Browsing by Author "Stevenson, Randolph T"

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    Genetic Links among Ideology, Cognitive Style, Big Five Personality, and Executive Functions
    (2015-04-21) Ksiazkiewicz, Aleksander Jan; Alford, John R; Wilson, Rick K; Stevenson, Randolph T; Martin, Randi C; Krueger, Robert F
    This dissertation provides novel insights into the role of genes in political attitudes and behaviors by examining the role of genes in political traits over time and by uncovering two novel sets of potential mediators between genes and politics. Chapter 1 provides an exhaustive review of the biopolitics literature, lays out a theoretical framework for the study of biopolitics, and reviews twin study methodology. Chapters 2 and 3 report results from twin study analyses that rely on an original survey of twins that was conducted in the fall of 2012 in cooperation with the Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research. Chapter 2 conducts one of the first genetically-informative panel studies of political traits. It finds that genetic factors are the primary contributors to trait stability over a four year period in mid-life, but that only environmental factors contribute to trait change over the same period. Chapter 3 conducts the first ever behavioral genetic analysis of three measures of cognitive style—the need for cognition, the need for cognitive closure, and the need to evaluate. It then shows that the correlations between cognitive style and political traits are driven, in most cases, primarily by genetic factors. This finding suggests that cognitive style variables may mediate the role of genes in politics, a possibility that is left open for future research. Chapter 4 utilizes an original online panel, collected via Amazon Mechanical Turk, to examine whether individual differences in executive functions are related to political traits. The results suggest that updating, a form of executive function, is related to several political traits. Moreover, because individual differences in executive functions are highly heritable, updating may mediate the genetic effect on politics. Chapter 5 summarizes the main contributions of this research, which include evidence of the role of genes in political trait stability in mid-life, the heritability of widely-studied cognitive style measures, and the possibility that cognitive style and executive functions mediate the role of genes in politics. The final chapter also lays out a research agenda for the biopolitics field. In short, this dissertation strongly supports integrating genes into political science theory.
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    Partisan Bias in Economic Perceptions: How Political and Economic Contexts Condition the Strength of the Partisan Screen
    (2018-04-16) Santoso, Lie Philip; Stevenson, Randolph T
    For more than 50 years, the usefulness of party identification (PID) in cross-national research has been a matter of dispute in the study of comparative political behavior. These debates are wide-ranging but boil down to how one conceptualizes the nature of PID. There are some who argued that PID is primarily a social identity while there are others who treat it simply as a political attitude. As a result, there are widespread disagreements about the stability, measurement, and applicability of the concept in comparative contexts. In this dissertation, I seek to move beyond these debates by focusing on the one aspect of PID that has reached a scholarly consensus: the function of PID as a perceptual screen through which individuals perceive realities. To do this, I first develop an individual-level theory of partisan bias drawn from a general psychological theory of motivated reasoning to formally define a “partisan screen” at the individual level. In particular, I argue that the key mechanism in which individuals develop a partisan screen is through the selective exposure to favorable information. Subsequently, I use this individual level theory to identify the contextual variables most likely to condition the strength of that screen for typical individuals in different political and economic contexts. Importantly, these factors are derived directly from my individual model of partisan bias – that is, I seek to identify the parameters of that theoretical model that can vary across contexts. This theoretical approach means that my empirical results about the impact of contexts speak directly to the veracity of the underlying individual level theory. My empirical results about the impact of these contextual variables reveal that selective exposure is indeed a key mechanism that partisans use to develop strong partisan screens in perceiving the economy. In particular, since my theory suggests that voters need to be able to identify a set of “trusted sources” that will consistently deliver a partisan message in order to develop a strong partisan screen, a key contextual variable that would explain the variation in the strength of the partisan screen needs to capture the ease to which individuals are able to identify these “trusted” sources. As such, I develop a compelling new measure of the identifiability of partisan media for different parties and different times and shows that it does have a strong causal effect on the strength of the partisan screen across contexts.
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    Political Methodologies for Electoral Engineering and Minority Representation
    (2022-04-21) Atsusaka, Yuki; Stevenson, Randolph T
    How can we design electoral institutions to achieve racially and ethnically fair representation in modern democracies? While a body of research examines the relationships between different electoral systems and the level of minority representation, remarkably less is known about how "changing" electoral systems from one form to another would affect minority representation. To overcome this limitation, this dissertation develops three new methodologies for studying the effects of electoral engineering on minority representation. In the first chapter, I offer a parsimonious mathematical model to explain and predict when racial minority candidates run for office and win in a particular district under first-past-the-post. Using novel datasets from Louisiana mayoral elections and state legislative general elections, I show that the mathematical model can accurately predict both minority candidate emergence and electoral victory while demonstrating that the model can answer relevant questions in redistricting and voting rights cases. In the second chapter, I propose a potential outcomes framework to study the causal effects of policy interventions on ranked outcome data. To illustrate the advantages of the framework, I reanalyze a survey experiment gauging the effect of different information on people's attitudes toward police violence and study ballot order effects in ranked-choice voting. In the third chapter, I introduce a spatial model for ethnic party competition in ethnically divided societies to study whether and under what conditions switching from first-past-the-post to ranked-choice voting yields moderation in ethnic party competition and reduces the level of racial and ethnic polarization. To simulate ethnic party competition under various conditions, I develop an algorithm based on agent-based modeling that is readily accessible to researchers and practitioners. Combining clustering and ecological inference with ranked ballot data from Bay Area Mayoral elections, I also show that switching from first-past-the-post to ranked-choice voting does not mitigate the level of racial polarization in the particular context. By integrating substantive knowledge with methodological innovation, this dissertation provides new opportunities for future research on electoral engineering and minority representation.
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    The Effect of Gender and Gender Stereotypes on Voter Evaluations of Complex Coalitional Environments
    (2022-09-22) Pascu-Lindner, Andra Diana; Stevenson, Randolph T
    This dissertation examines the impact of gender and gender stereotypes on voters' evaluations of high-information political environments. I first contend that there is an independent effect of Prime Minister gender on voter expectations of government formation outcomes -- and that government type and ideology will interact with the gender of the Prime Minister in meaningful ways. Using an experimental approach, I do not find systematic evidence to support the notion that Prime Minister gender is an important heuristic that voters rely on when forming expectations of future electoral outcomes. These findings -- despite refuting the theoretical expectations that I initially develop, have positive normative implications. This study reveals that voters hold accurate beliefs regarding the determinants of government participation and are able to assess a cabinets' chances of formation reasonably. Additionally, it suggests that male and female Prime Ministers are largely perceived as equally likely to be successful in forming a government. At the highest echelons of political power in coalition systems in Europe, it does not appear that female contenders for the position of Prime Minister suffer as a result of entrenched gender stereotypes on the part of voters.
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    The Effect of Religious Language and Commitments on Americans’ Political Behavior
    (2023-04-18) Quezada Llanes, Oscar Enrique; Stevenson, Randolph T
    Despite the decline in religious affiliation among American adults over the past three decades, religious motivations continue to be a part of American politics. This dissertation focuses on the role of religion in two areas of American political behavior: candidate evaluations and political participation. First, I examine the impact of a candidate's use of religious language on how Christian voters evaluate them. I argue that Christian voters are attuned to religious language and that, when candidates make religious appeals, voters use these appeals as cues to determine whether a candidate is an authentic representative of their group. Using data from two original surveys with two embedded survey experiments, I test how respondents from three major Christian traditions evaluate candidates who use broad and group-specific Christian language. Results show that some Christian voters make inferences about a candidate's politics and the representation they are likely to get based on the use of Christian language. Second, I investigate how religious and political identities work together to shape voters’ political engagement. Using cross-sectional datasets covering a long period of time, I reexamine a common finding in the literature, namely, that of the positive impact of church attendance on turnout. I show how the political participation of religious Republicans and religious Democrats is differentially impacted by their religious commitment and how this varies for members of different racial and ethnic groups. Together, these findings underscore the role of religious language and religious commitments in the political behavior of American voters and contribute to a more complex understanding of the interaction between religious communities and politics.