Samara Klar

The Influence of Competing Identity Primes on Political Preferences

In our increasingly diverse society, most Americans identify with more than one group. These multiple identities often align with conflicting policy choices, such as when a Democratic parent may support increased social services spending from a partisan perspective but may also worry about the increasing national debt as a parent. Given the significance of identity, political elites often work to prime identities that will win over the most supporters. A large literature documents the substantial role such identity priming can play in shaping preferences, but virtually no work considers the reality that identity primes often compete with one another. That is, different groups simultaneously prime different identities that align with their interests. In this article, I explore what makes one identity prime more effective than another. I do so by offering a theory of what types of rhetoric makes for a stronger identity prime (relative to other types of rhetoric). I test my expectations with a unique survey experiment addressing three issues. I find that, in a competitive setting, certain rhetorical techniques dominate and drive the identities people rely on when forming preferences. The results have implications for public opinion and identity in the ever-changing demographic world in which we live.

Women Also Know Stuff: Meta-Level Mentoring to Battle Gender Bias in Political Science

Women know stuff. Yet, all too often, they are underrepresented in political science meetings, syllabi, and editorial boards. To counter the implicit bias that leads to women’s underrepresentation, to ensure that women’s expertise is included and shared, and to improve the visibility of women in political science, in February 2016 we launched the “Women Also Know Stuff” initiative, which features a crowd-sourced website and an active Twitter feed. In this article, we share the origins of our project, the effect we are already having on media utilization of women experts, and plans for how to expand that success within the discipline of political science. We also share our personal reflections on the project.

The Effect of Network Structure on Preference Formation

How does network structure influence opinion? Relying on theories of preference formation and social networks, we randomize a sample of adults into networks that vary in structure. In one (a clustered lattice), individuals’ connections tend to be connected to each other; in another (a random network), individuals’ connections tend not to be connected, instead providing access to different regions of the network. We seed messages that reflect competing sides of policy debates in each network: one underdog viewpoint is seeded less often, while a dominant viewpoint is seeded more often. We track their diffusion and find that the random network increases exposure to underdog views, compared with the clustered lattice. Individuals in the random network subsequently learn more about the policy debates and become more sympathetic toward the underdog perspective. This has implications for how less funded information campaigns can strategically target social networks to maximize exposure and change minds.

Social Desirability Bias in the 2016 Presidential Election

Abstract Partisanship is a stable trait but expressions of partisan preferences can vary according to social context. When particular preferences become socially undesirable, some individuals refrain from expressing them in public, even in relatively anonymous settings such as surveys and polls. In this study, we rely on the psychological trait of self-monitoring to show that Americans who are more likely to adjust their behaviors to comply with social norms (i.e. high self-monitors) were less likely to express support for Donald Trump during the 2016 Presidential Election. In turn, as self-monitoring decreases, we find that the tendency to express support for Trump increases. This study suggests that – at least for some individuals – there may have been a tendency in 2016 to repress expressed support for Donald Trump in order to mask socially undesirable attitudes.

The influence of competing organisational appeals on individual donations

Policy scholars and the public alike are concerned not only with the actions policymakers take in the legislature but also with the money that enables policies to reach the legislative agenda. A significant portion of these funds come from individual donors. We examine how appeals from public policy organisations influence donation behaviour. Existing research studies the effectiveness of appeals in isolation, but few studies consider the competitive environment in which these appeals occur. With nearly 1.5 million nonprofit organisations in the United States, Americans face many competing appeals for their limited funds. We develop a theoretical account of the effects of competing appeals on donation behaviour and test our theory with a large experimental study across two Midwestern states. Our results suggest that negative emotional appeals, rather than increasing total donation behaviour, increase the proportion of donations directed towards the soliciting organisation. Furthermore, two competing appeals cancel out one another.

The Myth of Partisan Compromise

“Bipartisanship is not the opposite of principle. One can be very conservative or very liberal and still have a bipartisan mindset.” – Richard Lugar, Republican Senator, Indiana, concession statement Consider these two facts: (1) nearly 40 percent of Americans identify as political independents; (2) 58 percent of Americans believe that America needs a third party. The conditions seem perfect for a third party to emerge onto the American political scene. At the very least, one might expect that Democrats and Republicans should embrace bipartisanship in hopes of appealing to so many disaffected Americans. Yet in reality, the reverse is happening. Alternatives to the Republican and Democratic parties have declined dramatically over the past century (Tamas and Hindman 2014), as has voter support for third and minor parties (Hirano and Snyder 2007). Meanwhile, Democratic and Republican candidates are increasingly ideologically extreme (Groser and Palfrey 2014) and the American public often appears increasingly partisan, especially in their affect toward members of the opposing party (Iyengar et al. 2012; Mason 2014). How is it possible that an electorate in which nearly a plurality of people claim they are independent exists in this political climate? One of the greatest divides in American politics may well be the chasm between what we say and what we do. Throughout this book, we have shown the degree to which negative perceptions of partisanship influence the way ordinary Americans relate to politics. From self-identifying as independent to withdrawing from political conversation, eschewing outwardly partisan forms of political participation, and avoiding partisan coworkers and neighbors, many Americans are going undercover and deliberately avoiding partisanship. Throughout these chapters, however, we have not addressed the elephant in the room. How is it that Americans are both anti-partisan and politically polarized? In this chapter, we examine whether the people who reject partisanship are distinct from those who are polarized. Although undercover partisans may not actually be “independent” in the political sense of the word, perhaps they are so ashamed of parties that they have begun to seek compromise and hold their representatives accountable to bipartisan values. We explore what undercover partisans want from parties in two ways. First, we take people at their own word and we simply ask people who call themselves “independent” to tell us what they want from politics and from their representatives.