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ObjectivesThe objective of this study was to empirically test the wide belief that Reviewer #2 is a uniquely poor reviewer.MethodsThe test involved analyzing the reviewer database from Political Behavior. There are two main tests. First, the reviewer's categorical evaluation of the manuscript was compared by reviewer number. Second, the data were analyzed to test if Reviewer #2 was disproportionately likely to be more than one category below the mean of the other reviewers of the manuscript.ResultsThere is no evidence that Reviewer #2 is either more negative about the manuscript or out of line with the other reviewers. There is, however, evidence that Reviewer #3 is more likely to be more than one category below the other reviewers.ConclusionsReviewer #2 is not the problem. Reviewer #3 is. In fact, he is such a bad actor that he even gets the unwitting Reviewer #2 blamed for his bad behavior.

In this comment on Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell's article "Gendered Citation Patterns across Political Science and Social Science Methodology Fields," I explore the role of changes in the disparities of citations to work written by women over time. Breaking down their citation data by era, I find that some of the patterns in citations are the result of the legacy of disparity in the field. Citations to more recent work come closer to matching the distribution of the gender of authors of published work. Although the need for more equitable practices of citation remains, the overall patterns are not quite as bad as Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell conclude.

Campaigns change how some people vote. How campaigns have this effect is less well understood. The prevailing view is that these effects occur by changing the content of voters' attitudes such as partisanship or issue positions (persuasion) and by changing the weights voters applied to these determinants of vote choice (priming). Recent research has challenged this view and suggests that the support for these priming and persuasion effects is overstated. Unfortunately, no research directly specifies and tests the specific psychological mechanism responsible for campaign priming. In this article, I draw on the differences in the forms of attitude strength and demonstrate that changes in citizens' uncertainty are responsible for these effects. The results suggest that persuasion and changes in uncertainty (but not ambivalence or importance) are responsible for the changes in voters' decisions during the campaign. Substantively, the largest effects occur because of changes in the uncertainty voters have about the nature of the candidates' character traits. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Campaigns change how some people vote. How campaigns have this effect is less well understood. The prevailing view is that these effects occur by changing the content of voters' attitudes such as partisanship or issue positions (persuasion) and by changing the weights voters applied to these determinants of vote choice (priming). Recent research has challenged this view and suggests that the support for these priming and persuasion effects is overstated. Unfortunately, no research directly specifies and tests the specific psychological mechanism responsible for campaign priming. In this article, I draw on the differences in the forms of attitude strength and demonstrate that changes in citizens' uncertainty are responsible for these effects. The results suggest that persuasion and changes in uncertainty (but not ambivalence or importance) are responsible for the changes in voters' decisions during the campaign. Substantively, the largest effects occur because of changes in the uncertainty voters have about the nature of the candidates' character traits.

How campaigns shape voters' decisions is central to the study of political behavior. The basic conclusion is simple: campaigns matter. While we know who campaigns influence, there is no clear empirical evidence of why or how campaigns matter. This comes from two things. First, despite different theories about campaigns, the existing studies measure the campaign as a function of time. Second, these studies ignore the individual‐level psychological mediators of these effects. We know that there are differences across time during a campaign, but we do not know how or why. In this article I suggest that campaigns work by altering voters' uncertainty about the candidates and combine aggregate and individual‐level data using a hierarchical logit estimated via Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. I find that voters change how they weigh their attitudes during the campaign because of changes in their uncertainty about the candidates.

Attitude strength is an important, but contested, subject in social psychology. Political scientists often rely on measures of attitude strength such as attitude importance, accessibility, or certainty in their work while ignoring the politically meaningful differences across types of strength. This omission is particularly relevant in the discussion of the formation of candidate evaluations. The research reported here indicates that accessibility is not the relevant type of attitude strength when describing how voters use issues in evaluating candidates. Instead, voters' reliance on issues when evaluating candidates depends on the voter's certainty about where the candidates stand. Given the different antecedents of certainty and accessibility, this result suggests that that citizens are able to more carefully process and use information available to them during an election campaign than would be expected by the prevailing theories of attitude formation.

AbstractThe American Dream is central to the national ethos, reflecting people's optimism that all who are willing to work hard can achieve a better life than their parents. Separate from the support for the idea of the American Dream itself is whether the public believes it is attainable. We consider the origins and dynamics of the public's belief in the achievability of the American Dream. Is the American Dream a symbolic vision, rooted in political socialization rather than contemporary politics? Or does optimism about the American Dream follow from the viability of the dream, rising with economic prosperity and falling with declining opportunity? We develop a new macrolevel measure of belief in the American Dream from 1973 to 2018. We show that it moves over time, responsive to changes in social mobility, income inequality, and economic perceptions. As inequality increases, belief in the attainability of the American Dream declines.

From the moment Donald Trump declared his candidacy in the run up to the 2016 American election, his personality was front and centre. Voters were prompted from the get-go to consider "trusting" his "strong leadership," his "honesty," and his business acumen. Unlike many presidential candidates who are career politicians, including governors, senators, or members of congress, Trump has none of this experience but does have a level of personal infamy that rivals some of the most notorious personalities—political or otherwise—in global history. Indeed, much of the content of his campaign was, strictly speaking, devoid of "real" policy discussion, and he chose instead to prey upon the emotions of voters while insulting the personalities of his opponents. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, magnified this by, in her advertising, focusing on Trump's character to the exclusion of issue appeals.