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ObjectiveOne explanation for why voters' preferences are privileged by policymakers is that voters are likely to communicate their preferences through additional avenues as well. We examine this "communication hypothesis" by comparing the policy preferences of different types of political participators.MethodsWe analyze the National Annenberg Election Survey (2008) using latent class analysis to identify different types of political participators and multinomial logistic regression to compare the policy preferences of these participator types.ResultsVoters who also engage in additional online and/or offline political acts have policy preferences that differ in a number of meaningful ways from those who "only" vote.ConclusionThe findings indicate that prior research has overlooked important evidence on the connection between citizen participation and political outcomes due to a primary focus on the act of voting. This study suggests how future research can assess the impact of citizens' broader patterns of political participation.

Drawing from group theories of race-related attitudes and electoral politics, we develop and test how anxiety influences the relative weight of prejudice as a determinant of individuals' support for racial policies. We hypothesize that prejudice will more strongly influence the racial policy preferences of people who are feeling anxious than it will for people who are not. Using an experimental design we manipulate subjects' levels of threat and find significant treatment effects, as hypothesized. We find that individuals' racial policy attitudes are partially conditional on their affective states: individuals who feel anxious report less support for racial policies than those individuals who do not feel anxious, even when this threat is stimulated by non-racial content. More broadly, we conclude that affect is central to a better understanding of individuals' political attitudes and behaviors. Adapted from the source document.