US Presidential Election Research Articles

Celebrating Wins, Lamenting Losses in the Aftermath of Presidential Elections

Abstract: In this paper, we examine media use in the aftermath of the 2004, 2012, and 2020 presidential elections in the United States. Specifically, we test whether members of the party who won the election bask in reflected glory (BIRG; i.e., seek out pro-attitudinal media after preferred candidate wins) or whether members of the losing party cut off reflected failure (CORF; i.e., cut off ties with their party after a loss by decreasing their use of pro-attitudinal media). We also examine whether individuals whose candidate lost use pro-attitudinal media to repair their identity, or engage in information utility behaviors by seeking out counter-attitudinal information to learn about the opposing party following their win. Using two waves of survey data from the 2004, 2012, and 2020 US presidential elections, we find support for the BIRGing hypothesis. However, we did not find support for any of the hypotheses associated with losing the elections.

Seeing Red: Menstrual Art and Political Portraiture in the Trump Era

Summary In the middle of the 2015 United States presidential election race, artist Sarah Levy made a portrait of candidate Donald Trump with her menstrual blood. The work referenced Trump’s comments about menstruation during a conversation with journalist Meghan Kelly, in which he said that she had ‘blood coming out of her wherever’. While much discussed in the media, the portrait has not received the critical art historical attention it deserves. This paper considers the artistic, cultural, political and aesthetic inspiration of the creation of the menstrual artwork ‘Whatever’ (Bloody Trump), the techniques and materiality of the portrait, and its subsequent reception in public, art institutional and media discourse. Drawing on interviews with the artist and critical visual analysis in the tradition of feminist art history, this paper argues that ‘Whatever’ (Bloody Trump) should be understood as an important artwork that aesthetically interprets and recalls the white supremacist politics and strong menstrual taboos of the Trump era.

Legitimate questions: Public perceptions of the legitimacy of US presidential election outcomes

Numerous polls show most Republicans view the 2020 election as illegitimate, but we know relatively little about legitimacy perceptions among losing candidates’ supporters in past elections. I analyze 76 polls asking about the legitimacy of the 2000, 2016, and 2020 presidential elections. Even before 2020, the losing candidate’s supporters are much less likely to view the outcome as legitimate. Losers are about 60 percentage points less likely to accept the election in 2000, about 40 points less likely in 2016, and about 70 points less likely in 2020. Perceptions of legitimacy are typically higher than confidence in election results, and many voters express doubts about the vote count while still accepting the legitimacy of the result.

In or out? Citizenship outcomes of working sexual and gender minority people of Canada

AbstractDespite the greater visibility of sexual and gender minorities, due to data limitations, the quantitative literature on their citizenship outcomes is very limited. Using a large original survey of Canadian sexual and gender minorities and the Canadian General Social Survey, this article first examines the extent of political inclusion of sexual and gender minorities, as measured by sense of belonging to Canada and the province of residence, likelihood of voting, and confidence in the police and the justice system. Sexual and gender minorities are generally found to have a markedly weaker sense of belonging to Canada and confidence in its institutions. Next, these patterns are re‐examined accounting for the degree of outness. The results indicate considerable discrepancies across sexual and gender minorities in how outness affects their citizenship outcomes. In particular, it seems that the sociopolitical profile of these groups plays an important mediating role in the effects of outness on their citizenship outcomes.Related ArticlesBurnett, Craig M., and Aaron S. King. 2015. “The Personal Politics of Same‐Sex Marriage.” Politics & Policy 43(4): 586–610. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12126.Lewis, Gregory B., Marc A. Rogers, and Kenneth Sherrill. 2011. “Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Voters in the 2000 US Presidential Election.” Politics & Policy 39(5): 655–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2011.00315.x.Winburn, Jonathan, and Amanda Winburn. 2020. “The Role of Political Ideology in Public Opinion toward Enumerated Antibullying Policies in Public Schools.” Politics & Policy 48(3): 442–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12355.

Online news platforms still matter: generational news consumption patterns during the 2020 presidential election

Abstract Purpose Gen Z or younger news audiences are believed to contribute to declining news consumption as a result of decreased news interest and reduced trust, particularly in political news. It can have adverse consequences for democratic processes. This study offers a more nuanced perspective by qualifying the role of context, and generational differences and similarities in online political news consumption patterns before and after the 2020 US presidential election, which witnessed a series of unprecedented events in the country’s history. Design/methodology/approach To investigate these patterns, I use US aggregated website visitation data from Comscore in a quasi-experimental interrupted time series design, leveraging the 2020 election as a natural experimental condition. Findings While Gen Z are indeed consuming considerably less news, contrary to assumptions, there was significantly increased engagement with news websites following the election. Additionally, media audiences across generations are likely to reduce social media use during such events. Implications Major political events can significantly influence media use patterns such as the extent of news consumption in general and political news in particular, something not often considered in media effects-oriented research. There is also an urgent need to review and reassess our definitions of news, news sources, and its audience. Originality/value By using observational data in a quasi-experimental design, this study offers a more precise and refined perspective of generational patterns of online political news consumption in the context of a major political event that both corroborates as well as challenges some our existing notions of media use.

You are lying! How misinformation accusations spread on Twitter

PurposeMisinformation is notoriously difficult to combat. Although social media firms have focused on combating the publication of misinformation, misinformation accusations, an important by-product of the spread of misinformation, have been neglected. The authors offer insights into factors contributing to the spread of misinformation accusations on social media platforms.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use a corpus of 234,556 tweets about the 2020 US presidential election (Study 1) and 99,032 tweets about the 2022 US midterm elections (Study 2) to show how the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by locomotion orientation.FindingsThe study findings indicate that the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by writers' lower locomotion orientation, which is amplified among liberal tweet writers.Research limitations/implicationsPractitioners and policymakers can use the study findings to track and reduce the spread of misinformation accusations by developing algorithms to analyze the language of posts. A limitation of this research is that it focuses on political misinformation accusations. Future research in different contexts, such as vaccines, would be pertinent.Practical implicationsThe authors show how social media firms can identify messages containing misinformation accusations with the potential to become viral by considering the tweet writer's locomotion language and geographical data.Social implicationsEarly identification of messages containing misinformation accusations can help to improve the quality of the political conversation and electoral decision-making.Originality/valueStrategies used by social media platforms to identify misinformation lack scale and perform poorly, making it important for social media platforms to manage misinformation accusations in an effort to retain trust. The authors identify linguistic and geographical factors that drive misinformation accusation retweets.

COVID‐19‐related threat perceptions, political identity, and voting in the 2020 presidential election

AbstractPerceptions of the COVID‐19 virus varied drastically in the United States, with many people highly concerned by health‐related consequences (realistic threats) and many others concerned by sociocultural implications (symbolic threats). Across three studies, we tested whether differing realistic and symbolic COVID‐19 related threat perceptions varied along gender and political identity near the 2020 US Presidential Election. In all three studies, we found that realistic COVID‐19 related threat perceptions were positively associated with a liberal political identity; this pattern did not vary by gender. In Studies 1 and 3, symbolic COVID‐19 related threat perceptions were positively associated with a conservative political identity and also did not vary by gender. In Study 2, however, the association between symbolic threat and political identity did vary by gender. Symbolic COVID‐19 related threat perceptions were positively associated with a conservative identity for men but not women; for women, threat and political identity were unrelated.

Negativity bias in the spread of voter fraud conspiracy theory tweets during the 2020 US election

During the 2020 US presidential election, conspiracy theories about large-scale voter fraud were widely circulated on social media platforms. Given their scale, persistence, and impact, it is critically important to understand the mechanisms that caused these theories to spread. The aim of this preregistered study was to investigate whether retweet frequencies among proponents of voter fraud conspiracy theories on Twitter during the 2020 US election are consistent with frequency bias and/or content bias. To do this, we conducted generative inference using an agent-based model of cultural transmission on Twitter and the VoterFraud2020 dataset. The results show that the observed retweet distribution is consistent with a strong content bias causing users to preferentially retweet tweets with negative emotional valence. Frequency information appears to be largely irrelevant to future retweet count. Follower count strongly predicts retweet count in a simpler linear model but does not appear to drive the overall retweet distribution after temporal dynamics are accounted for. Future studies could apply our methodology in a comparative framework to assess whether content bias for emotional valence in conspiracy theory messages differs from other forms of information on social media.

Chinese Foreign Real Estate Investment and Local Voting in US Presidential Elections

Abstract Despite the increasing globalization of housing markets, little is known about its political implications. This study investigates whether rising Chinese investments in US homes influenced local voting in recent US presidential elections. Building on pocketbook/sociotropic voting and nativism theories, I develop hypotheses on the electoral consequences of foreign real estate investment through greater home demand and equity, improved local economies, and changing neighborhoods. Using difference-in-differences designs that combine a unique shock to Chinese capital outflows in 2013 with county-level measures of local attractiveness to Chinese investments, I find that greater exposure reduced Democratic vote shares in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Furthermore, an initially larger white population strengthened this effect, while a larger college-educated population weakened it. In contrast, local equity gains, housing competition, or economic strength did not systematically influence the effect. Together, the results appear more consistent with the pro-conservative effects of nativism.

Office Obligation as Civil Virtue: The Crisis of American Democracy, November 3, 2020–January 6, 2021, and After

This essay develops a new theoretical and empirical understanding of the contemporary crisis of American democracy. Between November 3, 2020, and January 7, 2021, President Donald Trump battled to overturn the results of the American presidential election, launching myriad lawsuits and pressuring hundreds of electoral officials. Confronting this antidemocratic assault was a resilient civil sphere that sustained “office,” an institution that, in a democratic society, inspires faith in the Constitution and loyalty to “we the people.” After investigating how this civil institution empowered electoral and legal officials to fight off Trumpian pressures, I focus on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and US Vice President Mike Pence, examining how they emerged as widely admired icons of civil courage. After Trump’s defeat, the televised hearings of the January 6th Commission created a “civic ritual” in the midst of which Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney became another icon, symbolizing the renewal of a “civil conservatism.” A new, if still precarious, vital center emerged, allowing Democratic prosecutors finally to launch criminal proceedings against Trump. Yet, the Republican Party remains unreconstructed and, for this reason, the future of American democracy is still in doubt.

Biden Hears a WHO

The World Health Organization (WHO), the body charged with implementing global pandemic response, figured heavily in the Republican and Democratic campaigns of the 2020 US presidential election. The contrast was stark: Donald Trump drew on and ramped up dissatisfaction with the United Nations system in general and the WHO in particular, culminating in his decision to pull the US out of the WHO in the middle of the pandemic, while Joe Biden rescinded the decision to leave the WHO the day after assuming the presidency. Despite this difference, neither party heeded renewed calls during COVID to put health justice and primary healthcare at the heart of global health policy. Both parties continued to prefer private philanthropic sources of funding for global vaccine initiatives, and both sought economic returns on vaccine development, potentially missing a rare opportunity to incorporate global health justice into US global health diplomacy.

RUN-AS: a novel approach to annotate news reliability for disinformation detection

The development of the internet and digital technologies has inadvertently facilitated the huge disinformation problem that faces society nowadays. This phenomenon impacts ideologies, politics and public health. The 2016 US presidential elections, the Brexit referendum, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war have been ideal scenarios for the spreading of fake news and hoaxes, due to the massive dissemination of information. Assuming that fake news mixes reliable and unreliable information, we propose RUN-AS (Reliable and Unreliable Annotation Scheme), a fine-grained annotation scheme that enables the labelling of the structural parts and essential content elements of a news item and their classification into Reliable and Unreliable. This annotation proposal aims to detect disinformation patterns in text and to classify the global reliability of news. To this end, a dataset in Spanish was built and manually annotated with RUN-AS and several experiments using this dataset were conducted to validate the annotation scheme by using Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms. The experiments evidence the validity of the annotation scheme proposed, obtaining the best F1m\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\ extbf F_\ extbf 1\ extbf m$$\\end{document}, 0.948, with the Decision Tree algorithm.

Democracy Intercepted.

Did platform feeds sow the seeds of deep divisions during the 2020 US presidential election?

Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing

Many critics raise concerns about the prevalence of ‘echo chambers’ on social media and their potential role in increasing political polarization. However, the lack of available data and the challenges of conducting large-scale field experiments have made it difficult to assess the scope of the problem1,2. Here we present data from 2020 for the entire population of active adult Facebook users in the USA showing that content from ‘like-minded’ sources constitutes the majority of what people see on the platform, although political information and news represent only a small fraction of these exposures. To evaluate a potential response to concerns about the effects of echo chambers, we conducted a multi-wave field experiment on Facebook among 23,377 users for whom we reduced exposure to content from like-minded sources during the 2020 US presidential election by about one-third. We found that the intervention increased their exposure to content from cross-cutting sources and decreased exposure to uncivil language, but had no measurable effects on eight preregistered attitudinal measures such as affective polarization, ideological extremity, candidate evaluations and belief in false claims. These precisely estimated results suggest that although exposure to content from like-minded sources on social media is common, reducing its prevalence during the 2020 US presidential election did not correspondingly reduce polarization in beliefs or attitudes.

4Disability Studies

Abstract This review of disability studies literature published in 2022 examines the field’s current investment in points of departure from ableist and neurotypical access to communication, work, and care. Such topics have been central to practices and theoretical concepts within disability justice movements, the neurodiversity movement, and the space of disability studies scholarship for at least the past fifteen years. While the literature surveyed in this review builds on that corpus, it is also imbued, whether explicitly or implicitly, with the continuing effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the rhetorical impacts of the 2020 US presidential election and the responses or lack thereof to the longstanding accessibility needs of disabled and neurodivergent populations illuminated through global lockdowns. The review considers Akemi Nishida’s Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency and Desire, Joshua St. Pierre’s Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication, and the spring 2022 special issue on ‘Sex Work and Disability’ from Disability Studies Quarterly.

The Impact of Islamophobia on Society, Attitudes, Policies and The Youths

Is Islamophobia a new marvel?. Are Islam and the Judeo-Christian West still hateful of and hostile toward each other? What has fueled the sudden rhetoric of Islamophobia in the United States of America and Europe?. After the attack of Twin Towers 9/11, Islam was being viewed as a conservative, barbaric and intolerant perspective of life. Muslim was posited as blood thirsty savages under the banner of a monolithic religion.The study aims to examine the impact of Islamophobia on society, attitudes, policies and the youths. Descriptive method with qualitative approach was used in the study. The 2016 Presidential elections of America were one of the most acrimonious and confrontational campaigns in the history of America. Extraordinary political rhetoric, outbursts in distasteful discriminatory tones, and anti-Muslim invectives blemished the campaign of United States (US) Presidential Elections of 2016. To endorse his political agenda, Donald J. Trump specifically focused upon Muslims as a grave issue, and likely toyed with the public pulses, which resulted in an unpredictable election result. Mirroring the perceived reality, media as an invention of information shapes public opinion. Media reports after 9/11 specifically underrepresented Muslim views and negatively portrayed Islamic culture. Islam was painted as a religion of discrimination, radicalization and regression by the Western media. With the advent of digital media, providing a carte blanche deserted the situation further. The rhetoric of Islamophobia dispersed hatred speech and acts of defamation on social media websites backed by the freedom of speech narrative.

Threat, voting and candidate support. The impact of mortality salience

IntroductionHow does threat motivate political choices? An extensive literature has noted the importance of threat in influencing political behavior. A growing literature in political psychology has used the concept of “mortality salience” to examine the role of existential threat in political decisions. Scholars have argued that inducing mortality salience by asking individuals to think about their own death should result in either reinforcement of their existing political worldview, a shift to a more politically conservative view, or support for a “status quo” option more generally.MethodsWe performed two survey experiments (N = 484 and 1514) manipulating mortality salience and candidate features (Exp. 2). Experiment 1 was performed one week before the 2016 US presidential election and utilized the varying features of the candidates. Experiment 2 manipulated features such as experience level (representing the status quo or change) and partisanship.ResultsWe find that mortality salience led to an increased likelihood of voting for Hillary Clinton, particularly for moderate and independent respondents. We also find that independent participants preferred the status quo candidate under mortality salience.DiscussionWe interpret the findings in both studies as supporting a connection between existential threat and preference for the status quo in psychological terms, at least for less partisan voters, rather than a conservative shift in ideological terms or a tendency to reinforce existing views.

Return to normality? Commentary on Joe Biden, Donald Trump and the 2020 US presidential election in China Daily

This paper examines the critical commentary on Joe Biden, Donald Trump and the 2020 United States presidential election in China’s English-language newspaper China Daily. A thematic analysis was conducted of all the relevant opinion and editorial pieces (op-eds) published in China Daily two months before and after the release of the US presidential election results. Thematic analysis showed that China Daily was highly critical of Trump, especially for politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic and exercising restrictions on China. China Daily’s attitudes towards Biden were more varied, with appraisal of Biden’s cabinet selections and suggestions for the Biden administration’s priorities. The newspaper constructed a Biden/Trump dichotomy that ultimately serves to strengthen the narrative of China as a reliable country in contrast with the hypocritical United States. China Daily situated the commentary on the 2020 US election into the discussion of political stability, the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate change crisis, and frequently used strategies of othering the US and victimizing China to present China as a responsible alternative world power pursuing global cooperation and harmony.

Computational Communication Methods for Examining Problematic News-Sharing Practices on Facebook at Scale

Social media, in general, and Facebook in particular, have been clearly identified as important platforms for the dissemination of mis- and disinformation and related problematic content. However, the patterns and processes of such dissemination are still not sufficiently understood. We detail a novel computational methodology that focusses on the identification of high-profile vectors of “fake news” and other problematic information in public Facebook spaces. The method enables examination of networks of content sharing that emerge between public pages and groups, and external sources, and the study of longitudinal dynamics of these networks as interests and allegiances shift and new developments (such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the US presidential elections) drive the emergence or decline of dominant themes. Through a case study of content captured between 2016 and 2021, we demonstrate how this methodology allows the development of a new and more comprehensive picture of the overall impact of “fake news,” in all its forms, on contemporary societies.

Comparing the #StopTheSteal Movement across Multiple Platforms: Differentiating Discourse on Facebook, Twitter, and Parler

Given that political groups are dispersed across platforms, resulting in different discourses, there is a need for more studies comparing communication across platforms. In this study, we compared posts about #StopTheSteal from three social media platforms after the 2020 US Presidential election and preceding the January 6 Capitol Riot. To do so, we utilized Snow and Benford’s typology of social movement frames—diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames—in the context of far-right movements and an additional frame device: violence cues. This study focused on the following three social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and Parler. We built three corpora of social media data: 26,093 Facebook posts, 248,643 tweets, and 400,600 Parler posts. Using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) classifiers, dictionary methods, and qualitative text analysis, we find that the use of these frames varies by platform, with users on the alt-tech platform Parler using violence cues such as “smash” and “combat,” suggesting a greater call to action relative to the mainstream platforms.