Wendy M. Rahn

Social Trust and Value Change: The Decline of Social Capital in American Youth, 1976-1995

Given the importance that generalized social trust plays in various theories of American society, recent evidence of its low levels among younger people portends ominous changes in American civic life. Using survey data collectedfrom high school seniors over the last 20 years, this paper examines the origins of social trust among young people and the causes of change in beliefs about trust over time. Such changes could not be accounted for by the explanations for declining trust offered in other accounts of social capital. An alternative explanation, based on the theoretical accounts ofAlexis de Tocqueville and Emile Durkheim, is that materialistic values may be undermining young peoples views about the trustworthiness of others. Both aggregate time series correlations and an individual-level model show that the rapid rise of materialistic value orientations that occurred among American youth in the 1970s and 1980s severely eroded levels of social trust. The paper concludes with some observations about the likely trajectory ofAmerican democracy, given the kinds of trends observed in the youth data.

INDIVIDUAL AND CONTEXTUAL VARIATIONS IN POLITICAL CANDIDATE APPRAISAL

Tn this note we elaborate on the conditions under which on-line and memory-based strategies of political candidate evaluation can be implemented. We suggest that the structure of information . may be an important contextual variable affecting the voters choice of these strategies. In addition, we propose that citizens with less political sophistication are particularly sensitive to structural differences in the political information environment. We use an experimental design that manipulates the information-processing context to test these ideas. Our results suggest that the context in which information is presented plays a critical role in moderating the influence of individual differences in political sophistication.

Rise of the Trumpenvolk

Despite the wide application of the label “populist” in the 2016 election cycle, there has been little systematic evidence that this election is distinctive in its populist appeal. Looking at historical trends, contemporary rhetoric, and public opinion data, we find that populism is an appropriate descriptor of the 2016 election and that Donald Trump stands out in particular as the populist par excellence. Historical data reveal a large “representation gap” that typically accompanies populist candidates. Content analysis of campaign speeches shows that Trump, more so than any other candidate, employs a rhetoric that is distinctive in its simplicity, anti-elitism, and collectivism. Original survey data show that Trump’s supporters are distinctive in their unique combination of anti-expertise, anti-elitism, and pronationalist sentiments. Together, these findings highlight the distinctiveness of populism as a mechanism of political mobilization and the unusual character of the 2016 race.

Geographies of Trust

Generalized social trust is an important component of social capital and has been linked to a variety of individual- and community-level outcomes, including low crime rates, effective government, and healthy and happy citizens. Drawing on a multicommunity survey conducted in several American towns and cities in 2002, the authors examine the individual and contextual origins of general social trust using the techniques of Hierarchical Linear Modeling. Based on prevailing theoretical understandings of social trust, the authors posit a comprehensive model to account for the contextual variation that remains after controlling for individual-level variables. Two community-level variables, voter turnout and commute times, emerge as important contextual predictors of social trust. The authors explore community attachment as a potential mediator of these effects, finding that it partially mediates the impact of commuting but not voter turnout, results consistent with their distinction between “experiential” and “cultural” theories of social trust formation.

Activation and application of political party stereotypes: The role of television

Despite tremendous changes in the American political system, the two major political parties continue to play an important role in mass political behavior. In this article we investigate how the medium of information presentation affects the likelihood that party images are activated and subsequently applied to process political candidate information. Conceptualizing party images as stereotypes, we use a two‐stage experimental design to test several hypotheses about stereotype processing under different information conditions. We find that television enhances the activation of party stereotypes for the more sophisticated, but inhibits activation for the less sophisticated. Once activated, however, partisan stereotypes are used in an information‐economizing way by both sophisticated and less sophisticated individuals to evaluate political candidates. However, television interferes with the ability of the less sophisticated to use policy information.

Thinking about Political Psychology: The Contours of Political Psychology: Situating Research on Political Information Processing

The field of political psychology has a long history and a broad purview. It includes – has always included – a wide diversity of theories, approaches, quantitative and qualitative research methods, and verdicts. This is as true today as it has been true historically. There are, therefore, diverse issues and problems that have received long-standing attention in this interdisciplinary field. Yet, despite these many concerns, it is possible to identify some ebb and flow in the extent to which particular paradigms have characterized different research eras in political psychology. The purpose of this chapter is threefold. First, we will attempt to provide the reader with a very broad (and hence somewhat cursory) overview of the breadth of concerns that have characterized the modern era of research in political psychology. Second, we will identify what we believe are some central trends in the evolution of “defining work” in this subfield. And, third and most important in the current context, we will locate the research reported in this volume within the diversity and central tendencies of broader issues in political psychology. The work reported in this volume is limited in scope, and we want to identify these limitations explicitly. At the same time, we hope to make it clear that by accepting a narrow purview and bringing to bear the considerable intellectual and scholarly energies of some of the best scholars in the field, considerable payoff in depth of knowledge is possible.

The Bodies Politic: Chronic Health Conditions and Voter Turnout in the 2008 Election

Health policy researchers often evaluate the social and economic consequences of chronic illness, but rarely have they considered the implications of chronic illness on one important form of political participation: voting. However, if chronic illnesses--already unequally distributed in society--are associated with differential rates of voter turnout, then these inequalities in democratic representation could, in turn, produce further health inequity. In this study, we use data from eight states from the 2009 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey to examine the associations between having diagnoses of five chronic conditions and turnout in the 2008 US presidential election. After adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics and some health-related confounding factors, we find that individuals with cancer diagnoses are more likely to vote, while those with heart disease diagnoses are less likely to vote. These associations differ by race and educational status; notably, African Americans and those with lower education with cancer are even more likely to turn out to vote than whites and those with more education with cancer. We discuss the implications of our findings in the context of health social movements and the role of health organizations in shaping political processes, important directions for the study of health politics.