David P. Redlawsk

Donald Trump, contempt, and the 2016 GOP Iowa Caucuses

ABSTRACT Theories of discrete emotions distinguish contempt from other negative emotions, and recent evidence shows that contempt toward candidates played a major role in two US Senate races in 2014. Contempt felt by respondents was the most significant emotion predicting voting against three of the four major party candidates, and had effects independent of other emotions, such as anger, anxiety, and hope. In the present paper, the 2016 Republican Iowa Caucus provides the opportunity to examine contempt in a different context: an intra-party primary campaign, where candidates share the important characteristic of party affiliation. We find that while voters perceived all leading GOP candidates as expressing at least some contempt, Donald Trump was seen as expressing the most contempt by far. Voters also felt contempt for at least some candidates of their own party. When they did so, it predicts significantly lowered probabilities of voting for Cruz, Trump, and Rubio, and increased probabilities of voting for one or more of their opponents. Implications of these findings for theory and research on the role of contempt and other specific emotions in voting behavior are discussed.

Donald Trump and right-wing populists in comparative perspective

ABSTRACT We compare sources of Donald Trump’s appeal in the 2016 US presidential campaign to the appeal of right-populists from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. We compare the appeal of right-populist to center-right candidates in each case (as measured with feeling thermometers) and test hypotheses about how the appeal of right-populists differs from that of center-right candidates. Standard predictors of affect toward right-of-center candidates were generally less relevant as a basis of affect toward right-populist candidates. This comparative perspective demonstrates that Trump’s appeal was based on racial resentment, anti-immigration sentiments and anxiety. Affect toward Trump and other right-populists from these Anglo-democracies fits patterns previously observed in Europe, a pattern that appears to be world-wide.

Bringing the Heat Home: Television Spots about Local Impacts Reduce Global Warming Denialism

ABSTRACT Efforts to educate the general public about global warming and the potential policy solutions that could mitigate its effects have relied on the diffusion of facts. But, cognitive scientists have documented that psychologically distant events like global warming elicit less concern and motivation to act relative to immediate, proximal and certain events. This paper documents a quasi-experiment that tested the effect on attitudes of a television campaign that emphasized the temporally, geographically and socially proximal impacts of global warming on the ecosystems and business activity of a historically conservative area of the United States. The campaign aired on one cable provider. Subscribers of that and of competing providers in the same zip-codes were polled after the campaign. Respondents exposed to the campaign were more likely to believe that global warming is happening, to accept the scientific consensus, to be more concerned about impacts and more supportive of policy solutions.

How Voters Decide: HOW VOTERS DECIDE

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What Voters Do – A First Cut

We have two goals for this chapter. First and foremost, we want to describe, in broad outlines, what voters in our mock election campaigns actually did. Now, our “broad outlines” may seem like the minutest details to many students of politics, who typically are primarily concerned with which candidate – or even which partys candidate – won the election. But remember that our purpose is to get inside the heads of ordinary citizens while they are making their vote decisions. To accomplish this goal, we must dig much deeper than simply observing the vote choice and trying to explain it from preelection political attitudes and values. Second, we must describe the actual measures and operationalizations of the information processing and search variables described at a more conceptual level in Chapter 2, which provide the windows for looking (if not actually getting) inside the heads of our voters. It is precisely these data that no previous students of the vote decision have had, and because they are unique to our study, we must carefully describe how the crucial variables are constructed. Because most of the measures we rely upon will be unfamiliar to most of our readers, we must spend sufficient time describing them. These measures are so central to our undertaking that this discussion cannot be relegated to appendices. Thus, a full understanding of what is to follow requires the reader to work through this chapter carefully.

Studying Voting as a Process

Presidential campaigns are inherently dynamic events that occur over a certain period of time. They have a defined beginning, around the time candidates throw their hats into the ring, along with a clear ending – Election Day. Throughout the campaign season, citizens are inundated with information about the candidates, whether they wish to pay attention to politics or not. One would have to read no newspapers or magazines, watch no television and listen to no radio, and have no contact with other people in order to avoid acquiring at least a little information about the candidates running for president. The amount of information available during a campaign varies, however, depending on the campaign cycle itself. During a contested primary season, for example, significant amounts of information are readily available, at least in those states holding contested primaries. On the other hand, once a candidate has locked up the nomination, the amount of information about the campaign may drop temporarily, only to be revived during the parties conventions. Similarly, both the amount of information and the type of information available vary. Before this series of experiments began, we examined a selection of newspapers during the 1988 presidential election season and found evidence that issue-oriented information becomes much more readily available as campaigns progress, while candidate background information (such as family, education, prior jobs, etc.) predominates early in the primaries and then again early in the general election season (Lau, 1992).

How Voters Decide: Overview of Experimental Procedures

In this appendix we provide many of the nuts and bolts details of different experiments that we have conducted using our new dynamic process-tracing methodology and the presidential campaign simulation created to go with it. We begin with a description of the subjects who participated in the experiments and the methods by which they were recruited. We then discuss the general procedures that were followed in actually running the experiments. We conclude with a little more detail on the eight mock candidates who “ran” in our mock campaigns. SUBJECTS As mentioned briefly in Chapter 3, our requirements for participation in our experiments were only two: (1) Subjects had to be eligible to register and vote in U.S. elections (i.e., they had to be U.S. citizens at least 18 years of age), and (2) subjects could not be currently enrolled in a college or university. In practice, the studies also required subjects to be literate, as much of the experimental material was presented in written form. Our subject recruitment procedure differed between the first three experiments, when we had funding to pay subjects, and the last, when we did not. For the first three experiments, we could pay each subject

Citizens and Politics: An Experimental Study of Information Search, Memory, and Decision Making During a Political Campaign

20 for participating – which, as will be detailed later, lasted about two hours – and some subjects were obtained by advertisements in local newspapers or community bulletin boards.