Why Trump? he is the ultimate salesman, and the ultimate superman with a super will

Donald Trump’s presidential election victory earlier this month stunned much of the media and political science community. But how could he have won despite his chances being written off by so many? To explore the answer to this question, David P. Redlawsk takes us back in time to the Iowa Caucus of August last year, and describes a rally which began to open his eyes to why Trump has had such an appeal to so many voters

The Effect of Biased Communications On Both Trusting and Suspicious Voters

In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the candidate. This behavior appears to run counter to rational models of decision making, and it is sometimes interpreted as evidence of non-rational "motivated reasoning". We consider scenarios in which this effect arises in a model of rational decision making which includes the possibility of deceptive information. In particular, we will consider a model in which there are two classes of voters, which we will call trusting voters and suspicious voters, and two types of information sources, which we will call unbiased sources and biased sources. In our model, new data about a candidate can be efficiently incorporated by a trusting voter, and anomalous updates are impossible; however, anomalous updates can be made by suspicious voters, if the information source mistakenly plans for an audience of trusting voters, and if the partisan goals of the information source are known by the suspicious voter to be "opposite" to his own. Our model is based on a formalism introduced by the artificial intelligence community called "multi-agent influence diagrams", which generalize Bayesian networks to settings involving multiple agents with distinct goals

Challenging people's political views and values makes them think even harder and produce better arguments to defend themselves

To many, American politics and society seem more polarized than they have ever been. Why, then do people cling so tightly to their values, identities and attitudes? In new research, Cengiz Erisen, David P. Redlawsk, and Elif Erisen looked at the effects of presenting people with information that conflicted or refuted their own ideologies. They found that far from convincing ..

The Effects of Politician’s Moral Violations on Voters' Moral Emotions

Existing empirical research on voters’ responses to individual politicians’ moral transgressions pays limited attention to moral emotions, although moral emotions are an integral part of voters’ moral judgment. This study looks at U.S. voters’ discrete moral emotional responses to politician’s moral violations and examines how these discrete moral emotional responses are dependent on voters’ own moral principles and the extent to which they identify with a political party. We report on a 5 × 3 between-subjects experiment where 2026 U.S. respondents reacted to politicians’ violations of one of five moral foundations defined by Moral Foundations Theory. We randomly vary which moral foundation is violated and the partisanship of the politician. While voters’ own moral principles somewhat condition moral emotional responses, we find that voters’ moral emotional responses mostly depend on partisan identification. When voters share party identity with a politician committing a moral violation, they respond with less anger, contempt, disgust and shame than when they do not share party identity. The effect is greater among strong partisans. However, we find limited evidence that specific moral emotions are activated by violations of particular moral foundations, thereby challenging Moral Foundations Theory

Codebook with descriptive statistics for variables (min, max, and mean).

Codebook with descriptive statistics for variables (min, max, and mean)