PropertyValue
?:about
?:abstract
  • How voters use political issues to elect political candidates is of central importance to our understanding of democratic representation. Research on voting behavior often assumes that American voters hold distinct economic and cultural issue preferences. In this research note, we point out that this does not necessarily imply that preferences for candidates’ positions on the two issue dimensions are also additively separable in voters’ decisions. Analyzing survey data on US presidential elections from 1996 to 2016, we estimate to what extent voters’ economic and socio-cultural preferences are nonseparable and find that the two general dimensions act as substitutes in their decisions. Our finding implies that voting decisions are partially structured by an underlying single dimension, as liberal deviations from a voter’s ideal point on social issues can be compensated by conservative deviations on economic issues.Scholars have maintained that public attitudes often diverge from expert consensus due to ideology-driven motivated reasoning. However, this is not a sufficient explanation for less salient and politically charged questions. More attention needs to be given to anti-intellectualism - the generalized mistrust of intellectuals and experts. Using data from the General Social Survey and a survey of 3,600 Americans on Amazon Mechanical Turk, I provide evidence of a strong association between anti-intellectualism and opposition to scientific positions on climate change, nuclear power, GMOs, and water fluoridation, particularly for respondents with higher levels of political interest. Second, a survey experiment shows that anti-intellectualism moderates the acceptance of expert consensus cues such that respondents with high levels of anti-intellectualism actually increase their opposition to these positions in response. Third, evidence shows anti-intellectualism is connected to populism, a worldview that sees political conflict as primarily between ordinary citizens and a privileged societal elite. Exposure to randomly assigned populist rhetoric, even that which does not pertain to experts directly, primes anti-intellectual predispositions among respondents in the processing of expert consensus cues. These findings suggest that rising anti-elite rhetoric may make anti-intellectual sentiment more salient in information processing. (xsd:string)
?:author
?:contributor
?:hasFulltext
  • false (xsd:boolean)
is ?:hasPart of
?:inLanguage
  • Englisch (EN) (xsd:string)
?:isPartOf
?:libraryLocation
?:linksLabel
  • Volltext (xsd:string)
?:name
  • Vote Choice and the Nonseparability of Economic and Social Issues (xsd:string)
?:provider
?:publicationType
  • Monographie (xsd:string)
  • Zeitschriftenaufsatz (de)
  • journal_article (en)
?:sourceInfo
  • GESIS-BIB (xsd:string)
  • In: Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 84(2020) no. 1 ; p. 158-170. ISSN 0033-362X (xsd:string)
rdf:type
?:url