when participants had less information about the candidates on which to base their choices, (2) when participants felt more ambivalent about their choices, (3) among participants with more limited cognitive skills, and (4) among participants who devoted less effort to the candidate evaluation process. The name‐order effect was greater among left‐handed people when the candidate names were arrayed horizontally, but there was no difference between left‐ and right‐handed people when the names were arrayed vertically. These results reinforce some broad theoretical accounts of the cognitive process that yield name‐order effects in elections.

  March 13, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12178   open full text
• Classroom Climate and Political Learning: Findings from a Swedish Panel Study and Comparative Data.
  Mikael Persson.
  Political Psychology. March 13, 2014
  Numerous studies have shown that an open classroom climate for discussion increases students' civic knowledge. However, most previous studies draw on cross‐sectional data and have not been able to show that the effect is causal. This article presents results from a Swedish panel survey following students during the first year in the gymnasium (upper secondary level). Using this study, we are better equipped to evaluate the link between an open classroom climate and political knowledge. Results suggest that the effect is causal. A 10% increase in open classroom climate is associated with about 5 percentage points higher knowledge. The beneficial effect of an open classroom climate is an important insight that should be seriously considered not only by researchers but also by educational policy makers, school managements, and teachers.

  March 13, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12179   open full text
• “We Must Be the Change We Want to See in the World”: Integrating Norms and Identities through Social Interaction.
  Laura G. E. Smith, Emma F. Thomas, Craig McGarty.
  Political Psychology. March 13, 2014
  In this article, we propose a social psychological mechanism for the formation of new social change movements. Here, we argue that social change follows the emergence of shared injunctive social norms that define new collective identities, and we systematically spell out the nature of the processes through which this comes about. We propose that these norms and identities are created and negotiated through validating communication about a normative conflict; resulting in an identity‐norm nexus (INN), whereby people become the change they want to see in the world. We suggest that injunctive norms are routinely negotiated, validated, and integrated with shared identity in order to create the potential to effect change in the world. Norms and identities need not be integrated or connected in this way, but the power of social actors to form new social movements to bring about sociopolitical change will tend to be severely limited unless they can bring about the integration of identity and action.

  March 13, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12180   open full text
• The Sins of Their Fathers: When Current Generations Are Held to Account for the Transgressions of Previous Generations.
  Nobuhiko Goto, Jolanda Jetten, Minoru Karasawa, Matthew J. Hornsey.
  Political Psychology. February 12, 2014
  When are current generations held accountable for transgressions committed by previous generations? In two studies, we test the prediction that current generations will only be assigned guilt for past atrocities when victim group members perceive high levels of cultural continuity between historical perpetrators and the current generation within the perpetrator group. Japanese participants were presented with information describing the current generation of Americans as either similar or dissimilar in personality to the Americans who were implicated in dropping the atomic bomb on Japan during World War II. The results of both studies revealed that victim group members assigned more guilt to current Americans when they perceived high (compared to low) outgroup continuity, and they did so relatively independently of the transgressor group's guilt expressions.

  February 12, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12172   open full text
• Physiological Arousal and Political Beliefs.
  Jonathan Renshon, Jooa Julia Lee, Dustin Tingley.
  Political Psychology. February 12, 2014
  It is by now well known that political attitudes can be affected by emotions. Most earlier studies have focused on emotions generated by some political event (e.g., terrorism or increased immigration). However, the methods used in previous efforts have made it difficult to untangle the various causal pathways that might link emotions to political beliefs. In contrast, we focus on emotions incidental (i.e., irrelevant) to the decision process, allowing us to cleanly trace and estimate the effect of experimentally induced anxiety on political beliefs. Further, we build upon innovative new work that links physiological reactivity (Oxley et al., 2008a; Hatemi, McDermott, Eaves, Kendler, & Neale, 2013) to attitudes by using skin conductance reactivity as a measure of emotional arousal. We found that anxiety—generated by a video stimulus—significantly affected physiological arousal as measured by tonic skin‐conductance levels, and that higher physiological reactivity predicted more anti‐immigration attitudes. We show that physiological reactivity mediated the relationship between anxiety and political attitudes.

  February 12, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12173   open full text
• The Role of Inclusive and Exclusive Victim Consciousness in Predicting Intergroup Attitudes: Findings from Rwanda, Burundi, and DRC.
  Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Rezarta Bilali.
  Political Psychology. February 12, 2014
  The present research examined the differential relationship between distinct construals of collective victimhood—specifically, inclusive and exclusive victim consciousness—and intergroup attitudes in the context and aftermath of mass violence. Three surveys in Rwanda (N = 842), Burundi (N = 1,074), and Eastern DRC (N = 1,609) provided empirical support for the hypothesis that while exclusive victim consciousness predicts negative intergroup attitudes, inclusive victim consciousness is associated with positive, prosocial intergroup attitudes. These findings were significant when controlling for age, gender, urban/rural residence, education, personal victimization, and ingroup superiority. Additionally, exclusive victim consciousness mediated the effects of ingroup superiority on negative intergroup attitudes. These findings have important theoretical implications for research on collective victimhood as well as practical implications for intergroup relations in regions emerging from violent conflict.

  February 12, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12174   open full text
• Precision Weapons, Civilian Casualties, and Support for the Use of Force.
  James Igoe Walsh.
  Political Psychology. February 12, 2014
  Precision weapons such as drones have become important elements of the military strategies of the United States and other countries. How does the use of precision weapons influence public support for the use of force? The public is averse to casualties, mission failure, and collateral damage. I argue that precision weapons increase the salience and importance of avoiding civilian harm. Individuals adopt their expectations about the outcomes of using these weapons and have lower tolerance for attacks that result in civilian deaths. This proposition is consistent with the results of two survey experiments. In the first, the possibility of civilian casualties leads to larger declines in support for the use of force than do military casualties or mission failure. In the second, respondents primed with information about an attack with precision weapons exhibited less tolerance for civilian harm than those primed with other weapons systems, despite the fact that the outcomes described to all respondents were identical.

  February 12, 2014   doi: 10.1111/pops.12175   open full text
• Not in My Backyard! Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation, and Support for Strict Immigration Policies at Home and Abroad.
  Maureen A. Craig, Jennifer A. Richeson.
  Political Psychology. September 30, 2013
  Many controversial immigration policies have recently emerged across the United States and abroad. We explore the role of national context in shaping support for such policies. Specifically, we examine whether the extent to which ideological attitudes—Right‐Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)—predict policy support is moderated by the national context of the policy. Across three studies, United States citizens read about a controversial immigration policy affecting either their own country (United States) or a foreign country (Israel or Singapore) and indicated their support for the policy. Results reveal that SDO predicts policy support, regardless of its national context; this effect is mediated by perceived competition. Conversely, RWA predicts policy support only if the policy affects domestic immigration; this effect is mediated by perceptions of cultural threat. Consistent with prior research, the present findings highlight the role of perceived cultural threat to one's ingroup and perceived competition in shaping attitudes toward immigration and shed light on some of the motivations underlying the recent rise in popularity of strict immigration policies.

  September 30, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12078   open full text
• Partisan Bias and Information Discounting in Economic Judgments.
  Mark D. Ramirez, Nathan Erickson.
  Political Psychology. September 06, 2013
  Research shows that partisanship biases people's views about the economy. Yet, there is little understanding of the factors, if any, that might mitigate the influence of partisanship on these judgments or the effect of partisanship on metacognitive judgments. This study uses an experimental design to show that partisanship continues to bias economic judgments even when subjects receive direct and neutral information about specific aspects of the economy. Moreover, it extends our understanding of partisan bias by showing it has a direct effect on people's metacognitive assessments of their own attitudes—particularly the degree of uncertainty people have in their own economic judgments. However, it appears that people are aware of the conflict between their partisan‐based judgment and economic information since we observe increases in economic uncertainty when information is counter to a subject's partisan predisposition. The results provide new insight into the extent of partisan bias and the difficulty of countering partisan‐based judgments.

  September 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12064   open full text
• Anger, Exposure to Violence, and Intragroup Conflict: A “Lab in the Field” Experiment in Southern Israel.
  Thomas Zeitzoff.
  Political Psychology. September 06, 2013
  I examine how anger stemming from violence in the Israel‐Palestine conflict influences intragroup retaliation. In July 2010 I conducted a series of experiments in two cities in the Southern District of Israel affected to varying degrees (high and low) by rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. For each experiment, subjects were partnered anonymously with a member of their community. They were then exposed to one of two emotional manipulations: one that induced anger or one that did not. Finally, each subject was given an opportunity to keep an endowment or allocate it towards destroying a portion, or all, of their partner's income (“pay to punish”) in retaliation for their partner having taken money from them previously. This decision to “pay to punish” was designed to closely mimic the costly nature of conflict. The findings suggest that anger has a conditional effect on decisions to pay to punish: in Sderot (most affected by rocket fire), anger decreases punishment, while in Ofakim (less affected), it increases punishment. Additionally, higher exposure to violence made subjects more likely to engage in negative reciprocity.

  September 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12065   open full text
• The Temporal Consistency of Personality Effects: Evidence from the British Household Panel Survey.
  Andrew J. Bloeser, Damarys Canache, Dona‐Gene Mitchell, Jeffery J. Mondak, Emily Rowan Poore.
  Political Psychology. August 15, 2013
  Personality traits have been posited to function as stable influences on political attitudes and behavior. Although personality traits themselves exhibit high levels of temporal stability, it is not yet known whether the effects of these traits are marked by comparable temporal consistency. To address this question, this research note examines data from Wave 13 (2003–2004), Wave 15 (2005–2006) and Wave 17 (2007–2008) of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). Twenty‐seven behavioral and 14 attitudinal dependent variables are studied. Consistency of effects is gauged via a series of multilevel models in which personality effects are permitted to vary by year. High levels of temporal consistency are observed for personality traits as represented by the Big Five framework.

  August 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12067   open full text
• Personality Dispositions and Political Preferences across Hard and Easy Issues.
  Christopher D. Johnston, Julie Wronski.
  Political Psychology. August 15, 2013
  A wealth of theoretical and empirical work suggests that conservative orientations in the mass public are meaningfully associated with personality dispositions related to needs for certainty and security. Recent empirical research, however, suggests that (1) associations between these needs and economic conservatism are substantially weaker than associations with conservative identifications and social conservatism, and (2) political sophistication plays an important role in moderating the translation of needs into political preferences within the economic domain. The present article extends this work by offering a theoretical model of the heterogeneous translation of personality dispositions into political preferences across issues and issue domains. We argue that these needs structure preferences directly for highly symbolic issues like those in the social domain, but they structure preferences indirectly through partisanship for difficult issues like those in the economic domain. We test this theory utilizing a national survey experiment in the United States and explore its broader implications for both the literature on the psychological determinants of political ideology and for debates over the “culture war” in the United States.

  August 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12068   open full text
• Narratives and Social Identity Formation Among Somalis and Post‐Enlargement Poles.
  Sarah Scuzzarello.
  Political Psychology. August 15, 2013
  The article examines the narratives of collective belonging among two migrant groups, Somalis and post‐enlargement Poles, who live in the London borough of Ealing (United Kingdom). In order to gain a better understanding of the processes of social identity formation, the article proposes a synthesis of a social identity approach, in particular the recent discursive developments in the field, with a political opportunity structure approach. Drawing upon these bodies of research, the article analyzes the understandings of collective identity among Somalis and post‐enlargement Poles according to three sets of social relationships: the group's relationship with the political environment; its relationship with other groups; and its relationship with people who share the same ascribed identity. The findings of the study confirm that social identity is shaped by not only intra‐ and intergroup cognitive elements but also by the political environment in which a group operates.

  August 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12071   open full text
• Perceived Threat, Social Identification, and Psychological Well‐Being: The Effects of Political Conflict Exposure.
  Katharina Schmid, Orla T. Muldoon.
  Political Psychology. July 29, 2013
  Using data drawn from the adult population in Northern Ireland (N = 1,515), this article examines the relationship between perceived intergroup threat and psychological well‐being, taking into consideration the mediating role of social identification and the moderating role of political conflict exposure. Results by and large confirmed our predictions that perceived threat would be directly associated with poorer well‐being but would also exert a positive indirect effect on well‐being via increased social identification. However, these relationships were dependent on individuals' prior conflict exposure, such that the positive indirect relationship between perceived threat and psychological well‐being emerged only for two subpopulations: individuals who had high direct and high indirect exposure to conflict, and individuals who had low direct, but high indirect conflict exposure. No indirect effects emerged for individuals with relatively lower conflict exposure. Results are discussed with regard to their implications for research on the consequences of intergroup threat in political conflict settings and beyond.

  July 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12073   open full text
• Anxiety, Immigration, and the Search for Information.
  Shana Kushner Gadarian, Bethany Albertson.
  Political Psychology. June 12, 2013
  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.

  June 12, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12034   open full text
• The Uncertainty Paradox: Perceived Threat Moderates the Effect of Uncertainty on Political Tolerance.
  Ingrid Johnsen Haas, William A. Cunningham.
  Political Psychology. June 12, 2013
  People respond to dissimilar political beliefs in a variety of ways, ranging from openness and acceptance to closed‐mindedness and intolerance. While there is reason to believe that uncertainty may influence political tolerance, the direction of this influence remains unclear. We propose that threat moderates the effect of uncertainty on tolerance; when safe, uncertainty leads to greater tolerance, yet when threatened, uncertainty leads to reduced tolerance. Using independent manipulations of threat and uncertainty, we provide support for this hypothesis. This research demonstrates that, although feelings of threat and uncertainty can be independent, it is also important to understand their interaction.

  June 12, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12035   open full text
• Cooperation in Ethnically Diverse Neighborhoods: A Lost‐Letter Experiment.
  Ruud Koopmans, Susanne Veit.
  Political Psychology. June 12, 2013
  Several studies suggest a negative impact of ethnic diversity on cooperation, but most of them rely on attitudinal and other indirect measurements of cooperation or are derived from the artificial laboratory setting. We conducted a field experiment based on the lost‐letter technique across 52 neighborhoods in Berlin, Germany. The study has two aims. First, we investigate whether the negative effect of ethnic heterogeneity on cooperation holds for concrete cooperative behavior in a real‐world setting. Second, we test the most prominent psychological mechanism that has been proposed to explain the negative effects of heterogeneity on cooperation, namely in‐group favoritism. We do so by experimentally varying the ethnicity and religion of the senders of letters. We find strong support for the negative effect of ethnic diversity on cooperation. We find no evidence, however, of in‐group favoritism. Letters from Turkish or Muslim organizations were as often returned as those from German and Christian organizations, and the ethnic diversity effect was the same for all types of letters.

  June 12, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12037   open full text
• The Secrecy Heuristic: Inferring Quality from Secrecy in Foreign Policy Contexts.
  Mark Travers, Leaf Van Boven, Charles Judd.
  Political Psychology. June 12, 2013
  Three experiments demonstrate that in the context of U.S. foreign policy decision making, people infer informational quality from secrecy. In Experiment 1, people weighed secret information more heavily than public information when making recommendations about foreign political candidates. In Experiment 2, people judged information presented in documents ostensibly produced by the Department of State and the National Security Council as being of relatively higher quality when those documents were secret rather than public. Finally, in Experiment 3, people judged a National Security Council document as being of higher quality when presented as a secret document rather than a public document and evaluated others' decisions more favorably when those decisions were based on secret information. Discussion centers on the mediators, moderators, and broader implications of this secrecy heuristic in foreign policy contexts.

  June 12, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12042   open full text
• Emotional Rescue: How Affect Helps Partisans Overcome Collective Action Problems.
  Eric W. Groenendyk, Antoine J. Banks.
  Political Psychology. June 12, 2013
  Why does party identification motivate citizens to participate in politics? From a theoretical standpoint, it is in a partisan's self‐interest to free ride on the efforts of others. Yet, mere identification with a party is enough to motivate many people to overcome this structural hurdle. We theorize that, by virtue of aligning one's self with a party, individuals become more likely to react to their political environment with anger and enthusiasm rather than fear. Anger and enthusiasm are associated with approach and continuation of current behavior, while fear triggers behavior reconsideration. In short, party identification stimulates participation via anger and enthusiasm. On the other hand, fear produces thought but not much action. We find support for our model using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) and an original laboratory experiment.

  June 12, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12045   open full text
• Understanding the Determinants of Political Ideology: Implications of Structural Complexity.
  Stanley Feldman, Christopher Johnston.
  Political Psychology. June 12, 2013
  There has been a substantial increase in research on the determinants and consequences of political ideology among political scientists and social psychologists. In psychology, researchers have examined the effects of personality and motivational factors on ideological orientations as well as differences in moral reasoning and brain functioning between liberals and conservatives. In political science, studies have investigated possible genetic influences on ideology as well as the role of personality factors. Virtually all of this research begins with the assumption that it is possible to understand the determinants and consequences of ideology via a unidimensional conceptualization. We argue that a unidimensional model of ideology provides an incomplete basis for the study of political ideology. We show that two dimensions—economic and social ideology—are the minimum needed to account for domestic policy preferences. More importantly, we demonstrate that the determinants of these two ideological dimensions are vastly different across a wide range of variables. Focusing on a single ideological dimension obscures these differences and, in some cases, makes it difficult to observe important determinants of ideology. We also show that this multidimensionality leads to a significant amount of heterogeneity in the structure of ideology that must be modeled to fully understand the structure and determinants of political attitudes.

  June 12, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12055   open full text
• Identity and Engagement among Political Independents in America.
  Samara Klar.
  Political Psychology. June 06, 2013
  Political behavior among independents has been documented for decades, yet we are left with limited insight into their political engagement. What, if anything, motivates independents to engage in politics? In this study, I apply psychological theories of attitude importance to explain high variation in political‐engagement levels among independents. Using two recent datasets, I find engagement levels are comparable across independents and partisans, yet predictors of their engagement differ substantially. Ideological strength predicts engagement for partisans—but not for independents. Instead, my data show that independents' engagement is best predicted by the importance they place on their independent identity. These data provide evidence that independence is a meaningful political identity and that identity importance is a key to explaining what motivates the independent voter to engage with politics.

  June 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12036   open full text
• Response Latencies and Attitude‐Behavior Consistency in a Direct Democratic Setting: Evidence from a Subnational Referendum in Germany.
  Marco Meyer, Harald Schoen.
  Political Psychology. June 06, 2013
  This article addresses the role of response latencies in affecting the attitude‐behavior consistency in a German subnational referendum. As voters faced a comparatively easy choice in this referendum, it puts the hypothesis concerning the role of attitude accessibility in increasing attitude‐behavior consistency to a particularly hard test. Utilizing data from a two‐wave panel survey, the analysis examines the effect of response latencies on the attitude‐behavior consistency concerning participation and vote choice. The evidence confirms hypotheses derived from attitude‐consistency theory only in a limited number of cases. The institutional setting and the nature of choice thus appear to make a difference. Moreover, substantive findings depend partially upon the procedure to measure response latencies. Accordingly, sensitivity tests should be employed by default. Irrespective of operationalization, response latencies play a crucial role when it comes to respondents who answered that they would “perhaps” participate. Whereas a quickly uttered “perhaps” was indicative of a rather low likelihood of participation, a slowly given “perhaps” indicated a considerably high probability.

  June 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12039   open full text
• Measuring Stereotypes of Female Politicians.
  Monica C. Schneider, Angela L. Bos.
  Political Psychology. June 06, 2013
  One explanation for the dearth of women in elected office is that voters stereotype candidates based on their gender. Research in this vein often assumes that female candidates will be stereotyped similarly to women (e.g., as compassionate) and measures stereotypes as such. We question this assumption, proposing instead that female politicians constitute a subtype—a new stereotypical category with its own qualities—of the broader group of women. We compare the content of female politician stereotypes to other relevant comparison groups including politicians, male politicians, and female professionals. Using a classic methodology to determine stereotype content (Katz & Braly, 1933), we find that female politicians do not share the qualities that are ascribed to women (e.g., warm, empathetic). Our results show that female politicians seem to be “losing” on male stereotypical qualities while also not having any advantage on qualities typical of women. The content of female politician stereotypes is nebulous and lacks clarity in comparison to all other groups examined. We discuss implications for the future measurement of politician stereotypes.

  June 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12040   open full text
• Social Dominance and the Cultural Politics of Immigration.
  Benjamin J. Newman, Todd K. Hartman, Charles S. Taber.
  Political Psychology. June 06, 2013
  We argue that conflict over immigration largely concerns who bears the burden of cultural transaction costs, which we define as the costs associated with overcoming cultural barriers (e.g., language) to social exchange. Our framework suggests that the ability of native‐born citizens to push cultural transaction costs onto immigrant out‐groups serves as an important expression of social dominance. In two novel studies, we demonstrate that social dominance motives condition emotional responses to encountering cultural transaction costs, shape engagement in cultural accommodation behavior toward immigrants, and affect immigration attitudes and policy preferences.

  June 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12047   open full text
• Societal Threat to Safety, Compensatory Control, and Right‐Wing Authoritarianism.
  Alberto Mirisola, Michele Roccato, Silvia Russo, Giulia Spagna, Alessio Vieno.
  Political Psychology. June 06, 2013
  We analyzed directly and indirectly the relationships between societal threat to safety, perceived control, and the increase in right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA) in two studies. In Study 1 (national sample of the Italian population, N = 1,169), we performed a longitudinal analysis structured into three waves (January 2003, September 2004, and January 2005). A moderated regression analysis showed that RWA increased from 2003 to 2005 as a function of perceived societal threat to safety more among low‐ than among high RWA scorers. In experimental Study 2 (Italian university students, N = 131) a moderated mediation model showed loss of perceived control to mediate the relation between societal threat to safety and the increase in RWA, but among low authoritarians only. Limitations, implications, and possible developments of this research are discussed.

  June 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12048   open full text
• How (Not) To Interpret and Report Main Effects and Interactions in Multiple Regression: Why Crawford and Pilanski (2013) Did Not Actually Replicate Lindner and Nosek (2009).
  Jarret T. Crawford, Lee Jussim, Jane M. Pilanski.
  Political Psychology. June 06, 2013
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12050   open full text
• Replication Actually: Comment on Crawford and Pilanski (2013).
  Brian A. Nosek, Nicole M. Lindner.
  Political Psychology. June 06, 2013
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  June 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12051   open full text
• Making Sense of Climate Change: How Story Frames Shape Cognition.
  Michael D. Jones, Geoboo Song.
  Political Psychology. June 06, 2013
  In 2006, Adam J. Berinsky and Donald R. Kinder published findings in the Journal of Politics that demonstrated that framing news as a story influences how individuals cognitively organize concepts and information. The study presented here moves forward in this tradition. This research combines samples obtained in the springs of 2009 and 2010 while conducting online experiments. In these experiments, slightly over 2,000 respondents are asked to organize concepts presented in one of three culturally nuanced stories about climate change or where information is presented as a list. Hierarchical cluster analysis indicates that when respondents are exposed to culturally congruent stories, respondent organizational patterns are more likely to mirror the story. We discuss the implications of these findings.

  June 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12057   open full text
• Beyond Total Effects: Exploring the Interplay of Personality and Attitudes in Affecting Turnout in the 2009 German Federal Election.
  Harald Schoen, Markus Steinbrecher.
  Political Psychology. April 29, 2013
  This article addresses the role of personality traits in shaping electoral participation. Utilizing data from a survey conducted after the 2009 German federal election, we demonstrate that agreeableness and emotional stability increase electoral participation. Yet, the main contribution of this article is to link personality traits to attitudinal predictors of turnout. First, we demonstrate that attitudinal variables, including party identification, civic duty, political interest, and internal and external efficacy, serve as intervening variables that mediate the impact of personality on turnout. Second, we show that personality traits exhibit conditioning effects by increasing or decreasing the impact of attitudinal factors on electoral participation. By and large, the evidence suggests that openness, agreeableness, and extraversion render attitudes (somewhat) less powerful in affecting turnout while conscientiousness and emotional stability increase the impact of certain attitudes. Third, we put indirect and conditioning effects together and find that emotional stability and conscientiousness exhibit particularly interesting patterns of effects: They shape attitudes in a way conducive to higher turnout and make these attitudes more powerful in affecting voter participation.

  April 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12031   open full text
• Social Identity and Youth Aggressive and Delinquent Behaviors in a Context of Political Violence.
  Christine E. Merrilees, Ed Cairns, Laura K. Taylor, Marcie C. Goeke‐Morey, Peter Shirlow, E. Mark Cummings.
  Political Psychology. April 29, 2013
  The goal of the current study was to examine the moderating role of in‐group social identity on relations between youth exposure to sectarian antisocial behavior in the community and aggressive behaviors. Participants included 770 mother‐child dyads living in interfaced neighborhoods of Belfast. Youth answered questions about aggressive and delinquent behaviors as well as the extent to which they targeted their behaviors toward members of the other group. Structural equation modeling results show that youth exposure to sectarian antisocial behavior is linked with increases in both general and sectarian aggression and delinquency over one year. Reflecting the positive and negative effects of social identity, in‐group social identity moderated this link, strengthening the relationship between exposure to sectarian antisocial behavior in the community and aggression and delinquency towards the out‐group. However, social identity weakened the effect for exposure to sectarian antisocial behavior in the community on general aggressive behaviors. Gender differences also emerged; the relation between exposure to sectarian antisocial behavior and sectarian aggression was stronger for boys. The results have implications for understanding the complex role of social identity in intergroup relations for youth in post‐accord societies.

  April 29, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12030   open full text
• A Change is Gonna Come: Generational Membership and White Racial Attitudes in the 21st Century.
  Tatishe M. Nteta, Jill S. Greenlee.
  Political Psychology. April 01, 2013
  The election of President Barack Obama offers a unique opportunity to test the impressionable‐years hypothesis—the theory of political socialization that predicts that widely experienced political events can have a lasting impact on the political attitudes of individuals who experience that event in their youth, thereby creating a generational distinction. Using data from an original survey embedded in the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we examine the racial attitudes of White youth who came of age during Barack Obama's presidential campaign and election to see if those individuals are significantly more liberal on racial attitudes than older generations of Whites. In other words, we look for early evidence that an “Obama generation” has emerged. We find there are indeed early signs of a generational distinction. Members of the “Obama generation” are more strongly opposed to racial resentment, but they exhibit similar levels of opposition to old‐fashioned racism as older cohorts. Additionally, we uncover that the factors that traditionally structure racial attitudes among Whites, most notably contact, education, and residential proximity, work quite differently for members of this generation. We take these findings as initial evidence that Barack Obama's presidency will have a lasting impact on the racial views of a generation of Americans.

  April 01, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12028   open full text
• Harmful Ideas, The Structure and Consequences of Anti‐Semitic Beliefs in Poland.
  Michal Bilewicz, Mikołaj Winiewski, Mirosław Kofta, Adrian Wójcik.
  Political Psychology. March 31, 2013
  The harmfulness of anti‐Semitic beliefs is widely discussed in current political and legal debates (e.g., Cutler v. Dorn). At the same time, empirical studies of the psychological consequences of such beliefs are scarce. The present research is an attempt to explore the structure of contemporary anti‐Semitic beliefs in Poland—and to evaluate their predictive role in discriminatory intentions and behavior targeting Jews. Another aim was to determine dispositional, situational, and identity correlates of different forms of anti‐Semitic beliefs and behavior. Study 1, performed on a nation‐wide representative sample of Polish adults (N = 979), suggests a three‐factorial structure of anti‐Semitic beliefs, consisting of: (1) belief in Jewish conspiracy, (2) traditional religious anti‐Judaic beliefs, and (3) secondary anti‐Semitic beliefs, focusing on Holocaust commemoration. Of these three beliefs, belief in Jewish conspiracy was the closest antecedent of anti‐Semitic behavioral intentions. Study 2 (N = 600 Internet users in Poland) confirmed the three‐factor structure of anti‐Semitic beliefs and proved that these beliefs explain actual behavior toward Jews in monetary donations. Both studies show that anti‐Semitic beliefs are related to authoritarian personality characteristics, victimhood‐based social identity, and relative deprivation.

  March 31, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12024   open full text
• The Effect of Terror on Institutional Trust: New Evidence from the 3/11 Madrid Terrorist Attack.
  Peter Thisted Dinesen, Mads Meier Jæger.
  Political Psychology. March 31, 2013
  Research from the United States suggests that the 9/11 terrorist attack increased trust in political institutions by creating a “rally effect.” In this research note we analyze Eurobarometer data collected immediately before and after the March 11, 2004 terrorist attack in Madrid to replicate and extend previous findings from the United States. We report that, first, trust in different types of institutions (political, media, justice) increased significantly immediately after the Madrid terrorist attack; second, the effect of the attack varied systematically across different types of institutions; and, third, the effect was generally short‐lived. Our results suggest that the rally effect of terror on trust in institutions generalizes across national contexts but also that the effect differs across types of institutions.

  March 31, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12025   open full text
• Legacies of Srebrenica: The Dutch Factor in EU‐Serbian Relations.
  Ainius Lašas.
  Political Psychology. March 31, 2013
  Having been traumatized by the actions of the Bosnian Serb army and its primary supporter Serbia in Srebrenica, the Netherlands insisted on applying strict EU conditionality criteria for Belgrade's candidacy. The Dutch determination to repeatedly stall the process of EU‐Serbian negotiations and to snub the preferences of the rest of the EU members cannot be adequately explained without taking into account the role of self‐conscious affect. The article not only provides a fresh perspective of the enlargement process, but it also offers revisions to the habituated‐deliberative choice hypothesis, which to date has not taken into account the role of self‐conscious affect.

  March 31, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12026   open full text
• History Matters: Effects of Culture Specific Symbols on Political Attitudes and Intergroup Relations.
  James H. Liu, Chris G. Sibley, Li‐Li Huang.
  Political Psychology. March 31, 2013
  A theory of the historical anchoring and mobilization of political attitudes is proposed, arguing that culture‐specific symbols, configured by historical charters, are an important resource in defining nationhood and legitimizing public opinion in a way that makes some political attitudes difficult to change. Five studies in New Zealand and Taiwan using diverse methods converged to show that historical events with “charter status” have an additive effect in explaining variance in political attitudes regarding biculturalism in New Zealand and independence in Taiwan even after controlling for the effects of Social Dominance Orientation, Right‐Wing Authoritarianism, relevant social identities, and collective guilt. Field and lab experiments showed that the impact of historical symbols did not depend on the mobilization of social identity (e.g., increasing mean scores and indirect effects), but the historical anchoring of political attitudes in representations was resistant to change. Manipulations of the salience of historical events changed levels of social identification, but did not change mean levels of support for New Zealand biculturalism or Taiwanese independence. Even an intense and immersive pretest/posttest design taking high school students on a national museum tour failed to change attitudes towards biculturalism in New Zealand.

  March 31, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12027   open full text
• On the (In)Compatibility of Attitudes Toward Peace and War.
  Boris Bizumic, Rune Stubager, Scott Mellon, Nicolas Van der Linden, Ravi Iyer, Benjamin M. Jones.
  Political Psychology. February 22, 2013
  Although attitudes toward peace and war are usually treated as two opposite poles of one dimension, in this article we argue that they may represent two distinct dimensions. To investigate this idea, we developed and tested a new balanced measure, the Attitudes Toward Peace and War (APW) Scale, in three studies (N = 4,742) in the United States and Denmark. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that attitudes toward peace and war formed two distinct, though negatively related, factors. Structural equation modeling showed that antecedents of attitudes toward peace included egalitarian ideological beliefs, the values of international harmony and equality, and empathic concern for others, and consequences included intentions to engage in peace‐related activities. On the other hand, antecedents of attitudes toward war included authoritarian ideological beliefs, the values of national strength and order, and less personal distress, and consequences included intentions to engage in warlike activities. Results also showed that political affiliation had an impact on the relationship between peace and war attitudes, with conservatives less likely to find the attitudes incompatible. The findings support the view that attitudes toward peace and war represent two distinct dimensions.

  February 22, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12032   open full text
• AMPing Racial Attitudes: Comparing the Power of Explicit and Implicit Racism Measures in 2008.
  Tessa M. Ditonto, Richard R. Lau, David O. Sears.
  Political Psychology. February 18, 2013
  In 2008, ANES included for the first time—along with standard explicit measures of old‐fashioned and symbolic racism—the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), a relatively new implicit measure of racial attitudes. This article examines the extent to which four different measures of racial prejudice (three explicit and one implicit) predict public opinion during and after the 2008 election, including Americans' views towards several racial policy issues, their evaluations of, and feelings toward, Barack Obama, and their attitudes toward a Black president in general. Oversamples of African American and Latino respondents in the 2008 ANES enable us to broaden our tests of these measures beyond traditional White samples. We find that racial prejudice played an important role for all racial/ethnic groups but that the traditional explicit measures of racism are by far the stronger predictors for all of our dependent variables (compared to the new implicit measure) for both White and Black respondents. Surprisingly, the AMP adds clear explanatory power only to models in the Latino sample.

  February 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12013   open full text
• Threat and Right‐Wing Attitudes: A Cross‐National Approach.
  Emma Onraet, Alain Hiel, Ilse Cornelis.
  Political Psychology. February 18, 2013
  Threat relates to right‐wing ideological attitudes at the individual level. The present study aims to extend this relationship to the national level. More specifically, in a sample of 91 nations, we collected country‐level indicators of threat (including inflation, unemployment, gross national product, homicide rate, and life expectancy). Moreover, we analyzed data from the European and World Value Survey (total N = 134,516) to obtain aggregated country‐level indicators for social‐cultural and economic‐hierarchical right‐wing attitudes for each of these countries. In accordance with previous findings based on the individual level, a positive relationship between threat indicators and right‐wing attitudes emerged. This relationship was stronger than what was usually reported at the individual level. In the discussion, we focus on the mutually reinforcing influence at the individual and national levels in terms of right‐wing attitudes.

  February 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12014   open full text
• “We may be pirates, but we are not protesters”: Identity in the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
  Avelie Stuart, Emma F. Thomas, Ngaire Donaghue, Adam Russell.
  Political Psychology. February 18, 2013
  Radical activist organizations face the complex task of managing their identity so as to draw political attention but also to appear legitimate and thus gain public support. In this article we develop a picture of the identities of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) members, a group mostly known for their direct action against whaling, via a thematic analysis of material from the SSCS website and interviews with SSCS members. In online commentary, founder Captain Paul Watson establishes several deliberately paradoxical notions of who the Sea Shepherds are. We relate these identity statements to interviews with core activists to examine how they manage the identity conflicts resulting from the group identity, such as being seen as “pirates” and “hard lined vegans.” We found that SSCS positions themselves as a diverse and unstructured organization, yet distinctively passionate and willing to take action where others will not. The implications of this research are discussed in relation to the importance of understanding the constraints and conflicts around political activist identities.

  February 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12016   open full text
• “It's Only Other People Who Make Me Feel Black”: Acculturation, Identity, and Agency in a Multicultural Community.
  Caroline Howarth, Wolfgang Wagner, Nicola Magnusson, Gordon Sammut.
  Political Psychology. February 18, 2013
  This article explores identity work and acculturation work in the lives of British mixed‐heritage children and adults. Children, teenagers, and parents with mixed heritage participated in a community arts project that invited them to deliberate, construct, and reconstruct their cultural identities and cultural relations. We found that acculturation, cultural and raced identities, are constructed through a series of oppositional themes: cultural maintenance versus cultural contact; identity as inclusion versus identity as exclusion; institutionalized ideologies versus agency. The findings point towards an understanding of acculturation as a dynamic, situated, and multifaceted process: acculturation in movement. To investigate this, we argue that acculturation research needs to develop a more dynamic and situated approach to the study of identity, representation, and culture. The article concludes with a discussion on the need for political psychologists to develop methods attuned to the tensions and politics of acculturation that are capable of highlighting the possibilities for resistance and social change.

  February 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12020   open full text
• Victim and Perpetrator Groups' Responses to the Canadian Government's Apology for the Head Tax on Chinese Immigrants and the Moderating Influence of Collective Guilt.
  Michael J. A Wohl, Kimberly Matheson, Nyla R. Branscombe, Hymie Anisman.
  Political Psychology. February 18, 2013
  European and Chinese Canadians' perceptions and expectations of the Canadian government's apology for the head tax placed on Chinese immigrants during the early twentieth century were examined, along with Chinese Canadians' willingness to forgive the transgression. Among both European and Chinese Canadians, beliefs about the importance attributed to the event and perception of the apology as deserved and sincere heightened expectations of improved intergroup relations. Collective guilt acceptance among European Canadians heightened the relation between perceived sincerity and positive expectations, whereas collective guilt assignment by Chinese Canadians heightened the relation between sincerity and forgiveness. A one‐year follow‐up of whether Chinese Canadians were equally satisfied with the apology indicated that their willingness to grant forgiveness had waned, and although on the whole expectations of improved relations were met, those who assigned more collective guilt were less convinced. Intergroup apologies and their effectiveness at facilitating intergroup relations are discussed.

  February 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12017   open full text
• Multidimensionality of Right‐Wing Authoritarian Attitudes: Authoritarianism‐Conservatism‐Traditionalism.
  John Duckitt, Boris Bizumic.
  Political Psychology. February 18, 2013
  Traditionally Right‐Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) has been seen as a unidimensional construct. Recently, however, researchers have begun to measure three distinct RWA dimensions (Feldman, 2003; Funke, 2005; Van Hiel, Cornelis, Roets, & De Clercq, 2006). One of these new multidimensional RWA approaches has conceptualized these three dimensions as Authoritarianism, Conservatism, and Traditionalism (ACT), which are viewed as expressions of basic social values or motivational goals that represent different, though related, strategies for attaining collective security at the expense of individual autonomy. Findings are reported from two studies to assess the validity and predictive utility of the multidimensional ACT approach. First, a direct cross‐national comparison showed that the three ACT dimensions were reliable and factorially distinct and demonstrated the measurement invariance of the three latent constructs across Serbian and NZ (New Zealand) samples. The three ACT dimensions predicted self‐reported behavior differentially in both samples, and a comparison of latent means showed the Serbian sample higher than the NZ sample on the ACT dimensions of Authoritarianism and Traditionalism but markedly lower on Conservatism. Second, a reanalysis of previously collected NZ data showed that the three ACT scales differentially predicted three dimensions of generalized prejudice in a theoretically meaningful manner. These findings underline the importance of studying ideological attitudes, such as RWA, multidimensionally.

  February 18, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12022   open full text
• Loss Aversion and Foreign Policy Resolve.
  Jeffrey D. Berejikian, Bryan R. Early.
  Political Psychology. February 15, 2013
  This article draws upon recent findings from the field of neuroscience to explore how loss aversion affects foreign policy resolve. We theorize that U.S. policy makers are more resolute in pursuing preventive policies that seek to avoid losses than they are in pursuing promotive policies that seek to acquire new gains. To test our theory, we conduct the first large‐n analysis of foreign policy hypotheses derived from the neuroscience of loss aversion using data from 100 cases of U.S.‐initiated Section 301 trade disputes. The results provide strong support for the loss‐aversion‐based theory, revealing that American policy makers are willing to fight harder and hold out longer in trade disputes with preventive objectives than they are in cases with promotive ones. Our study demonstrates that hypotheses derived from neuroscientific findings can be tested using large‐n techniques in study of foreign policy, revealing a new avenue of inquiry within the field.

  February 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12012   open full text
• Conspiracy Accounts as Intergroup Theories: Challenging Dominant Understandings of Social Power and Political Legitimacy.
  Antonis Sapountzis, Susan Condor.
  Political Psychology. February 15, 2013
  Conspiracy accounting is often regarded as an atypical, pathological form of political reasoning, and little research has considered how ordinary social actors may refer to political conspiracies in the course of argument. In this article, we consider the spontaneous use of conspiracy narratives by politically engaged Greek citizens in interview discussions of the Macedonian crisis. Analysis revealed that conspiracy narratives were typically used to challenge dominant representations that attributed the Macedonian crisis to Greek xenophobic nationalism. Specifically, conspiracy accounts were used to dispute assumptions concerning Greece's majority status by representing the political opposition as a consortium rather than a single out‐group, by recasting the threat posed to Greece as a matter of realistic rather than symbolic competition, and by extending the historical frame of reference to encompass past and prospective future threats to the Greek people and the Greek state. In conclusion, we note how the use of conspiratorial reasoning may be used to construct complex causal arguments concerning intergroup relations and to challenge dominant ideological assumptions about social hierarchy and political legitimacy. In this respect, conspiratorial reasoning might be regarded as a prototypical form of intergroup representation.

  February 15, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12015   open full text
• Mapping the Connections between Politics and Morality: The Multiple Sociopolitical Orientations Involved in Moral Intuition.
  Christopher M. Federico, Christopher R. Weber, Damla Ergun, Corrie Hunt.
  Political Psychology. January 24, 2013
  According to moral foundations theory (Haidt & Joseph, 2004), five foundations are central to moral intuition. The two individualizing foundations—harm/care and fairness/reciprocity—hinge on the rights of the individual, whereas the three binding foundations—in‐group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity—focus on communal bonds. Recent work suggests that reliance on the various foundations varies as a function of sociopolitical orientation: liberals consistently rely on the individualizing foundations, whereas conservatives rely on both the individualizing and binding foundations. In an effort to further explore the relationship between sociopolitical orientation and morality, we argue that only certain types of sociopolitical attitudes and beliefs should relate to each cluster of foundations. Drawing on dual‐process models of social and political attitudes, we demonstrate that the individualizing foundations are aligned with attitudes and beliefs relevant to preferences for equality versus inequality (i.e., SDO and competitive‐jungle beliefs), whereas the binding foundations are aligned with attitudes and beliefs relevant to preferences for openness versus social conformity (i.e., RWA and dangerous‐world beliefs). We conclude by discussing the consequences of these findings for our understanding of the relationship between sociopolitical and moral orientations.

  January 24, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12006   open full text
• Self‐Harm Focus Leads to Greater Collective Guilt: The Case of the U.S.‐Iraq Conflict.
  Daniel Sullivan, Mark J. Landau, Nyla R. Branscombe, Zachary K. Rothschild, Tracey J. Cronin.
  Political Psychology. January 24, 2013
  Collective guilt from harm one's group has caused an out‐group is often undermined because people minimize or legitimize the harm done (i.e., they generate exonerating cognitions). When a group action has harmed both the in‐group and an out‐group, focusing people on “self‐harm”—ways in which the in‐group has harmed itself—may elicit more collective guilt because self‐harm is less likely to be exonerated. In Study 1, American participants who focused on how the invasion of Iraq had harmed the United States expressed greater collective guilt over harm inflicted on the people of Iraq than those who focused on Iraqi suffering. Study 2 showed that this effect is due to reductions in exonerating cognitions among people focused on self‐harm. We consider the implications of these findings for intergroup reconciliation, particularly in situations where two groups have been involved in open conflict.

  January 24, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12010   open full text
• A Dual Process Model of Attitudes towards Immigration: Person × Residential Area Effects in a National Sample.
  Chris G. Sibley, John Duckitt, Robin Bergh, Danny Osborne, Ryan Perry, Frank Asbrock, Andrew Robertson, Gavin Armstrong, Marc Stewart Wilson, Fiona Kate Barlow.
  Political Psychology. January 24, 2013
  This research took a person × situation approach to predicting prejudice by looking at how social worldviews interact with real‐world environmental factors to predict how people respond to immigrants within their local area. Taking a Dual Process Motivational approach, we hypothesized that a higher proportion of immigrants in the local community would be associated with negative attitudes toward immigration for respondents high in dangerous world beliefs. Conversely, we hypothesized that living in a highly affluent (as opposed to socioeconomically deprived) community would be associated with negative attitudes toward immigration for respondents high in competitive world beliefs. Both hypotheses were supported using regional information derived from national census data combined with representative survey data from a large telephone sample conducted in New Zealand (N = 6,489). These findings support the proposition that individual differences interact with specific features of the environment to predict people's levels of prejudice in distinct ways.

  January 24, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12009   open full text
• Personality Traits and Political Participation: Evidence from South Korea.
  Shang E. Ha, Seokho Kim, Se Hee Jo.
  Political Psychology. January 24, 2013
  Using a nationally representative survey fielded in 2009, we analyze the relationships between personality traits and various modes of political participation in South Korea. We find statistically significant relationships between personality (measured by the Five‐Factor Model) and several nonelectoral modes of participation. Openness correlates positively with protest participation, rally attendance, financial contributions to political causes, news media contacts, and political activities via the Internet. Agreeableness correlates negatively with these five participation modes as well as petition signing. Conscientiousness is positively associated with individual political acts (e.g., contacting news media and elected officials and donation), while it is negatively associated with collective actions such as participation in rally. However, we do not find any significant relationship between personality and voter turnout. Reflecting an unusually conflictual political climate of South Korea in 2008, we discuss these findings' implications focusing on the personality‐situation interactions.

  January 24, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12008   open full text
• Voting and Values: Reciprocal Effects over Time.
  Michele Vecchione, Gianvittorio Caprara, Francesco Dentale, Shalom H. Schwartz.
  Political Psychology. January 24, 2013
  Two studies investigated reciprocal effects of values and voting. Study 1 measured adults' basic values and core political values both before (n = 1379) and following (n = 1030) the 2006 Italian national election. Both types of values predicted voting. Voting choice influenced subsequent core political values but not basic values. The political values of free enterprise, civil liberties, equality, law and order, military intervention, and accepting immigrants changed to become more compatible with the ideology of the chosen coalition. Study 2 measured core political values before (n = 697) and following (n = 506) the 2008 Italian national election. It largely replicated the reciprocal effects of voting and political values of Study 1. In addition, it demonstrated that left‐right ideology mediated the reciprocal effects of voting and political values. Moreover, voter certainty moderated these effects. Political values predicted vote choice more weakly among undecided than decided voters, but voting choice led to more value change among undecided voters.

  January 24, 2013   doi: 10.1111/pops.12011   open full text
• Descriptive Representation, Political Efficacy, and African Americans in the 2008 Presidential Election.
  Jennifer L. Merolla, Abbylin H. Sellers, Derek J. Fowler.
  Political Psychology. December 28, 2012
  Political efficacy is an important psychological orientation that has been used extensively by scholars to help explain voting and other forms of participation. However, very few scholars have sought to treat political efficacy as a dependent variable. In this research note, we look at the linkage between descriptive representation and political efficacy. Drawing from existing literature, we argue that an increase in descriptive representation positively affects levels of political efficacy. We examine support for this argument by looking at whether levels of efficacy increased among African Americans after the election of Barack Obama using data from the 2008–2009 American National Election Studies (ANES) panel study. We find that the effects of descriptive representation on efficacy varied depending on one's partisanship. Black Republicans, Independents, and weak Democrats experienced an increase in efficacy. However, Black Democrats and White Democrats who strongly identify with the party experienced a similar boost in efficacy, which suggests that partisanship can override the effects of having a descriptive representative.

  December 28, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00934.x   open full text
• Political Intolerance, Right and Left.
  Jarret T. Crawford, Jane M. Pilanski.
  Political Psychology. December 07, 2012
  Research recently published in Political Psychology suggested that political intolerance is more strongly predicted by political conservatism than liberalism. Our findings challenge that conclusion. Participants provided intolerance judgments of several targets and the political objective of these targets (left‐wing vs. right‐wing) was varied between subjects. Across seven judgments, conservatism predicted intolerance of left‐wing targets, while liberalism predicted intolerance of right‐wing targets. These relationships were fully mediated by perceived threat from targets. Moreover, participants were biased against directly opposing political targets: conservatives were more intolerant of a left‐wing target than the opposing right‐wing target (e.g., pro‐gay vs. anti‐gay rights activists), while liberals were more intolerant of a right‐wing target than the opposing left‐wing target. These findings are discussed within the context of the existing political intolerance and motivated reasoning literatures.

  December 07, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00926.x   open full text
• Affective Contagion in Effortful Political Thinking.
  Cengiz Erisen, Milton Lodge, Charles S. Taber.
  Political Psychology. December 07, 2012
  We offer a theory of motivated political reasoning based on the claim that the feelings aroused in the initial stages of processing sociopolitical information inevitably color all phases of the evaluation process. When a citizen is called on to express a judgment, the considerations that enter into conscious rumination will be biased by the valence of initial affect. This article reports the results of two experiments that test our affective contagion hypothesis—unnoticed affective cues influence the retrieval and construction of conscious considerations in the direction of affective congruence. We then test whether these affectively congruent considerations influence subsequently reported policy evaluations, which we call affective mediation. In short, the considerations that come consciously to mind to inform and to support the attitude construction process are biased systematically by the feelings that are aroused in the earliest stages of processing. This underlying affective bias in processing drives motivated reasoning and rationalization in political thinking.

  December 07, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00937.x   open full text
• Collective Rights and Personal Freedoms: A Discursive Analysis of Participant Accounts of Authoritarianism.
  Debra Gray, Kevin Durrheim.
  Political Psychology. November 05, 2012
  This article presents a discursive analysis of participant accounts of authoritarianism, with the aim of understanding how participants construct accounts about authority, when, and for what purposes. Participants completed a 30‐item Right‐Wing Authoritarianism scale and were then interviewed about how they went about this task. Analyses revealed that, despite an overall consistency when answering items on an authoritarianism scale, participants in this study did not consistently choose to produce authoritarian responses in contrast to the nonauthoritarian alternative. Instead, the construction and expression of authoritarian ideas was found to be directly related to two rhetorical features of conversing about authoritarianism: (1) the ideological dilemma of society versus individual and (2) the mobilization of arguments about social and personal threat that allowed participants to construct accounts about collective rights or personal freedoms. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for current debates about how authoritarianism should be theorized and studied.

  November 05, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00932.x   open full text
• Beyond the Ethnic‐Civic Dichotomy: Cultural Citizenship as a New Way of Excluding Immigrants.
  Arjan Reijerse, Kaat Van Acker, Norbert Vanbeselaere, Karen Phalet, Bart Duriez.
  Political Psychology. October 17, 2012
  In European Union (EU) countries, public debates about immigrants and citizenship are increasingly framed in cultural terms. Yet, there is no agreement within the citizenship literature on whether a cultural citizenship representation can be distinguished from the more established ethnic and civic representations and on how its measures relate to anti‐immigrant attitudes. The present study tested measures of citizenship representations among high school students (N = 1476) in six EU countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Sweden). Factor analyses favored a three‐factor model of citizenship representations (i.e., ethnic, cultural, and civic factors), which showed partial metric invariance. Across countries, ethnic and cultural scales correlated positively with each other and negatively with the civic scale. Moreover, ethnic and cultural scales related positively and the civic scale negatively to anti‐immigrant attitudes. However, when analyzed simultaneously, relations of the ethnic scale with anti‐immigrant attitudes were no longer significant, while those of the cultural and civic scales proved to be robust. Implications of these findings are discussed.

  October 17, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00920.x   open full text
• Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Political Orientations.
  Carolyn L. Funk, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Alford, Matthew V. Hibbing, Nicholas R. Eaton, Robert F. Krueger, Lindon J. Eaves, John R. Hibbing.
  Political Psychology. October 17, 2012
  This article reports results from the first twin study of adults in the United States that focuses exclusively and comprehensively on political traits. These data allow us to test whether a common set of genetic and environmental influences act upon a broad variety of values, personality traits, and political attitudes. In short, it allows us to empirically investigate whether there are a core set of predispositions that form the basis of our political orientations and, if so, whether these predispositions are shaped by the same environmental and innate forces. The key finding from our analysis is that there are core political predispositions that are rooted in common genetic and environmental influences and that these predispositions are empirically distinct from broader personality traits.

  October 17, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00915.x   open full text