Professor of political science and psychology; I study belief systems + the psychological bases of political preferences. Inveterate Fall fan + cat enthusiast.
Jun 29, 2023 • 8 tweets • 1 min read
NEW pre-print from #twitterless Ariel Malka, me, and @tomstello_ : "Partisanship and Anti-Democratic Orientation and Unsorted Partisanship and Anti-Democratic Orientation in the American Public." (1/n) psyarxiv.com/rh9zm/
Standard accounts of American polarization imply that partisans will be more willing to degrade democracy when they are ideologically sorted and hold negative views of the opposing party. (2/n)
Dec 30, 2022 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
With due respect to all parties, I think folks here on the bird may be polarizing too much on this take. It does not surprise me much that academics & union leaders would diverge on the interpretations of specific labor settlements. (1/x)
I don't think the crucial factor is academics providing expensive educations to rich east coast kids, though. Rather, union leaders & academic experts on labor relations are psychologically specialized in ways that lead them to think about the same issues in different ways. (2/x)
Nov 14, 2022 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
Why did so much of the pundit/journalist class convince itself that a red wave of epic proportions was on its way, only to be surprised by the actual outcome? Was this really something that was so impossible to see coming? A thread! (1/n)
Much has been said about the proliferation of cheap GOP polls in key states in the last few weeks of the campaign. This was undoubtedly real -- and a factor that distorted the more naive poll aggregators. (2/n)
Jul 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The classic analysis of fascism as rooted in impulse and will does a great job capturing the pornographic nature of far-right politics. Right-wing rhetoric glorifies order in the abstract, but effectively disinhibits and disorders dangerous human motives. (1/n)
Human social groups have hierarchies (e.g., those inherent in any form of leadership) and make ingroup/outgroup distinctions, but right-wing politics aestheticizes and absolutizes these things beyond any real functionality. (2/n)
Jun 20, 2022 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
To add to my earlier comments on this: the forms of radicalization we seen in various left spaces are not simply the mirror image of the process on the right. (1/n)
One part of this asymmetry is that -- level of radicalization aside -- different sorts of people sort into left and right spaces, e.g., (2/n) psyarxiv.com/xhvyj
Nov 2, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
New preprint from myself, Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, & Tomasz Baran: "National Collective Narcissism, In-Group Satisfaction, and Religious Commitment in Contemporary Poland." (1/n) osf.io/preprints/soca…
Using data from a six-wave panel study of Polish adults collected in 2020, we find that religious commitment is tied to national identity in multiple ways (2/n)
Sep 26, 2021 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
The Costello et al (2021) piece this Atlantic article discusses is a very good piece of research that makes some solid methodological advances. But the Atlantic article provides a poor overview of the overall authoritarianism literature, esp. on the political-science side. (1/n)
"Experts" have been looking for left-wing authoritarianism since the 1950s. If you use std authoritarianism measures or ones that are ideologically-neutral (per Rokeach), LWA is relatively hard to find in WEIRD countries. (2/n)
Sep 22, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
There's a lot going on here, and part of this is just an illustration of the degree to which racial/ethnic identity is doing as much or more work as religious conservatism among a subset of conservative whites. (1/n)
But the fact that conservative white Catholics are as hostile to immigration and less opposed to abortion than conservative white evangelicals also suggests something ironic (but not entirely unexpected) about the conservative Catholic political project in the US. (2/n)
Sep 6, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I RTed this thread yesterday, but this particular tweet really is an important one. I think it's relevant not only to teaching, but also to political communication. (1/n)
Those of us who are high in political engagement spend a lot of time talking to (or at) each other, and we lose all sense of what outliers were are in terms of how much more time we spend thinking about politics and how much more central politics is to our identities. (2/n)
Aug 23, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Bumping this again because it really does illustrate an important point about the nature of ideology. That is, ideology cannot be reduced to symbolic ideology - ideology as identity and the set of social & psychological motives that attract ppl to an ideological identity (1/n)
Rather, ideological labels and the motives behind them to some extent acquire different socially-constructed content on the basis of group/party conflicts, elite actions, and historical features unique to specific societies. (2/n)
Jul 21, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Fascinating comparative analysis from LF Mantilla: "[C]entralized, hierarchical faith communities are more likely to resist aligning themselves with political parties than their decentralized, egalitarian counterparts." (1/n) washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
"Catholicism has not always avoided partisanship. The Catholic Church spent much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries fighting partisan battles against a diverse array of nationalist, liberal and socialist opponents." (2/n)
Jun 12, 2021 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
I don't agree with all of the arguments here, but it is an interesting read that points to the complexity of public opinion and the extent to which actual behavioral trends may operate separately from political discourse. Some random thoughts: (1/n) noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-social-c…
Social conservatism as a political tendency is first and foremost a kind of identity politics -- it's about who gets recognition, who is in and who is out, and who should be dominant. (2/n)
Jun 10, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Good thread from @robfordmancs; I concur that social media might accentuate diffs in ideological conformity b/w the more vs less politically engaged, given that elites, activists, pundits, & the engaged in general are more likely on social media. (1/n)
In this vein, we know from work by Groenendyk et al (2020) that priming ideological norms can increase expression of ideologically-constrained opinions. We might very reasonably assume that the social networks of the engaged do a lot of this. (2/n) papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Apr 29, 2021 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
A related comment: there's something to the argument that conservatism is more of a temperament than an abstract ideology. But how does temperament get fleshed out in practical terms? (1/n)
The notion of conservatism as cautious, limit-seeking temperament is certainly consistent with at least one stream of research on personality and politics, e.g., (2/n) annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.114…
Apr 28, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It is realities of this sort that complicate any simple narrative about political messaging on inequality. I used the (not new) term 'environmental racism' here, but it might be too jargony for mass communications. But then: how do you talk about problems like this? (1/n)
In this vein, the Kalla & English (2021) study was well done and comports with prior studies. I don't dispute it & I think it is relevant for communications about *some* things. But many issues require you to confront race, and you can't message your way out of doing so. (2/n)
Apr 21, 2021 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
What I keep coming back to is that the modern 'conservative' ideological framework -- crystallized under Reagan -- more or less collapsed during GW Bush's second term. (1/n)
By 'ideological framework,' I have in mind the conservative elite consensus behind Reaganism: laissez faire economics, muscular foreign policy, and traditional values. (2/n)
Apr 2, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Here are some results for the white subsample only. Note that the ideology measure = ideological self-placement, so symbolic rather than operational ideology in these models and the earlier ones. (1/n)
Been digging into the new 2020 ANES release this week, and I got curious as to what might predict negative attitudes toward increasing ballot access. So, I took a look at the ANES items on early voting, voter ID, and felon disenfranchisement. (1/n)
The following analyses look at the full sample, with dummies for racial group. I was especially interested in the role of racial attitudes, so I ran 4 sets of models -- each using a different racial attitude. (2/n)
Jan 11, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
There's nothing wrong with this article; the last line is perhaps the most important. But in terms of the Broader Discourse on this point, a lot of folks seem to have unrealistic expectations of what education & knowledge accomplish. (1/n) washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/0…
The general idea is that fancy Ivy League educations mean that folks like Cruz and Hawley should "know better." Putting aside the elitism involved in accepting that premise, there are a number of ways that it us not consistent with what we know about education & knowledge. (2/n)
