This page describes a selection of my on-going research projects. For further information, please email me at scott.matthews@mun.ca.
'Valence cues mitigate apparent negativity bias in retrospective voting: Evidence from six experiments' (with Austin Hart)
Does bad or negative news weigh more heavily on evaluations of government performance than equally positive news? The negativity bias – the tendency to react more strongly to negative versus positive stimuli – is well documented in cognitive and behavioral research, but evidence of asymmetry in retrospective voting is less clear. Observational studies offer mixed results and limited leverage over competing explanations. Experimental tests of negativity bias in retrospective voting are very rare and typically gauge responses to a single piece of news (e.g., unemployment is up two-points from last year). Retrospective voting, however, is a recursive process that requires individuals to appraise new information and integrate their reaction into a summary impression over time. This paper builds on prior work by developing an experimental framework that challenges individuals to appraise and integrate performance information in real time. We present results from six experiments – three original and three relying on replication data. We find that evidence of the negativity bias emerges most clearly when the distinction between good and poor performance is muddy. We also show that this is not the result of bias in encoding or recall. The overall pattern of results is most consistent with accounts of negativity bias emphasizing the role of positive expectations in promoting relatively stronger responses to negative information.
‘Do Business Opinions about Secession Matter to Voters?’ (with Karlo Basta)
Discursive struggles prior to independence referenda play out over a number of issues, with one of the most prominent ones relating to the economic costs of secession. Anti-secessionists normally (and with good reason) try to portray independence as highly risky from the standpoint of long-term growth, jobs, and wealth. Secessionists counter by trying to minimize the material costs, more rarely arguing that independence will create greater prosperity. Debates about the economic costs of secession, however, do not include only politicians and the occasional economist. Private business players – both individual company representatives and business bodies – make frequent appearances too. Yet we do not know whether voters actually get swayed by what business tells them about the economic consequences of independence. Accordingly, we study whether business framing of the costs of independence matters to voters. Based on the results of a survey experiment, fielded to a sample of Scottish voters in 2020, our key conclusion is that relatively educated “polar identifiers” (those who think of themselves as exclusively Scottish or British) are susceptible to business messaging when it comes to economic expectations, but only when the business source aligns with their identity. Put otherwise, educated individuals who think of themselves as Scottish only are susceptible to messages by regional business, but not by state-wide business.
Building on findings in diverse literatures in political science, economics and psychology, we surmise that an important effect of the steep rise in inequality in the United States may be to undermine popular support for public investment in costly collective goods. We argue that economic inequality may influence perceptions of the: fairness of the political economy system in the broad sense; fairness of the distributive features of a policy on either the tax or spend side; and likelihood of successful delivery of promised policy goals. Via any of these mechanisms, citizens who learn or attend to the fact that they are on the losing side of rising inequality might be expected to become less willing to pay material costs to pay for collective goods. We evaluate the impact of inequality on collective goods support, finding support for our theory in a series of experimental studies.
'Motivation or Information?: Disentangling Sources of Partisan Difference in Political Judgment' (with Eric Merkley)
That committed partisans consistently differ with regard to a host of political attitudes and beliefs is close to a truism among political scientists, yet the sources of these differences are widely debated. The dominant view is that partisan differences derive from divergent partisan motivations: whereas government partisans wish to perceive the world in a way that reflects positively on government, opposition partisans wish just the opposite. The principal alternative view is that partisan differences in attitudes and beliefs reflect divergent partisan information: partisans are endowed with diverging stores of perceptually relevant information, and also diverge in their assessments of the validity of new information that they encounter. While these theoretical possibilities are hopelessly confounded in much existing work, we disentangle them with a combination of experimental and observational designs. In two experiments with Canadian samples, we decouple partisan information and motivation, holding the former constant while manipulating the latter. In an observational study of the 2021 Canadian federal election, we leverage considerable geographic variation in the competitiveness of the major parties to identify the impact of differential electoral threat on the motivation to view out-parties negatively. The findings have implications for the study of partisanship in Canada and beyond.
'Racial Attitudes and the Canadian Party System, 1988-2021' (with Randy Besco)
We propose to examine the evolution of racial attitudes and evaluations of the major parties, using CES data from 1988-2021. While race has not generally been a salient dimension of party conflict in Canada, increased attention to immigration over the past two decades and polarization of the major parties in the left-right dimension suggest the relationship is likely to have strengthened over the past thirty years. The elections of 2015, 2019 and 2021, moreover, were arguably historically unprecedented in the salience of racial identity and of race-related (or racialized) issues (e.g., immigration, refugees, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples) in advance of and during the campaign. These dynamics reflected prominent political events, including Jagmeet Singh’s selection as the first non-white leader of a major federal party in 2017, the “blackface controversy” during the 2019 election, the global movement for racial justice inspired by the killing of George Floyd in the United States, and the discovery of unmarked remains on the grounds of former residential schools in the summer of 2020. The analysis will have broad implications for the study of party politics and political attitudes, including for the future of conflict in the Canadian party system.
'Does Retrenchment Change Public Opinion on Transgender Rights?' (with Quinn Albaugh and Elizabeth Baisley)
Although research examines whether LGBTQ+ rights gains change public opinion, we know less about whether LGBTQ+ rights policy retrenchment does so as well. We use Flores and Barclay’s (2016) framework of backlash, consensus, legitimacy, and polarization to study whether news on policy retrenchment on transgender rights shifts public opinion. We draw on two pre-registered experiments about transgender and nonbinary students’ use of names and pronouns at school. We embedded each experiment in a nationally representative survey in Canada (May 2024 and July 2025). Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: control, retrenchment with no partisan cues, and retrenchment with partisan cues. We do not find evidence that news of policy retrenchment shifts public opinion (through backlash, legitimacy, or polarization). Instead, our findings are most suggestive of a consensus model where policy seems to be the enactment of majority opinion and does not significantly shape public opinion.
'Does Inequality Politicize or Alienate? Evidence from Open-ended Responses in an Online Survey' (with Tim Hicks and Alan Jacobs)
This paper investigates citizens’ political responses to rising economic inequality. We argue that two broad categories of response have been prominent in the theoretical literature: policy-focused and system-focused. A policy-focused response places the blame and imagines remedies for growing inequality within the domain of government action or inaction. A system-focused response, conversely, attributes increasing inequality to basic, relatively fixed features of the political, social and economic order. The distinction between these responses is important because of their potential to shape how states respond to growing inequality. While past research has studied these two types of citizen responses extensively, we introduce a novel data source: thousands of open-ended textual responses produced by U.S. adults exposed to information regarding growing income inequality and asked to express their thoughts. Using a large language model, we code these data for the presence of policy- and system-focused responses, and also for negative evaluations of all kinds. We find that nearly half of our respondents expressed a negative evaluation of the inequality information to which they were exposed. Most importantly, we find that system-focused responses clearly dominate policy-focused ones.
'The Decline in Support for LGBTQ2S+ Rights in Canada' (with Quinn Albaugh and Elizabeth Baisley)
Recently, right-wing political parties and activists have put LGBTQ2S+ issues, particularly transgender issues, back on the political agenda. How has public opinion on LGBTQ2S+ rights changed? Do trends in public opinion vary by issue or group? We use data on nine LGBTQ2S+ rights attitudes from the Ipsos Pride Surveys (2021-2025). We find declines on both newly salient (“newer”) transgender issues and historically salient (“older”) LGBTQ2S+ issues. Support on newer issues has declined substantially more than on older issues, in part because newer issues have lost support among nearly every group we can examine, except NDP partisans. However, on older issues, the decline is more concentrated among particular groups, such as young people and Conservatives. As a result, advocates for transgender rights may need to shore up support with groups traditionally thought to be allies. These results lay the groundwork for future research on increased opposition to LGBTQ2S+ rights.
Updated: November 25, 2025