In their landmark work, Statehouse Democracy: Public Opinion and Policy in the American States, Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993) study the effects of individual state partisanship and political ideology on state presidential voting. In general, they found that partisanship and ideology affected presidential voting independently of one another. In addition, from 1988 through 1992 (the last yea...

In this paper, we trace the route by which genetics could ultimately connect to issue attitudes and suggest that central to this connection are chronic dispositional preferences for mass-scale social rules, order, and conduct—what we label political ideology. The need to resolve bedrock social dilemmas concerning such matters as leadership style, protection from outgroups, and the degree to whi...

Ideology detection from text plays an important role in identifying the political ideology of politicians who have expressed their beliefs on many issues. Most existing approaches based on bag-of-words features fail to capture semantic information. And other sentence modeling methods are inefficient to extract ideological target context which is significant for identifying the political ideolog...

Previous research on personality traits and political attitudes has largely focused on the direct relationships between traits and ideological self-placement. There are theoretical reasons, however, to suspect that the relationships between personality traits and political attitudes (1) vary across issue domains and (2) depend on contextual factors that affect the meaning of political stimuli. ...

Existential threat lies at the heart of intergroup conflict, but the literature on existential concerns lacks clear conceptualization and integration. To address this problem, we offer a new conceptualization and measurement of existential threat. We establish the reliability and validity of our measure, and to illustrate its utility, we examine whether different existential threats underlie th...

Political communication often takes complex linguistic forms. Understanding political ideology from text is an important methodological task in studying political interactions between people in both new and traditional media. Therefore, there has been a spate of recent research that either relies on, or proposes new methodology for, the classification of political ideology from text data. In th...

• We examined the relation between political ideology and racial categorization. • People categorized morphed faces that ranged from 100% Black to 100% White. • Conservatism (vs. liberalism) was associated with the tendency to categorize racially ambiguous faces as Black. • Relation between ideology and categorization was mediated by opposition to equality. • This research helps to explain the ...

This article explores those factors which shape a political organization’s choice of tactics in political mobilization with a particular focus on the influence of gender ideology. To understand why political organizations engaging in contentious politics choose to employ violent tactics, nonviolent tactics, or a mixture of both, current scholarship has tended to focus on factors such as relatio...

In light of the increasing refusal of some parents to vaccinate children, public health strategies have focused on increasing knowledge and awareness based on a "knowledge-deficit" approach. However, decisions about vaccination are based on more than mere knowledge of risks, costs, and benefits. Individual decision making about vaccinating involves many other factors including those related to ...

We address two questions regarding the relationship between political ideology and responses to threatening or aversive stimuli. The first concerns the reason for the connection between disgust and specific political and moral attitudes; the second concerns the observation that some responses to threat (i.e., neuroticism/anxiety) are associated with a more left-wing political orientation.