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In this study, we discuss one example where behavior genetic findings vary greatly across political contexts. We present original findings on how party identification is heritable around the 2008 election on a sample of twins from Minnesota. As this is in contrast with findings from the late 1980s and with how a mid‐2000 study interpreted their results, we explain how the increasing partisan ideological polarization could be responsible for these seemingly contradictory findings. In the Minnesota sample, we show a genetic correlation between party identification and ideology, a finding consistent in the political science literature. We highlight how heritability of political characteristics, like all others, is population specific and highly context dependent stressing its nondeterministic nature.

Recent developments in spatial voting have moved beyond finding the most appropriate utility function and started to assess individual differences in decision strategy. The question is not if a proximity or directional worldview performs better in general, rather under what conditions do people pick one strategy over the other? We draw on psychological theories to develop a survey-based measure of individual decision strategy and take a behavior genetic route to explaining the individual differences. We argue that dispositional traits shape whether an individual develops a directional or proximity worldview of the political arena. Utilizing a classical twin design, we capitalize on the documented relationship between partisanship and a directionalist worldview. We find that, in the Minnesota Twin Political Survey, both the strength of party identification and directional voting are moderately (~20 percent) but significantly ( p < 0.05) heritable with no socialized component contributing to the variance. The covariation between the two traits is predominantly driven by common underlying genetic effects ( p < 0.01). Implications for the rational voter models are discussed in light of the findings.

This book is about how opinion polls are reported in the media. Opinions polls are not reported in the media as unfiltered numbers, and some opinion polls are not reported at all. This volume demonstrates how opinion polls travel through several stages that eventually turn boring numbers into biased news in the media. The framework offered in this book helps to understand how some polls end up in the news coverage, and which systemic biases abound in the news media reports of opinion polls. In the end, a change narrative will be prominent in the reporting of opinion polls which contributes to what the general public sees and shares. The findings cover journalists, politicians, experts and the public, and how they all share a strong preference for change. Erik Gahner Larsen is Senior Scientific Adviser at the Conflict Analysis Research Centre, University of Kent, UK. Zoltán Fazekas is Associate Professor of Business and Politics, with focus on quantitative methods in the Department of International Economics, Government and Business at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. .

AbstractIn a nationally representative study, we explore the public's views of the 2016 presidential nominees. Current measures generally focus on approval of given candidates with closed‐ended questions, but much can be learned by soliciting the public's unconstrained candidate preferences—not only in the direction of how they feel, but the depth of their views and who they really want to see in office. Employing open‐ended questions, we find that more than 75% of the voting public preferred an option other than what was offered. Even when constraining choices to politicians, the Democratic and Republican nominees were not preferred by the majority of the public, and this held true when restricting the analyses to partisans only. We further asked voters to express, in their own words, what they thought of the two candidates for president. The majority of the public described both candidates in negative terms. They spoke with deep disdain for the opposition's candidate, as well as their own party's candidate. The results add support to the view that US primary elections are failing to produce candidates who represent the public's interests and signal the potential for further instability in US government.

On 15 April, over a few days, Danish schools partially reopened. Only children up until the 5th grade were allowed to return to school. We present results from a two‐wave panel survey collected for parents with children in the 4th to the 7th grade in the week that schools partially reopened (Wave 1, initial N = 1,303) and again 2 weeks after (Wave 2, initial N = 1,000 re‐interviewed). Using a difference‐in‐difference analysis, we compare parents with children below and above the cut‐off. We do not find major differences in how our outcomes of interest develop. Government support decreased slightly more for parents whose children stayed at home, but child well‐being, parental stress, and economic situation mostly evolved in parallel for the two groups of families. More research is warranted on the long‐term effects of school lockdowns and reopening under different social contexts.

Although political polls show stability over short periods of time, most media coverage of polls highlights recurrent changes in the political competition. We present evidence for a snowball effect where small and insignificant changes in polls end up in the media coverage as stories about changes. To demonstrate this process, we rely on the full population of political polls in Denmark and a combination of human coding and supervised machine learning of more than four thousand news articles. Through these steps, we show how a horserace coverage of polls about change can rest on a foundation of stability.

AbstractThe connections between narcissism and political orientations have been theorized by scholars and increasingly evoked by political parties, politicians, public intellectuals, and the media. Yet surprisingly little research has been undertaken to empirically asses the veracity of these claims. We address this lacuna by identifying the relationship between narcissism, political ideologies, and partisanship in a nationally representative sample taken days before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Overall, we find those on the left and right are equally narcissistic. However, liberals and conservatives differ in which dimensions drive their narcissism. Specifically, we find that the entitlement facet of narcissism is uniformly related to more conservative positions, whereas exhibitionism is related to more liberal values, including political party identification. Narcissism, as a complex multidimensional construct, has an important role in understanding political ideology.

This article discusses possible issues of how media content and exposure were linked in previous research. It argues that the original conclusions of the article 'Who's Afraid of Conflict? The Mobilizing Effect of Conflict Framing in Campaign News' do not hold due to the chosen operationalization. It also demonstrates that using the proposed methodology, both exposure to conflictual and non-conflictual news yield the same substantive conclusion. In addition to re-evaluating the role of conflict, the article contributes to the discussion on how to integrate media and individual-level measures in the study of electoral behavior.

In nearly all studies on legislative party competition, all votes are treated equally. It is argued in this article that the cooperation between parties varies substantively depending on the type of legislation analysed. However, establishing a measure of the relative significance of votes has challenged legislative studies for decades. A novel measure for legislative significance is therefore proposed: length of debate. Using parliamentary votes from 23 legislative periods in the Danish parliament from 1953 to 2003 and debate length as measurement for bill significance, analyses are presented that focus on between‐party voting patterns on significant and non‐significant legislation and the presence, extent and features of legislative cartels is discussed. The results suggest that looking only at significant legislation reveals more clearly the legislative cartels within the legislature. These findings challenge the traditional assumption of treating parliamentary votes equally, and they allow for a better understanding of legislative cartels in the Folketing.