With enough women, majority based decision making rules can help foster communication processes that support women’s authority

Recent years have seen growing calls for the greater representation of women in political bodies and corporate boards. But does greater representation for women lead to more power in decision making? Using data from an empirical study of group interaction around deliberation, J. Baxter Oliphant, Tali Mendelberg, and Christopher F. Karpowitz find that the rules around how decisions are made matter; when decisions are majority-based, and there are enough women to control the decision, then men begin to treat women with more respect. When decisions need to be unanimous, minority men are empowered and do not modify their behavior towards women

America's Complex Relationship With Guns: An In-depth Look at the Atttitudes and Experiences of U.S. Adults

A new Pew Research Center survey attempts to better understand the complex relationship Americans have with guns and how that relationship intersects with their policy views.The survey finds that Americans have broad exposure to guns, whether they personally own one or not. At least two-thirds have lived in a household with a gun at some point in their lives. And roughly seven-in-ten – including 55% of those who have never personally owned a gun – say they have fired a gun at some point. Today, three-in-ten U.S. adults say they own a gun, and an additional 36% say that while they don't own one now, they might be open to owning a gun in the future. A third of adults say they don't currently own a gun and can't see themselves ever doing so.To be sure, experiences with guns aren't always positive: 44% of U.S. adults say they personally know someone who has been shot, either accidentally or intentionally, and about a quarter (23%) say they or someone in their family have been threatened or intimidated by someone using a gun. Half see gun violence as a very big problem in the U.S. today, although gun owners and non-owners offer divergent views on this.Gun owners and non-owners are also deeply divided on several gun policy proposals, but there is agreement on some restrictions, such as preventing those with mental illnesses and those on federal watch lists from buying guns. Among gun owners, there is a diversity of views on gun policy, driven in large part by party affiliation.The nationally representative survey of 3,930 U.S. adults, including 1,269 gun owners, was conducted March 13 to 27 and April 4 to 18, 2017, using the Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel

Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology - 2021

Partisan polarization remains the dominant, seemingly unalterable condition of American politics. Republicans and Democrats agree on very little – and when they do, it often is in the shared belief that they have little in common.Yet the gulf that separates Republicans and Democrats sometimes obscures the divisions and diversity of views that exist within both partisan coalitions – and the fact that many Americans do not fit easily into either one.Republicans are divided on some principles long associated with the GOP: an affinity for businesses and corporations, support for low taxes and opposition to abortion. Democrats face substantial internal differences as well – some that are long-standing, such as on the importance of religion in society, others more recent. For example, while Democrats widely share the goal of combating racial inequality in the United States, they differ on whether systemic change is required to achieve that goal.These intraparty disagreements present multiple challenges for both parties: They complicate the already difficult task of governing in a divided nation. In addition, to succeed politically, the parties must maintain the loyalty of highly politically engaged, more ideological voters, while also attracting support among less engaged voters – many of them younger – with weaker partisan ties.Pew Research Center's new political typology provides a road map to today's fractured political landscape. It segments the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. The study is primarily based on a survey of 10,221 adults conducted July 8-18, 2021; it also draws from several additional interviews with these respondents conducted since January 2020

The Moral Judgment of Political Actors

This dissertation examines how citizens form moral judgments of presidential candidates and how these judgments affect voting. Recent work connecting morality with political behavior over-emphasizes the impact of issues and largely ignores actors. I argue that moral judgments of actors help voters determine which candidate they should support and complements the impact of moral issues. Moral judgments mediate between political predispositions and behavior. Moral traits are important because they are based on moral emotions that have unique elicitors and consequences. Moral emotions emerge when the self is not involved and motivate behavior loyal to the in-group. The first empirical analysis verifies that moral judgments are built on moral emotions. Negative moral judgments of out-party leaders make citizens feel aversion rather than anxiety, and aversion has important implications that motivate support for the more moral candidate. Moral judgments form through an on-line model of information processing. Political predispositions such as party identification and ideology activate moral emotions, shaping moral judgments. These connections with predispositions are typically forgotten, leaving longer-lasting moral judgments that affect voting. A survey experiment shows that negative moral judgments of actors have a larger effect on vote choice than incompetence. Individuals primed to believe that a hypothetical out-party president is immoral are significantly more likely to vote against that president. They are also more likely to support down-ballot candidates who oppose the immoral president and are less open to compromise. Observational evidence from the 1984 to 2012 American National Election Studies and the 2008 National Annenberg Election Study panel support the experimental evidence. Voters who are ambivalent about the candidates' moral character or favor the out-partisan's are significantly less loyal at the ballot box. This effect is often significantly stronger than the effect of judgments of competence and issue attitudes. A conjoint experiment tests which moral judgments matter the most. The findings reveal that partisanship does not overwhelm the impact of moral character traits. Individuals care about moral character broadly when choosing a candidate to support; they do not simply choose the candidate who shares their party identification

Gender inequality in deliberation: Unpacking the black box of interaction

When and why do women gain from increased descriptive representation in deliberating bodies? Using a large randomized experiment, and linking individual-level speech with assessments of speaker authority, we find that decision rules interact with the number of women in the group to shape the conversation dynamics and deliberative authority, an important form of influence. With majority rule and few women, women experience a negative balance of interruptions when speaking, and these women then lose influence in their own eyes and in others'. But when the group is assigned to unanimous rule, or when women are many, women experience a positive balance of interruptions, mitigating the deleterious effect of small numbers. Men do not experience this pattern. We draw implications for a type of representation that we call authoritative representation, and for democratic deliberation. © 2014 American Political Science Association