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AbstractIn this paper, we analyze how variations in partisan representation across different levels of government influence Americans' satisfaction with the democracy in the United States. We conduct two survey experiments and analyze data from the 2016 American National Election Study postelection survey. We find that Americans are the most satisfied with democracy when their most preferred party controls both the federal and their respective state governments. However, we also find that even if an individual's least preferred party only controls one level of government, they are still more satisfied with democracy than if their most preferred party controls no levels of government. These findings suggest that competition in elections across both the national and state government, where winning and losing alternates between the two parties, may have positive outcomes for attitudes toward democracy.

Seemingly, gender, language, and partisanship are intertwined concepts. We believe that the use of gendered language in political settings may be used strategically by political elites. The purpose of this paper is to craft a tool for scholars to test the interconnection between politics, gender, and language—what we refer to as being the gendered language and partisanship nexus. We test our prediction using original word rating data. From our test, we find significant variation across seven hundred words in ratings as masculine and feminine and discover that words rated as masculine are more likely to be rated as dominant and negatively valenced. We additionally find that Republican men are most likely to rate words as more masculine. Using this dictionary, we find that Republican presidents are more likely to use masculine language than Democratic presidents in their State of the Union addresses and that the Republican Party uses more masculine language than the Democratic Party in their official party platform.

AbstractEthnonationalist politics have been on the rise in the United States since the 2008 financial crisis, culminating with the rise of Donald Trump. We examine why two seemingly unconnected things—economic crises and prejudice—so often arise simultaneously. Combining theories of economics and emotions, we connect economic crises and prejudice through the role of emotional response to crises, namely anger and anxiety. We use two survey experiments in the United States to test various theories of how emotions might connect economic threat to negative intergroup attitudes. We find that economic concerns increase both anger and anxiety among individuals, but that these emotions have distinct effects on prejudice. Angry individuals show increased prejudice, but only towards groups one is ideologically predisposed to be prejudiced towards. In contrast, anxiety exhibits few consistent effects on prejudice.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a key policy issue during the 2020 election in the United States. As such, it is important to analyze how voters evaluated government responses to the pandemic. To this end, in this article, we examine factors that influenced Americans' evaluations of state-level COVID-19 policy responses. We find that during the pandemic onset period, Americans typically rated their state governments' responses more favorably if their governor was a co-partisan. In contrast, during the re-opening period, we find that Democrats relied on both partisanship and policy to evaluate their state-level responses, while Republicans continued to rely solely on partisanship. We contend that given the complex policy environment surrounding COVID-19, Americans may have not been fully aware of the policies their state governments adopted, so they relied on partisan cues to help them evaluate their state-level policy responses. But by the re-opening period, Americans likely had enough time to better understand state-level policy responses; this allowed Democrats to also evaluate their state-level responses based on policy. These findings shed light on how Americans evaluated COVID-19 responses just prior to the 2020 election.

AbstractStudies on discrete emotions typically work to evoke one emotion at a time. Yet many political phenomena cause multiple emotions. Threats, for example, cause, anger, and fear, have diametrically opposing behavioral consequences. As a result, the effect of experimental treatments can be masked by the countervailing influence of emotions with similar affect. This issue is exacerbated by existing measures of negative emotions, such as the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). We show that the PANAS is contaminated by systematic measurement error, as negative affect produced by one emotion influences responses on the other. To overcome this, we develop an alternative version of the PANAS that allows respondents to select which emotions they are feeling, then rate the severity. This technique accurately captures respondent's emotional reactions, reducing measurement error and thus decreasing the correlation between fear and anger. The tactics we developed have broad relevance for experimental researchers analyzing emotional responses to politics.

Political scientists have long been interested in the effects that media framings have on support or tolerance for controversial speech. In recent years, the concept of cancel culture has complicated our understanding of free speech. In particular, the modern Republican Party under Donald Trump has made "fighting cancel culture" a cornerstone of its electoral strategy. We expect that when extremist groups invoke cancel culture as a reason for their alleged censorship, support for their free speech rights among Republicans should increase. We use a nationally representative survey experiment to assess whether individuals' opposition to cancel culture is principled or contingent on the ideological identity of the speaker. We show that framing free speech restrictions as the consequence of cancel culture does not increase support for free speech among Republicans. Further, when left-wing groups utilize the cancel culture framing, Republicans become even less supportive of those groups' free speech rights.