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"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature"--

Political scientists have been trying to understand how political campaigns affect voter turnout for decades. Now, with the rise and ubiquity of social media platforms such as Facebook, those who study political campaigns have access to a new and potentially vast data source on voters' intentions. In new research, Jaime Settle analyses over 100 million Facebook updates, finding that 1.3 percent more users in battleground states posted status updates about politics, and that this increased their likelihood of voting by nearly 40 percent.

AbstractAt present, the field of political psychology lacks an effective framework to conceptually organize the findings from the voluminous literature assessing whether interpersonal political interaction makes democracy better or worse. Historically, the scholarship examining various styles of interactions has remained siloed; scholars have not designed their studies to facilitate comparisons across different styles, so the accumulation of knowledge about one style often fails to influence how knowledge is accumulated about other styles. Moreover, the approaches used to study interpersonal political interaction bundle together constituent facets of discussion in a way that makes it difficult to unpack the relationship between the structural features and attitudinal outcomes of that interaction. In this review, I seek to develop a conceptual framework with two goals: (1) to encourage research design that intentionally examines why and how particular features of interpersonal interactions are linked to particular kinds of attitudinal outcomes, regardless of the style of interaction and (2) to facilitate communication between academic researchers and practitioners in order to strengthen the theory‐to‐practice pipeline for interpersonal political interaction research.

Why does the competitiveness of an election affect voter turnout? Previous research has focused on elite behavior in mobilizing political participation and voters' altered assessments about the importance of their vote. However, I argue that exposure to political competition activates voters' emotions---which in turn affect the decision to turnout---and that individual differences in threat sensitivity moderate this mediated relationship. After first elaborating a theory for these relationships, I use data from the 2008 National Election Study to demonstrate that heightened electoral competitiveness is associated with stronger emotional evaluations of the presidential candidates. To further elucidate the relationships, I collect a sample of 113 million status messages posted on the online social networking site Facebook during the 2008 presidential election. Automated content analysis reveals that users living in competitive "battleground" states are more likely to express emotion when they discuss politics on the site, and that emotional activation in status messages partially mediates the relationship between exposure to competition and self-reported voting. I next explore whether a genetic sensitivity to threat conditions the way that exposure to political contention affects voter turnout. The nascent genopolitics literature theorizes that genetic, psychological, and physiological differences should be integral in interpreting political stimuli from the environment, but there have been few empirical confirmations of this expectation. I find in two distinct datasets that people who carry a version of a gene that makes them especially sensitive to social stress are more responsive to the level of contention in their political environment. I follow up on this finding with a mobilization field experiment designed to activate emotions toward political competition. My dissertation is one of the first attempts to identify the specific causal mechanisms that underlie the effects of individual biological differences on political outcomes. This research topic is relevant and timely: as our country continues to polarize and the consequences of people's emotional reactions to political disagreement intensify, it is important to understand the causal mechanisms that relate political contention to political behavior

Opening the Black Box of Political Discussion -- The 4D Framework of Political Discussion -- Data Collection -- Detection: Mapping the Political Landscape -- Decision: To Talk or Not to Talk? -- Discussion Part 1: Racing Hearts and Sweating Palms : The Psychophysiological Experience of Political Discussion -- Discussion Part 2: Walking a Tightrope : Expression in Political Discussions -- Determination: When Discussion Divides Us -- Individual Dispositions and the 4D Framework -- The Costs of Conversation.

While everyone deals with stressful situations on a daily basis, individuals have different behavioral reactions to that stress. We argue that life stress also affects individuals' political behavior, but this effect is contingent on their past political involvement. While individuals familiar with and engaged in the political process are unaffected when confronted with stress in life, individuals who are not routinely involved in the electoral process are more likely to disengage from politics. To test the differential effects of stress on the likelihood of political involvement, we fielded two experiments, one preceding the U.S. presidential election of 2012 and the second preceding the 2013 municipal election in a small Midwestern American town. We find that when triggered to consider life stressors unrelated to politics, individuals without a history of past participation in politics are less likely to vote while individuals who are habitual voters are unaffected.

Political socialization research has focused on the role of parents, extracurricular activities, and the school curriculum during adolescence on shaping early adult political behavior (Beck & Jennings, 1982; Flanagan, Syvertsen, & Stout, 2007; Torney-Purta, Richardson, & Barber, 2004). However, no study to date has examined how properties of adolescents' social networks affect the development of adult political outcomes. Using social network analysis, we find that both a respondent's social integration in high school and his friends' perceptions of their own social integration affect the respondent's later political behavior as a young adult. Peer and network effects are at work in political socialization. This has important implications for our understanding of the development of social capital, political trust, and political participation, as well as our general understanding about how one's social network influences one's own attitudes and behavior. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Political socialization research has focused on the role of parents, extracurricular activities, and the school curriculum during adolescence on shaping early adult political behavior (Beck & Jennings, 1982; Flanagan, Syvertsen, & Stout, 2007; Torney-Purta, Richardson, & Barber, 2004). However, no study to date has examined how properties of adolescents' social networks affect the development of adult political outcomes. Using social network analysis, we find that both a respondent's social integration in high school and his friends' perceptions of their own social integration affect the respondent's later political behavior as a young adult. Peer and network effects are at work in political socialization. This has important implications for our understanding of the development of social capital, political trust, and political participation, as well as our general understanding about how one's social network influences one's own attitudes and behavior.