Issue Stances Research Articles

Do candidates’ policy positions matter in regional elections? Evidence from the 2021 elections to the Welsh Senedd

ABSTRACT An oft-cited benefit of candidate-based elections is that voters can hold individual candidates accountable for their issue stances. However, voters may not always be aware of candidates’ policy positions, a concern which becomes especially salient in regional elections. Using mass online survey data and a fixed effects approach, we investigate the extent to which voters were influenced by the policy positions of individual candidates when voting in the 2021 elections to the Welsh Senedd. We find that candidates’ policy positions did matter, but that this effect was small, limited to issues voters deemed to be particularly important, and only emerges among voters with high political interest. That said, our findings also suggest that the influence of candidates’ policy positions on voting behaviour was not substantially smaller when compared to national elections in the UK and elsewhere. We discuss options for improving voter responsiveness to candidates’ issue stances.

Pushing hands and buttons: The effects of corporate social issue stance communication and online comment (in)civility on publics’ responses

Despite increasing interest and involvement in corporate social advocacy (CSA) among companies, there are growing concerns among public relations scholars and practitioners regarding the undesired outcomes of CSA communication. To advance the knowledge of whether and how CSA communication might contribute to enhancing publics’ support for an organization, a 3 (organizational issue stance: pro-refugee immigration vs. against-refugee immigration vs. open dialogue) x 2 (social media comment civility: civil vs. uncivil) between-subjects online experiment was conducted with a U.S. adult sample (N = 1388). We found when the organization expressed its pro-refugee immigration stance (in contrast to advocating against refugee immigration or calling for open dialogue), greater support toward the organization was intended by participants. Advocating for open dialogue about refugee immigration resulted in undesired effects only when social media user comments following the CSA communication were uncivil, as it led to higher level of conflicted and cynical feelings sequentially, which in turn lowered participants’ intended support for the organization. Political ideology and pre-existing issue stance were key moderators influencing participants’ responses to the organization’s CSA statement. Theoretical and practical implications for public relations scholars and practitioners are further discussed.

Evaluating the persuasive influence of political microtargeting with large language models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have raised the prospect of scalable, automated, and fine-grained political microtargeting on a scale previously unseen; however, the persuasive influence of microtargeting with LLMs remains unclear. Here, we build a custom web application capable of integrating self-reported demographic and political data into GPT-4 prompts in real-time, facilitating the live creation of unique messages tailored to persuade individual users on four political issues. We then deploy this application in a preregistered randomized control experiment (n = 8,587) to investigate the extent to which access to individual-level data increases the persuasive influence of GPT-4. Our approach yields two key findings. First, messages generated by GPT-4 were broadly persuasive, in some cases increasing support for an issue stance by up to 12 percentage points. Second, in aggregate, the persuasive impact of microtargeted messages was not statistically different from that of non-microtargeted messages (4.83 vs. 6.20 percentage points, respectively, P = 0.226). These trends hold even when manipulating the type and number of attributes used to tailor the message. These findings suggest-contrary to widespread speculation-that the influence of current LLMs may reside not in their ability to tailor messages to individuals but rather in the persuasiveness of their generic, nontargeted messages. We release our experimental dataset, GPTarget2024, as an empirical baseline for future research.

Legislators’ accountability for issue stances: evidence from Australia’s Marriage Law Postal Survey

ABSTRACT For legislators to be held accountable for their stances voters need to sanction unpopular positions. However, because of strong party discipline it is difficult to identify the effects of individual MPs’ stances rather than the stance of their party, because MPs almost always have the same stance as their party. Researchers must therefore study issues which cut across parties or where parties allowed representatives to follow their conscience. Same-sex marriage is one such issue. We use data from the 2017 marriage law survey and subsequent 2019 federal election results to test whether MPs whose referendum positions were out-of-step with their district faced electoral sanction. We find that a standard deviation increase in congruence at the level of the polling place catchment area yields a statistically and substantively insignificant change in vote share of −0.1 percentage points. The results question the degree to which electors control their representatives beyond voting for a party label.

The combined effects of consumer-company stance congruence and consumers’ pre-existing corporate attitude in corporate social advocacy

Publics’ reactions to corporate social advocacy (CSA) initiatives can be influenced not only by their agreement with companies’ issue stances but also by their pre-existing perceptions of the companies involved. With the purpose of providing a more comprehensive understanding of CSA outcomes, this study draws on social identity theory and examines how consumer-company stance congruence in CSA interacts with consumer publics’ pre-existing corporate attitude to influence their boycott and buycott intentions. Using real companies, two experiments were conducted with CSA on two socio-political issues: abortion laws (N = 258) and gun laws (N = 257). The results from Experiment 2 showed a buffering effect of positive pre-existing corporate attitude on publics’ boycott intentions, when they have incongruent issue stances with companies. In Experiment 1, publics’ perceived like-minded opinions opposing CSA were also found to boost their boycott intention. This study adds a nuanced understanding of the triadic consumer-issue-company dynamics in CSA from the social identity and public opinion perspectives, providing useful guidelines for CSA practices.

Are rural attitudes just Republican?

AbstractRural residents are typically construed as being more conservative than urban residents. Is this true, or do rural residents carry unique interests from Republicans or conservatives? Using the 2020 ANES, we compare responses from 22 national issues by interacting urban and rural residency with Republican and Democrat identification. We find that issue preferences are partisan, not place-based: rural Democrats resemble their urban counterparts and urban Republicans resemble their rural counterparts, rather than rural areas specifically being more Republican. However, rural Democrats are more conservative than urban Democrats on issues relating to immigration, transgendered people in the military, and income inequality. These results point to partisan nationalization in issue stances, with exceptions, and that rural is not always Republican.

Issue Communication Network Dynamics in Connective Action: The Role of Non-Political Influencers and Regular Users

Social media influencers (SMIs) have prevailed in online communication networks and can play key roles in connective action. However, how influencers connectively drive activism communication network is less clear. This study conceptualizes issue influencers as users who emerge as influential nodes in shaping the communication network in a contentious political issue niche. A new typology of influencers is proposed based on both issue and platform influence. Drawing on connective action theory and SMI studies, this study employed a Stochastic Actor-Oriented Model to examine how structural (endogenous) processes and influencer-level (exogenous) characteristics explain the communication network dynamics among issue influencers based on 200,000 Weibo posts from approximately 150,000 unique users about a gender policy discussion in China. The results show reciprocity, closure triplets, and influencer-level attributes including issue stance and influencer status significantly drive the longitudinal activism communication network. This study suggests that, when political influencers are absent, non-political influencers and regular users can effectively lead a contentious communication network on a platform with increasing censorship and suppression.

How do Voters Form Perceptions of Party Positions?

AbstractPolitical debates are structured by underlying conflict dimensions, such as left-right and economic and cultural ideology, which form the basis for voter choice and party competition. However, we know little about how voters arrive at perceptions of parties' positions on these dimensions. We examine how the emphasis parties place on the different issues that make up a higher-level ideological dimension affects perceptions of their position on that dimension. Using two population-based survey experiments, we present respondents with either short or long statements that communicate the same issue stances. We then test whether the length of statements affects positional perceptions on the higher-level dimension. The empirical results show support for our hypotheses and imply that political parties – and the context in which they compete – can affect their perceived position even if underlying issue stances remain stable.

Publics’ Views of Corporate Social Advocacy Initiatives: Exploring Prior Issue Stance, Attitude Toward a Company, and News Credibility

Corporate social advocacy (CSA) has emerged to promote change on social issues in response to publics’ expectations and demands, but how different publics might respond to CSA differently is little understood. Grounded in Du et al.’s (2010) corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication framework, social judgment theory (SJT), and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), we conducted an online survey ( N = 505) to examine whether publics perceived CSA differently depending on their existing stance on an issue and whether the existing stance interacted with their attitude toward the company and news credibility. The results showed that individuals’ reaction to the CSA differed in light of their existing stance on an issue. Furthermore, when an individual's stance was undecided, attitude toward the company and news credibility were significantly related to change in issue stance, attitude toward the CSA campaign, and skepticism toward the company’s motives. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications.

News media impact on sociopolitical attitudes.

In the present project we assessed whether partisan news affects consumers’ views on polarizing issues. In Study 1 nationally representative cross-sectional data (N = 4249) reveals that right-leaning news consumption is associated with more right-leaning attitudes, and left-leaning news consumption is associated with more left-leaning attitudes. Additional three-wave longitudinal data (N = 484) in Study 2 reveals that right-leaning news is positively (and left-leaning news is negatively) associated with right-leaning issue stances three months later, even after controlling for prior issue stances. In a third (supplemental) study (N = 305), random assignment to right-leaning (but not left-leaning) news (vs. control) experimentally fostered more right-leaning stances, regardless of participants’ previously held political ideology. These findings suggest that partisan news, and particularly right-leaning news, can polarize consumers in their sociopolitical positions, sharpen political divides, and shape public policy.

It’s the emotion, stupid! Emotional responses to televised debates and their impact on voting intention

AbstractHow do emotional responses to televised debates impact on voting intention? The present article addresses this question drawing on an original dataset combining survey data and real-time responses gathered in the run-up of the 2017 German federal election. The paper contributes to three major discussions in the literature of political science and psychology. First, we show that emotional responses to media stimuli are independent explanatory factors influencing post-debate voting intention while in part mediating real-time evaluations of candidate statements. Second, our analysis demonstrates that the impact of emotional responses to televised debates can barely be deemed to be structured along one single dimension of valence but that discrete emotions show distinct effects. Third, the paper supports the notion that anger and enthusiasm have an indirect impact on voting intention by increasing the weight of political predisposition and reducing the weight of evaluation of current information on candidates’ issue stances in televised debates. We also find empirical evidence for the indirect effect of anxiety as well; it reverses the pattern and reduces the weight of political conviction while increasing the importance of evaluations about candidate statements. However, the latter finding does not seem to be very robust as in fact, substitutions are also able to generate this pattern. Finally, the paper reviews implications of the findings and discusses limitations and future perspectives of research.

Members of Parliament are Minimally Accountable for Their Issue Stances (and They Know It)

For incumbents to be accountable for their issue stances, voters must sanction incumbents whose positions are “out of step” with their own. We test the electoral accountability of British legislators for their stance on Brexit. We find that there is very limited issue accountability. Individuals who disagreed with their representative’s stance on Brexit were 3 percentage points less likely to vote for them. The aggregate consequences of these individual effects are limited. A one-standard-deviation increase in the proportion of constituents agreeing with their incumbent’s Brexit stance is associated with an increase of 0.53 percentage points in incumbent vote share. These effects are one and a half times larger when the main challenger has a different Brexit stance to the incumbent. A follow-up survey of Members of Parliament (MPs) shows that MPs’ estimates of the effects of congruence are similar in magnitude. Our findings suggest that issue accountability is conditional in nature and limited in magnitude even for an issue such as Brexit, which should be maximally amenable to such effects.

Nationalist ideology, rightwing populism, and public views about climate change in Europe

ABSTRACT Rising rightwing populism (RWP) potentially constitutes an obstacle to climate change mitigation, as European RWP parties and politicians often espouse climate change skepticism and oppose climate policies. Meanwhile, their party positions and issue stances have also become increasingly characterized by nationalism. Using European Social Survey data from 2016, we show that public attitudes consistent with nationalist ideology are clearly linked to voting for RWP parties and that people who hold these attitudes are more likely to be skeptical about climate change and to oppose policies that increase taxes on fossil fuels. With regard to policy attitudes, we find that nationalist ideology is more influential than traditional left-right political ideology, environmental values and political trust. The results also reveal substantial cross-national differences, as nationalist ideology is linked more closely to public views about climate change in Western European countries, where RWP parties with a nationalist rhetoric have had recent electoral successes.

What Makes Diets Political? Moral Foundations and the Left-Wing-Vegan Connection

Though meat-consumption is known to be a key factor in environmental damage, veganism and vegetarianism are still perceived to be left-wing-phenomena, ironically not penetrating to those who hold ideologies of conservation. Logical contradictions and historical counter-examples cast doubt on a substantive connection between political orientation and meat-eating. Instead, common psychological factors may predispose people toward both: left vs. right-wing political orientation and self-restrictive vs. omnivore eating preferences. Moral foundations have been shown to explain why even seemingly contradictory issue stances are brought forward in the context of the same ideological or political orientation. Here, we expand on these findings by showing the moral foundations to connect political orientation and vegan and vegetarian eating preferences as well as specific strategies of meat-eating justification in a large German sample. Specifically, the binding foundations authority and purity as well as avoidance tendencies are shown to differentially interact with meat-eating across the political spectrum with stronger effects for left-wing adherents and centrists than for the right-wing. Mediation analyses reveal that substantive parts of the association between political orientation and self-restriction in eating are attributable to differences in the moral makeup of left- and right-wing adherents. Connecting our results to prior work on the explanatory power of moral foundations for the political polarization of environmentalism, we discuss how our results may inform inter-ideologically appealing communications of reducing meat consumption, which is a worthwhile and necessary goal for mitigating climate change.

Issue stance and perceived journalistic motives explain divergent audience perceptions of fake news

Issue stances have always been an important factor in audiences’ news processing, and this study found that audiences’ attributions of motives to journalists can also affect news evaluations, particularly regarding whether a story is fake news. By exposing participants in Hong Kong to a news post (N = 215) via an online experiment, the findings suggest participants with opposing issue stances on the extradition bill controversy are likely to perceive the exact same new story as inaccurate and fake to significantly different degrees, consistent with the line of hostile media perceptions research. More notably, the phenomenon can be explained by the motives participants attribute to journalists. Among bill supporters, perceiving the journalists to be advocating mediates the relationship between perceived news inaccuracy and news fakeness; whereas perceiving journalists to be defending the authorities mediates the same relationship among bill opponents. Overall, the importance of motive attributions should not be ignored in journalism studies.

Targeted Issue Messages and Voting Behavior

In today’s data-driven campaigns, presidential targeting strategies rely on detailed perceptions about the political leanings and policy positions of Americans to decide which registered voters to contact and which messages to emphasize in their outreach. However, identifying supporters and opponents of a candidate’s policy positions is far from foolproof. This reality results in some citizens encountering political message(s) on congruent issues, where their issue stance aligns with the messaging candidate, and others encountering incongruent issue message(s), where the candidate and message recipient do not share the same position. Examining official contact records from the 2012 presidential campaign of Republican Mitt Romney, I find evidence that Romney’s campaign had some success when targeting Democrats with congruent issues. Messaging Democrats with an issue where they and Romney share common ground is associated with decreased support for Obama, increased abstention, and increased support for Romney. Contacting Democrats with an incongruent message and contacting Republicans with either an incongruent or congruent issue message had minimal effects on the voting behavior of the recipient.

Heated Atmosphere: Organizational Emotions and Field Structuring in Online Climate Change Debates

We use an organizational issue field to conceptualize how organizations partake in the signification of amorphous, yet intransigent issues – such as climate change. Following a network conception, field structure is captured as the linkages between organizations. Besides meaning system, and values, emotional expressions can affect the positioning of organizations within the field and, hence, how they define, debate, and address the core issue. Thus, we ask: How do framings, values, and emotion affect the structure of an organizational issue field? We answer our research question by synthesizing theories of fields, structuring, and emotion. By completing a network analysis of the online climate change debate, we find that organizations are most likely to link to other organizations expressing similar emotions – resembling organizational emotional entrainment. Expressed emotionality influences organizations’ positions in an organizational issue field even beyond cognitive framings like issue stance, values like moral worldviews, and typical in-group clusterings like organizational type or political orientation.

The Partisan and Policy Motivations of Political Donors Seeking Surrogate Representation in House Elections

Non-constituent donors constitute an increasingly important fundraising base for members of the U.S. House. These donors are theorized to be seeking “surrogate representation” by buying additional representation rather than relying solely upon representation provided by their own House members. However, precisely why they contribute in this way remains unclear. Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES) 2008–2014 in a series of logistic models, I investigate whether self-reported donors make contributions to House races outside of their home states for policy or partisan reasons. I uncover evidence that surrogate seekers make their out-of-state contributions to recover partisan representation and to gain additional partisan and policy representation. Further, conservative issue stances significantly increase the likelihood of out-of-state giving more so than liberal stances suggesting conservative donors have less difficulty identifying surrogate representatives. Taken together, the results suggest surrogate seekers are strategic and politically sophisticated with respect to their giving choices and motivations.

The Historical Presidency: Fear and Loathing in Presidential Candidate Rhetoric, 1952–2016

In this article, we build on research on affective (emotion‐based) polarization in American politics by investigating whether and how it has manifested in campaigns for the presidency. Drawing on a new data set of more than 11,000 statements about opponents from presidential stump speeches over the 1952–2016 period, we use quantitative content analysis to examine trends in negativity, fearful content, and anger content in these statements. We also conduct case studies of the 1968, 1992, and 2016 elections to examine qualitative patterns in these statements. We find compelling evidence that negative, fearful, and angry content in candidate statements about their opponents has been increasing over time among presidential candidates. We also find indications that fearful and angry rhetoric toward opponents is becoming more directed toward opponents’ character flaws rather than their issue stances. Our research suggests that affective polarization in presidential campaigns is a long‐term, and likely durable, development.

How Cross-Cutting News Exposure Relates to Candidate Issue Stance Knowledge, Political Polarization, and Participation: The Moderating Role of Political Sophistication

AbstractThis article seeks to improve our understanding of the role of cross-cutting news exposure in a democratic process—that is, whether and how exposure to counter-attitudinal news information is associated with citizens’ political issue knowledge, attitudinal polarization, and engagement in political activities. The results provide 2 contrasting roles of exposure to dissonant media outlets. On the one hand, results offer some evidence that dissonant media use contributes to gaining issue knowledge and inspiring citizen participation. On the other hand, some findings suggest that it reinforces, rather than attenuates, citizens’ attitudinal polarization. Thus, the findings from this study indicate mixed effects of exposure to counter-attitudinal news information.