Exploring the role of social identities in presidential candidate evaluation Taylor Michals Committee members: Dr. Crystal Hoyt, Dr. Al Goethals, Dr. Jennifer Erkulwater This research demonstrates how the social identities of race and gender can influence presidential candidate evaluation. Specifically, it emphasizes that political ideology and gender attitudes can play a significant role in ho...

Level of education is a predictor of a range of important outcomes, such as political interest and cynicism, social trust, health, well-being, and intergroup attitudes. We address a gap in the literature by analyzing the strength and stability of the education effect associated with this diverse range of outcomes across three surveys covering the period 1986-2011, including novel latent growth ...

T he Arab uprisings of 2011 left an indelible mark on the region. As Long-standing presidents fell in four countries, many wondered if a wave of democratization might be sweeping the region. This early optimism soon faded as countries as protests were violently suppressed in Bahrain and subsequently Libya, Syrian and Yemen fell into civil war. This narrative of the failure of the uprisings to y...

The Coevolution of Networks and Political Attitudes David Lazer a b , Brian Rubineau c , Carol Chetkovich d , Nancy Katz & Michael Neblo e a Department of Political Science, Northeastern University b Visiting Scholar, Harvard University c IRL School Department of Organizational Behavior, Cornell University d Public Policy Program, Mills College e Department of Political Science, The Ohio State ...

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.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, most Russians had lived their entire lives in a quintessentially authoritarian culture. Having been socialized in this environment, how could citizens acquire the attitudes and behaviors necessary to support a new, more pluralistic regime? Cultural theories of political learning emphasize the primacy of childhood socialization and hold that altering initial atti...

We examined the prospective association between general intelligence (g) at age 10 and liberal and antitraditional social attitudes at age 30 in a large (N= 7,070), representative sample of the British population born in 1970. Statistical analyses identified a general latent trait underlying attitudes that are antiracist, pro-working women, socially liberal, and trusting in the democratic polit...

Previous research on personality and political attitudes has been conducted in countries where political parties from the center dominate the political system. In the present research (N = 675), we focus on the relationship between the dark side of human personality and political orientation and extremism, respectively, in the course of a presidential election where the two candidates represent...