Mental Effort and Political Psychology: How Cognitive Resources Facilitate Collective Action and Political Reasoning

Political scientists have largely overlooked the issue of effort. It is a seemingly simple concept with great implications for the study of political behavior. With intuition alone we can often classify behaviors as more or less effortful. And many of the behaviors that interest political scientists concern this fundamental concept, but, somehow, we have failed to formally incorporate effort into our theories. Indeed, normatively speaking, citizens will engage the democratic process effortfully, not effortlessly. But what makes a behavior more or less effortful? How does the amount of effort expended in pursuit of a behavior affect the likelihood of actualizing that behavior? To answer these questions I have developed a resource model of political cognition which posits that effortful behaviors are essentially fueled by a limited, but renewable, supply of cognitive resources. In this dissertation I report the results of a series of experiments in which I apply the resource model to collective action behaviors as well as information processing. The results suggest that these behaviors, and mostly likely others as well, are, to a significant degree, dependent upon the sufficient availability of cognitive resources

The Priming Effects of Polling Location on Ballot Initiative Voting Decisions

Do the physical settings in which a voter casts their ballot affect their vote choices? Every state uses a variety of polling locations for the administration of election: churches, schools, libraries, fire stations, and etcetera. The literature on priming effects and voting is massive, but very little research examines the impact of the venue in which a ballot is cast has on voters’ decisions. In this study I argue that polling venues situated on church, school, or veteran’s association property influences the proportion of votes cast in favor of ballot measures related to each institution. I test these hypotheses using precinct level election results and population data from California’s 2008 general election and find results supporting, or suggesting, such a relationship

Debunking the myth that poor whites vote against their interests for Republicans

Recent years have seen the rise of the idea that poor whites in America have developed a tendency to vote for Republicans, who in general do not have their best interests in mind. Using National Election Survey data, Sean Richey, J. Benjamin Taylor, Jeffrey M. Glas and Junyan Zhu take a close look at this idea of ‘incorrect voting’, and find that poor whites actually tend to vote for Democrats – who do better represent their interests – around 75 percent of the time. They also comment that when poor whites do vote against their interests, this tends to be third party candidates, rather than Republicans

Inherited determinants of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis phenotypes: a genetic association study

Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis are the two major forms of inflammatory bowel disease; treatment strategies have historically been determined by this binary categorisation. Genetic studies have identified 163 susceptibility loci for inflammatory bowel disease, mostly shared between Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. We undertook the largest genotype association study, to date, in widely used clinical subphenotypes of inflammatory bowel disease with the goal of further understanding the biological relations between diseases