Christopher Weber

Traits versus Issues: How Female Candidates Shape Coverage of Senate and Gubernatorial Races

As female candidates may face greater challenges in establishing their “qualifications” for office, coverage of their personal traits may be pernicious, because it tends to de-emphasize substantive qualifications. This study focuses on relative amounts of trait and issue coverage of contests with and without women candidates. We find that races with female candidates yield more coverage of traits than male versus male contests and races with female candidates are less likely to generate issue coverage than trait coverage. Candidate gender and office interact; female gubernatorial candidates are most likely to garner trait coverage and least likely to engender issue coverage.

Emotions, Campaigns, and Political Participation

There has been a scarcity of work examining the political consequences of discrete emotions. This article examines the political effects of several emotions—anger, sadness, fear, and enthusiasm. Emotional ads should influence whether voters become politically active. To test this, two experiments were administered. The first examines emotional responses to campaign messages; the second tests whether emotions influence political participation. The results indicate anger is mobilizing, by increasing participatory intentions and factors related to participate. This result is then replicated using ad-tracking data. The findings indicate that emotions are an important factor in studying campaign effects.

Courting christians: How political candidates prime religious considerations in campaign ads

Religion occupies a central role in American politics. From being an impetus behind numerous political movements, to shaping how political candidates are considered, scholars and pundits alike have emphasized the role of religion for political behavior and attitudes. Yet, there has been a scarcity of empirical work examining the consequences of religious appeals in campaigns. Drawing on recent work that contends views about religious traditionalism have replaced many interdenominational differences in vote choice and issue attitudes, we argue that religious cues activate religious traditionalism, which subsequently influences how political candidates are considered. In a priming experiment administered to a representative cross-section of adults, we examine whether religious priming occurs. By manipulating the participant’s information environment, we also examine whether there are limits to priming. We find strong evidence religious traditionalism is activated when religious cues are embedded in campaign ads, but we find priming effects are reduced when participants are provided information about the candidate. While religious cues have the potential to shape how candidates are evaluated, we argue the consequences of religious cues are dampened among those who learn more about political issues and candidates.

The relationship between atypical semantic activation and odd speech in schizotypy across emotionally evocative conditions.

INTRODUCTION Odd speech is prevalent in individuals with schizotypy compared to controls and this odd speech is particularly pronounced under stress-induced conditions. Despite a number of research studies that have examined odd speech, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain unclear. There is reason to suspect that the increase in odd speech observed in schizotypy may reflect atypical semantic activation patterns, defined in terms of increased activation of weakly associated words within the semantic network. METHODS In this study, we compared atypical semantic activation in individuals with a broad set of cognitive-perceptual, interpersonal and disorganization schizotypal traits (n=83) and controls (n=23). Odd speech was measured using a behavior-based analysis of natural speech procured from a laboratory speech-task involving separate experimentally manipulated stressful, pleasant, and neutral conditions. RESULTS The schizotypy and control groups did not differ in semantic activation, but atypical semantic activation was more pronounced in individuals with disorganization traits and attenuated in those with interpersonal traits. Interestingly, the relationship between semantic activation and odd speech was observed for the stressful, but not pleasant or neutral conditions in the schizotypy group. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest that individuals with schizotypy may be able to inhibit atypical associations in nonstressful situations. However, their ability to prevent atypical semantic activation from affecting speech may be disrupted under stress, thus resulting in more odd speech. This study also highlights the dramatic differences in semantic activation across the various manifestations of schizotypy.

Socially Mediated Internet Surveys: Recruiting Participants for Online Experiments

The Socially Mediated Internet Survey (SMIS) method is a cost-effective technique used to obtain web-based, adult samples for experimental research in political science. SMIS engages central figures in online social networks to help recruit participants among visitors to these websites, yielding sizable samples for experimental research. We present data from six samples collected using the SMIS method and compare them to those gathered by other sampling approaches such as Amazons Mechanical Turk. While not representative of the general adult population, our SMIS samples are significantly more diverse than undergraduate convenience samples, not only demographically but also politically. We discuss the applicability of the method to experimental research and its usefulness for obtaining samples of special, politically relevant subpopulations such as political sophisticates and activists. We argue that the diversity of SMIS samples, along with the ability to capture highly engaged citizens, can circumvent questions about the artificiality of political behavior experiments entirely based on student samples and help to document sources of heterogeneous experimental treatment effects.

First Steps Toward a Dual-Process Accessibility Model of Political Beliefs, Attitudes, and Behavior

With the advent of the political behavior movement in political science in the 1950s, in particular with the publication of The American Voter in 1960, beliefs, feelings, and behavioral dispositions were brought to center stage in the prediction and explanation of political behavior. In line with an implicit assumption of human rationality, the social sciences commonly presumed that thoughts, feelings, and behavioral intentions coming to mind consciously determine the lion’s share of behavior. Congruent with this assumption of conscious considerations arbitrating the expression of beliefs and emotions, political scientists commonly ask people to voice their beliefs, report their likes and dislikes, recount feelings and past behaviors, and foretell their intended actions. Because of this reliance on introspection, much of what we know about public opinion and electoral behavior and how we model the expression of political attitudes, beliefs, and behavioral dispositions is based almost exclusively on what respondents say when asked for their present, past, or future beliefs, intentions, and behavior.

The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior, edited by W. Russell Neuman, George E. Marcus, Ann M. Crigler, and Michael Mackuen

much rhetoric about its ability to bring new voices into politics and to offer new means for ordinary people to become agents of political and social changes. Lately, scholars have grown more pessimistic about the Internet’s ability to up-end business as usual. Matthew Hindman (2008), for example, has found that a handful of political blogs attract the majority of traffic in the blogosphere, and those bloggers possess higher levels of education than the general public. While this book begins by celebrating the grass-roots efforts of bloggers, the last chapter of the book, which attempts to form some theories about the blogosphere, similarly points out the barriers to entry for new bloggers. Netroots Rising examines a small window of time when a few young guys with basic computer skills stumbled upon a new way to communicate and organize. The Internet is no longer the home of amateurs, and the Netroots have not yet settled upon a new cause or a new candidate. Netroots Rising provides an account not only of the rise of the Netroots, but, perhaps, also their fall.