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Nostalgia plays an increasingly central and polarizing role in American politics, as the Republican Party has become the primary proprietor of nostalgic rhetoric. This paper explores how feelings of collective nostalgia in a country with an unjust past are inextricably tied to racism and hostile sexism. We expect that nostalgia is strongly related to racist and sexist attitudes. We test these expectations using data from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study. Our findings reveal a standard deviation increase in nostalgia is associated with a 7–13 percentage point increase in the probability of expressing racist attitudes, and a 6–9 percentage point increase in the probability of expressing sexist attitudes, even after controlling for partisan affiliation and ideology. These results suggest that nostalgic sentiments can exacerbate prejudice and discrimination by perpetuating the belief that things were better when America was more unjust.

ABSTRACTUsing content analysis and original survey data, we investigated the news coverage and consequences of Donald Trump's "rigged-election" claims during the 2016 presidential election. We added to previous literature by showing that the effects of such claims were highly contingent on individual partisan affiliation. Republicans and Independents who believed that the elections were rigged via voter fraud or media bias were more likely to report that they intended to vote or had already voted. Democrats and Independents who believed that Hillary Clinton would benefit from voter fraud or media bias were more likely to vote for Donald Trump.

Party realignment is occurring along the lines of education in the United States. As college-educated voters increasingly align with the Democratic Party, it is necessary to revisit the partisan effect of turnout. We predict that, since 2016, the Democratic Party no longer benefits from higher turnout. Using validated voter turnout from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), we simulate election results across turnout rates for the 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections. Our findings show that increases in turnout greatly benefit the Democratic Party in the pre-Trump era. However, this pattern has drastically changed. In 2016, 2018, and 2020, the Democratic Party sees a much smaller gain in vote share as simulated turnout increases, but also a large vote share advantage when voter turnout is extremely low. These results indicate that continued party realignment along the lines of education could lead to a persistent reversal in the expected partisan effect of turnout—where Democrats perform better in low-turnout local or primary elections and Republicans perform better in high-turnout general elections.

In this paper, we utilize a module from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to explore how individual perceptions of media bias changed over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign. While previous literature has documented the role of partisan affiliation in perceptions of bias, we know considerably less about how these perceptions change during a presidential election. Consistent with existing theories of attitude change, perceptions of bias polarize with strong Democrats moving toward believing the media were biased against Hillary Clinton (and in favor of Donald Trump) and independent-leaning Republicans moving toward believing the media were biased against Donald Trump. At the end of the 2016 election, more individuals believed the media were biased against their side. These effects were moderated by how much attention individuals paid to the campaign.

MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson's classic article "Macropartisanship" extended the study of political behavior from static analyses of American elections to the dynamics of partisanship between elections. This launched new frontiers of research, such as studying the effects of presidential approval and economic indices on aggregate party identification. However, the Macropartisanship literature made an important oversight: changes in partisanship between elections are usually from one partisan group to identification as an independent, or vice versa. A single measure of aggregate partisanship, like the original Macropartisanship measure, leaves out independents altogether. This has important theoretical and empirical consequences that are evident in an era of increasingly strong partisanship. We conceive of Macropartisanship as a compositional variable and study how its components are affected by changes in economic sentiment and presidential approval.