National Election Studies Surveys Research Articles

Voting in the Mall: Ideology, Grievance, and Political Consumerism

In this paper we consider how political ideology, attitudes toward historically-marginalized groups, and identification with grievance groups shape Americans’ self-reported participation in political consumerism (i.e., political boycotts and buycotts). Using data from the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys, we find that ideological intensity has an asymmetrical effect on boycott behavior in 2016, with strong liberals considerably more likely to engage in boycott behavior than strong conservatives. In 2020 the effect of ideological intensity shifts upward dramatically for conservatives, with both liberals and conservatives likely to engage in boycott behavior. We also find mixed results for the effects of attitudes toward and identification with historically-marginalized groups, though we do find that general political participation (and related variables) are strongly related to boycott activity. We discuss the implications of our findings, particularly as they relate to the effects of ideological intensity for liberals and conservatives.

Altruistic concern: how racial ideologies explain racial differences in concerns for Black victims of crime and the police

We explore how concerned Americans are about the risk of violence faced by Black Americans. Using a 2022 American National Election Studies (ANES) survey, we compare concern for Black Americans as the victims of crime versus the police. We find White Americans to be the least concerned about both kinds of victimization, Black Americans the most concerned, and Latinx Americans in between. Interestingly, White Americans expressed significantly less concern about Black Americans being victimized by the police than by civilians. People’s racial ideologies play the largest role in explaining the average differences in concern between people with different racial identifications.

Education, racial identity, and perceptions of immigration and law enforcement in the United States

This research investigates the relationship between education, racial identity, political ideology, and socioeconomic factors in shaping American immigrants' attitudes toward immigration policies and perceptions of law enforcement. Analyzing data from the 2020 American National Election Studies (ANES) survey through multiple linear regression models, the study reveals significant influences of perceived police brutality and racial bias on public trust in law enforcement, with political ideology being a notable determinant in forming opinions on both immigration and policing. The findings emphasize the adverse impact of aggressive policing and racial profiling on immigrants' trust in law enforcement, highlighting the linkage between education and race in modulating perceptions of immigration policies. The results illustrate several ways socio demographic factors influence views on these pivotal issues and underscore the critical need for policy approaches that are mindful of the diversity of experiences and attitudes within immigrant communities. By unraveling the layered influences on immigrants' perceptions of immigration and policing, this research contributes valuable insights towards developing more informed, inclusive, and empathetic policy frameworks, reflecting the complex nature of immigration and law enforcement issues in a multifaceted societal context.

Health Behavior Model (HBM) and American’s perceived health risks of the COVID-19 vaccine

ABSTRACT We assessed the perceived risks of COVID vaccines using a Health Belief Model (HBM) among the American public during the vaccination roll-out in the USA. We employed a retrospective study of 1,149 adults from the 2020 American National Election Studies surveys to assess the public’s belief about the COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic. The logistic regression analysis found several predictors of perceived health risks of the COVID vaccine. For urban/suburban residents, having higher education, being older, being White, and having higher income emerged as protective factors. People with these characteristics are less likely to perceive the COVID vaccine as risky. Also, higher use of Twitter emerged as a protective factor for residents from urban/suburban regions. However, residents from rural/small towns who use Facebook often are more likely to perceive the COVID vaccine as risky. Perceived risks of vaccination are high among Facebook users of residents from rural/small towns and low among Twitter users among residents from urban/suburban areas. The authors identified several protective factors: being educated, older, economically well-off, and White. The authors propose interventions to reduce perceived risks and vaccine hesitancy among vulnerable populations.

Crowded Out: The Effects of Concurrent Elections on Political Engagement, Candidate Evaluation, and Campaign Learning in the United States

ABSTRACT Holding multiple elections simultaneously, also known as concurrent elections, is well known to benefit electoral systems by increasing the rate of voter turnout. Essentially, the public becomes more willing to participate in voting because they can vote for more offices, and more prominent offices, at once and thus have a greater influence upon the functioning of government in a more efficient manner. However, very little is known about what happens with the electorate outside of the simple increase in voting. Just because citizens choose to vote, it does not mean that they actually pay attention to all the campaigns or feel that their participation is valuable. Using 20 years of American National Election Study survey data, and focusing primarily on the relatively low-salience House of Representatives, this paper examines the psychological effects of concurrent elections in the United States. It concludes that, while concurrent elections do boost turnout, lower-salience candidates receive less attention during concurrent elections, leading the public to rate them more negatively and know less about them. Higher-salience office candidates avoid these negative consequences. Thus there is a trade-off with concurrent elections – more people tend to vote when multiple offices are contested simultaneously but those voters also tend to focus on the higher offices and ignore the bottom of the ballot.

Not Bowling Alone: Revisiting Partisan Types and Participatory Behaviors Using the Communication Mediated Model

Drawing on the two-wave 2020 American National Election Studies (ANES) survey, this study revisits partisan types by categorizing individuals’ party identification and positions on party-divided issues. A Latent Class Analysis reveals six types of partisans, which were further clustered into three types: polarized partisans (i.e., polarized Democrats and polarized Republicans, 47.85%), incongruent partisans (i.e., conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, 28.23%), and floating citizens (i.e., hesitant citizens and apathetic citizens, 23.92%) based on the partisan typology proposed in this study. Employing the O-S-R-O-R model, this study found that polarized partisans (O), who are the most politically active citizens, are more likely than incongruent partisans and floating citizens to seek pro-attitudinal news on multi-platforms (S), then to discuss politics (R), then to be politically knowledgeable (O), which finally leads to higher levels of political participation. The results highlight a worrisome tendency in US politics as participation is largely by biased polarized partisans. Nevertheless, incongruent partisans also have the potential to make contributions to both deliberative and participatory democracy because they are also politically active. Their discussion and participatory behaviors can be attributed to their mixed issue positions and counter-attitudinal news consumption on multi-platforms.

Does Anxiety Make Us “Informed” Citizens? The Mediating Role of Information-Seeking and Internal Political Efficacy in Forming Political Attitudes

Emotions are inseparable from political decision-making. This idea has been especially strongly supported for negative emotions. The current study examines the role of anxiety in forming political attitudes using data from a nationally representative American National Election Studies survey ( N = 5900). Our path analysis highlights a significant indirect relationship between anxiety and political participation through two mediators: information-seeking tendencies and internal political efficacy. By examining the unique role of anxiety in political decision-making, our study provides a more nuanced understanding of how negative emotions can impact democracy.

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration: Was There a Trump Effect?

This paper examines public opinion about immigration policy in 2012 and 2016, seeking to understand whether there are meaningful differences in public opinion across these elections, whether the predictors of opinion changed, and whether the issue’s salience grew. One prominent candidate for explaining differences in opinion about immigration in 2016 is the rhetoric of Donald J. Trump, whose presidential candidacy was launched with an attack on immigration from Mexico. We analyze content from Trump’s campaign speeches and from Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign speeches to compare the emphasis on immigration themes, finding that Trump talked far more about immigration than Romney did. We also examine media coverage and find a marked increase in mentions of the immigration issue, which should, in theory, lead to more people seeing immigration as an important problem. We analyze “most important problem” questions from American National Election Studies surveys and find that mentions of immigration increased from less than one percent in 2012 to about five percent in 2016. However, we find that the overall distribution of public opinion about immigration changed very little from 2012 to 2016. Multivariate models show that the predictors of opinion about immigration policies were primarily the same in 2016 as in 2012: a combination of perceived economic threat, perceived cultural threat, and ethnic prejudice. In addition, models of presidential vote choice find that immigration issues were statistically significant predictors in 2016 but not in 2012. All of this suggests that Trump’s 2016 candidacy did not persuade so much as it activated. Trump’s rhetoric did not significantly alter American public opinion on immigration. Still, his emphasis on the immigration issue did garner increased media coverage and was attractive to many Republican and conservative voters who already held anti-immigration views.

Why White Americans More Frequently Fail to View the Police Critically

AbstractIt matters how people view the police—and that there is a substantial racial gap in these views. Research has primarily focused on police experiences to explain generally less-positive views among Black Americans. We recommend a subtle but vital shift in focus, seeking instead to explain the remarkably more favorable average views about the police among White Americans. Utilizing comparable data from two 2016 American National Election Studies surveys, we explore the role of contact with the police, politics, and three different dimensions of racial attitudes and views, finding views about the police among White Americans to be shaped in primary ways by concerns about Black Americans. These factors, and racial resentment in particular, explain a significant portion of the average difference in views of the police between Black and White Americans. We discuss the implications of this subtle shift in focus, particularly for work which sets positive views about the police as the goal.

We Are One: The Social Maintenance of Black Democratic Party Loyalty

Despite growing ideological diversity within the group, black Americans have maintained their overwhelmingly unified support for the Democratic Party. We argue that black Democratic partisanship is upheld, in part, through black Americans’ use of social sanctions (both positive and negative) to encourage compliance with a group norm of Democratic Party support. Leveraging the exogenous assignment of racial social context provided by the race of an interviewer in face-to-face American National Election Study survey interviews of black respondents, we demonstrate the racialized social imperative of black Democratic Party identification. We show that black respondents are more likely to identify as Democrats in the presence of other blacks, particularly those respondents whose conservative ideological placement provides a cross-pressuring incentive to otherwise make an alternative partisan choice. Our social explanation of black partisan homogeneity is a significant departure from previous accounts that have focused almost exclusively on attitudinal ascriptions to racial shared fate.

Whose Party is It?: Lame Ducks, Presidential Candidates, and Evaluations of the Party

Presidents and presidential candidates serve as an important source cue for the mass public’s attitudes toward and evaluations of the political parties. Our study evaluates these dynamics during the transition from a lame duck president, Barack Obama, to a new party standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton. Our analysis takes advantage of the fact that the 2014 and 2016 Cooperative Election Study (CES) and the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Study (ANES) surveys asked respondents to evaluate both Obama, Clinton, and the Democratic Party. These data allow us to examine whether the transition from Obama to Clinton changed the primary referent for public attitudes toward the Democratic Party. Our results provide mixed evidence about a change in the relative importance of attitudes toward Clinton and Obama when the former became the nominee, and the latter was a lame duck. While the public’s view of the connection between Obama and Democratic Party’s ideological profile remained constant across time, respondents did update their affective assessments of the party in the face of a new party leader once Clinton was the nominee.

The Political Premium of Television Celebrity

This paper studies the electoral consequences of television stardom through the career of Ronald Reagan. I utilize quasi-experimental variation in television reception to estimate the causal effect of celebrity exposure on political support. I find that Reagan’s tenure as the host of a 1950s entertainment television program translated into support for his candidacy, in terms of votes and political donations, nearly two decades after the show’s first airing. Placebo checks suggest that this impact is not driven by unobserved heterogeneity or omitted variable bias. The effect was especially pronounced in the 1976 Republican primary elections relative to the general presidential elections and partially dissipated in locations where Reagan was a known political entity. Using the American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys, I provide evidence on possible mechanisms. Consistent with rational updating, nonpolitical media increased voters’ assessment of Reagan’s character and leadership, personalizing political considerations in elections featuring him. (JEL D72, L82, Z13)

Attitudes towards globalization barriers and implications for voting: Evidence from Sweden

Using six waves of the Swedish National Election Studies (SNES) survey data, we investigate the determinants of attitudes towards globalization barriers (trade and immigration) and how important these attitudes are in how people vote. In line with the existing results in the literature, we find that more educated and richer voters support freer trade and more immigration. We also find that conservative voters in Sweden are more likely to prefer freer trade but higher immigration barriers. Once various economic and demographic determinants of globalization barrier preferences along with voters’ ideologies on a liberal-conservative spectrum are controlled for in the analysis of voting behavior, trade barrier preferences lose their statistical significance while attitudes towards immigration barriers remain significant. This suggests that immigration attitudes affect voting behavior through channels involving identity-driven factors that are different from the channels through which more traditional electoral issues, such as trade barriers, work. Focusing on the anti-globalization Swedish Democrats, we confirm that voters with a greater preference for barriers to immigration were more likely to switch their votes to this party from the 2014 to the 2018 election.

Redistribution Preferences, Inequality Information, and Partisan Motivated Reasoning in the United States

In an era of rising inequality, the U.S. public’s relatively modest support for redistributive policies has been a puzzle for scholars. Deepening the paradox is recent evidence that presenting information about inequality increases subjects’ support for redistributive policies by only a small amount. What explains inequality information’s limited effects? We extend partisan motivated reasoning scholarship to investigate whether political party identification confounds individuals’ processing of inequality information. Our study considers a much larger number of redistribution preference measures (12) than past scholarship. We offer a second novelty by bringing the dimension of historical time into hypothesis testing. Analyzing high-quality data from four American National Election Studies surveys, we find new evidence that partisanship confounds the interrelationship of inequality information and redistribution preferences. Further, our analyses find the effects of partisanship on redistribution preferences grew in magnitude from 2004 through 2016. We discuss implications for scholarship on information, motivated reasoning, and attitudes towards redistribution.

Protest as One Political Act in Individuals’ Participation Repertoires: Latent Class Analysis and Political Participant Types

This study advances research on the role of protest in individual-level participation repertoires by examining how latent class analysis can be used to identify distinctive types of political participants. This methodological approach requires shifting researchers’ traditional theoretical and analytical focus on protest as a single political act to the ways in which political actors combine protest with other political behaviors. From a theoretical perspective, the study examines the increased salience of research on the causes and consequences of protest in the context of individuals’ broader participation repertoires. From a methodological perspective, an illustrative analysis is conducted using the 2016 American National Election Studies survey to test theoretical expectations about the relationship between protest and civic duty. The study concludes with a discussion of how latent class analysis can be used to advance research on protest as one political act in individuals’ broader repertories of political participation.

The Effect of Children's Gender on Parents’ Attitudes Toward Women

AbstractScholars have found that the gender of children—particularly, having daughters—has a discernible effect on parents’ attitudinal and behavioral support for the empowerment of women. In this article, we explore how the gender of children affects the gender attitudes of parents. Using data from the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES) survey, we estimate the effects of children's gender on parents’ feminist self‐identification, support for more women representatives, and attitudes toward traditional gender roles, both in general and separately for men and women. Surprisingly, we find that sons—and not daughters—have a systematic negative effect on feminist self‐identification and support for electing more women, as well as a positive effect on support for traditional gender roles. The effects of sons on feminist self‐identification and traditional gender roles are observed for both men and women, while the effects of sons on support for more women representatives are limited to women. It appears that having a son decreases support for feminist and egalitarian gender attitudes in both men and women to varying degrees across a variety of dimensions.

Las elecciones presidenciales en EEUU 2012-2016. Un estudio comparativo desde una perspectiva estatal e individual

En este artículo nos preguntamos: ¿Cuál fue la capacidad explicativa de la desigualdad y la pobreza en el ámbito estatal en las elecciones presidenciales de Estados Unido en 2012 y 2016? ¿Cuál fue el balance estatal en las elecciones presidenciales en Estados Unidos? Y exploramos a nivel individual, utilizando la “American National Election Studies Survey”, ¿qué variables nos ayudan a entender el voto en favor de los candidatos presidenciales republicanos en 2012 y 2016? Así, para contestar nuestras preguntas realizamos dos análisis, uno, en el ámbito estatal, y otro, a partir de los votantes, con el fin de explicar los resultados contrastantes de 2012 y 2016.

Attitudes Towards Globalization Barriers and Implications for Voting: Evidence from Sweden

Using six waves of the Swedish National Election Studies (SNES) survey data, we investigate the determinants of attitudes towards globalization barriers (trade and immigration) and how important these attitudes are in how people vote. In line with the existing results in the literature, we find that more educated and richer voters support freer trade and more immigration. We also find that conservative voters in Sweden are more likely to prefer freer trade but higher immigration barriers. Once various economic and demographic determinants of globalization barrier preferences along with voters’ ideologies on a liberal-conservative spectrum are controlled for in the analysis of voting behavior, trade barrier preferences lose their statistical significance while attitudes towards immigration barriers remain significant. This suggests that immigration attitudes affect voting behavior through channels involving identity-driven factors that are different from the channels through which more traditional electoral issues, such as trade barriers, work. Focusing on the anti-globalization Swedish Democrats, we confirm that voters with a greater preference for barriers to immigration were more likely to switch their votes to this party from the 2014 to the 2018 election.

Economic Vulnerability and Anti‐Immigrant Attitudes: Isolated Anomaly or Emerging Trend

ObjectiveDonald Trump's sustained emphasis on the negative impact of immigration policies for personal economic conditions necessitates reevaluating the influence of the latter on the former. We assess the interaction between income and individual economic anxiety on immigration attitudes.MethodsMultivariate analysis of the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Study survey data.ResultsAfter controlling for conventional explanations and standard political covariates, those who share an income bracket with foreign‐born workers and also expressed individual economic anxiety were significantly more likely to express negative attitudes toward immigrants in 2016, but not in 2012.ConclusionThe discrepancy between the results in 2016 and 2012 is partially attributed to the different rhetorical approaches toward immigration policy adopted by Donald Trump and Mitt Romney. Whether the 2016 results represent an isolated anomaly or emerging trend may depend on the rhetorical choices of future presidential candidates.

Testing political knowledge as a mediator of the relationship between news use and affective polarization

ABSTRACT Fueled by news media, affective polarization is on the rise in the United States. This study tests the possibility that people learn to be polarized from news by investigating whether political knowledge mediates the relationship between news use and affective polarization. Analysis of the 2016 American National Election Studies (ANES) survey (N = 4,271) shows that news media use is associated with higher levels of political knowledge, and also that higher levels of political knowledge are associated with increases in affective polarization. We find that those who actively use news media are more likely to have political knowledge, which, in turn, leads them to have more polarized attitudes toward candidates. The findings of the current study are discussed in light of scholarly conversations on affective polarization in American politics.