Core political values and the long-term shaping of partisanship

Party identification has been thought to provide the central organizing element for political belief systems. We argue in contrast that core values concerning equality and government intervention versus individualism and free enterprise are fundamental orientations that can themselves shape partisanship. We evaluate these arguments in the British case with a validated multiple-item measure of core values, using ordered latent class models to estimate reciprocal effects with partisanship on panel data from the British Household Panel Study, 1991-2007. We demonstrate that core values are more stable than partisanship and have far stronger cross-lagged effects on partisanship than vice versa in both polarized and depolarized political contexts, for younger and older respondents, and for those with differing levels of educational attainment and income, thus demonstrating their general utility as decision-making heuristics

Revisiting the Impact of Modernization on Support for Women Politicians: The Role of Women’s Political Empowerment

We examine the role of societal modernization and women’s political empowerment in generating support for women politicians amongst citizens. Using a global analysis of 116 countries with a new dataset of micro- and macro-level longitudinal data, we show that societal modernization and women’s political empowerment only have positive effects on support for women in politics when the other is also present. For citizens who experienced either societal modernization or women’s political empowerment, but not both, we do not see this positive relationship. Crucially, these patterns hold when analyzing the current social and political context, as well as the context experienced by citizens during their formative years. We argue that both social and political change are required to develop supportive attitudes towards women in politics

Young voters and their "never Tory" mindset: the making of a Labour generation?

The last general election brought a number of new voters into the electorate, especially younger ones who having voted for the first time, are more likely to turn out in future contests. Anja Neundorf and Thomas J. Scotto argue that although Labour cannot take their support for granted, for many of them the Conservative option is permanently off the menu

The economy and the elderly helped Trump lose in 2020, and it would be a mistake for the GOP if he ran again

In the years since Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, much has been written about how populists gain power. But what can Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss tell us about how populists stay in or lose power? Using a survey of 1,200 Americans, Anja Neundorf and Sergi Pardos-Prado find that despite being a populist, Trump was assessed and held to account by voters like any other incumbent. They write that his handling of the economy hurt Trump’s electoral prospects across all groups, and of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among older Americans

Dictators and their subjects: authoritarian attitudinal effects and legacies

This introductory essay outlines the key themes of the special issue on the long-term impact of autocracies on the political attitudes and behavior of their subjects. Here, we highlight several important areas of theoretical and empirical refinements, which can provide a more nuanced picture of the process through which authoritarian attitudinal legacies emerge and persist. First, we define the nature of attitudinal legacies and their driving mechanisms, developing a framework of competing socialization. Second, we use the competing socialization framework to explain two potential sources of heterogeneity in attitudinal and behavioral legacies: varieties of institutional features of authoritarian regimes, which affect the nature of regime socialization efforts; and variations across different subgroups of (post-)authoritarian citizens, which reflect the nature and strength of alternative socialization efforts. This new framework can help us to better understand contradictory findings in this emerging literature as well as set a new agenda for future research

How do inclusionary and exclusionary autocracies affect ordinary people?

We propose a distinction between inclusionary and exclusionary autocratic ruling strategies and develop novel theoretical propositions on the legacy that these strategies leave on citizens’ political attitudes once the autocratic regime broke down. Using data of 1.3 million survey respondents from 71 countries and hierarchical age–period–cohort models, we estimate between and within cohort differences in citizens’ democratic support. We find that inclusionary regimes—with wider redistribution of socioeconomic and political benefits—leave a stronger antidemocratic legacy than exclusionary regimes on the political attitudes of their citizens. Similarly, citizens who were part of the winning group in an autocracy are more critical with democracy compared with citizens who were part of discriminated groups. This article contributes to our understanding about how autocracies affect the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens

Political socialisation and the making of citizens

Political socialization describes the process by which citizens crystalize political identities, values and behavior that remain relatively persistent throughout later life. This chapter provides a comprehensive discussion of the scholarly debate on political socialization, posing a number of questions that arise in the study of political socialization and the making of citizens. First, what is it about early life experiences that makes them matter for political attitudes, political engagement, and political behavior? Second, what age is crucial in the development of citizens’ political outlook? Third, who and what influences political orientations and behavior in early life, and how are cohorts colored by the nature of time when they come of age? Fourth, how do political preferences and behavior develop after the impressionable years? The chapter further provides an outlook of the challenges and opportunities for the field of political socialization

Elite cues and economic policy attitudes: the mediating role of economic hardship

Do voters update their attitudes toward economic issues in line with their material self-interest? The consensus among students of public opinion is that material self-interest plays a very limited role and that competing non-material factors, such as partisanship or ideological predispositions, do most of the heavy lifting. This paper moves beyond comparing the role of material and non-material factors. Instead, we examine how these factors combine to shape policy preferences. Specifically, we propose a friendly amendment to Zaller’s influential model according to which attitudinal change results from the interaction between changes in elite messaging on the one hand and individual political predispositions on the other. In Zaller’s model, partisanship and ideological predispositions help explain why some resist and others embrace new elite messaging. We hypothesize that material self-interest also conditions the effect of elite messaging. Using British individual-level panel data collected over more than a decade, we show that material hardship predicts who, among left-wing voters, resist new right-wing partisan cues. Our results highlights the incremental impact of material self-interest on economic attitudes

How to improve representativeness and cost-effectiveness in samples recruited through Meta: a comparison of advertisement tools

The use of paid advertisements on social media, in particular Meta platforms, to create samples for online survey research is becoming increasingly common. In addition to researchers working on hard-to-reach populations, Meta’s promise of unmediated, quick, and cheap access to a large pool of survey takers across the world is appealing also for researchers who want to create diverse samples of national populations for cheaper prices. Yet the design of Meta’s advertisement optimization algorithm complicates the use of Meta advertisements for this purpose, as it generates a trade-off between cost-effectiveness and sample representativeness. In this paper, we rely on original online surveys conducted in the United Kingdom, Turkey, Spain, and the Czech Republic to explore how two primary tools determining the audience of Meta advertisements, i.e., campaign objectives and demographic targeting, affect the recruitment process, response quality, and sample characteristics. In addition to documenting the trade-offs between the cost and representativeness in Meta samples, our paper also shows that researchers can create high-quality, cost-efficient, and diverse samples if they use the right combination of Meta advertisement tools

The impact of Covid-19 on Trump’s electoral demise: the role of economic and democratic accountability

Did the COVID-19 crisis have a significant effect on Trump’s electoral demise? We present survey experimental evidence on two substantial effects of the pandemic. First, information on the unprecedented economic downturn significantly depressed Trump’s popular support across all partisan groups, and especially among middle-low and low-income respondents. Second, being primed on the poor public health record of the Trump administration reduced its electoral prospects among citizens between 55 and 70 years old. We conclude that the 2020 election was a normal contest compatible with theories of economic voting and political competence. Our results suggest that democratic accountability can be a powerful determinant of the fate of populist leaders once in power