Research

This page describes my on-going research projects, organized by theme. For further information, please email me at scott.matthews@mun.ca. 

On Retrospective Voting:

'No Negativity Bias in Experimental Tests of Retrospective Voting' (with Austin Hart)

A sizable literature in psychology finds that information that is negatively appraised attracts more attention and weighs more heavily in evaluative reasoning than positively appraised information. This research aligns with the longstanding conventional wisdom among scholars of retrospective voting, particularly economic-voting scholars, that incumbents are more strongly punished for bad performance than they are rewarded for good performance. Observational research on this expectation is, however, limited and the conclusions are mixed. At the same time, there are almost no experimental tests of negativity bias in retrospective voting. In this paper, we investigate asymmetry in retrospective voting using an experimental approach pioneered by Huber, Hill and Lenz (2012) and developed extensively in our own prior research (Hart and Matthews, 2022, 2023). The approach uses an abstract experimental framework that requires participants to monitor the performance of a hypothetical “incumbent” over time and then to “vote” on whether to reappoint or replace the incumbent. Notably, prior work based on this framework has replicated findings familiar in previous retrospective voting research, including incumbency and recency biases and benchmarking (or reference-point) effects. The present paper combines reanalysis of existing data – from Huber and colleagues and our own prior work – with three new experimental studies to provide an extensive experimental study of negativity bias in retrospective voting. We report multiple tests pertaining to four expectations that are fundamental to standard accounts of negativity bias in retrospective voting: that voters’ incumbent-retention decisions respond to the valence of performance; that retention decisions are more responsive to variation in negatively than positively valenced performance; that the disutility of poor performance outweighs that of good performance; and that voters are more attentive to negative than positive performance outcomes. The results are almost uniformly inconsistent with the existence of negativity bias in retrospective voting. While we find some evidence that valence matters, there is no significant evidence of negativity bias in participants’ retention decisions or in the accuracy of their recollections of incumbent performance. We conclude by identifying implications for our understanding of the operation of retrospective voting in real-world elections, suggesting that, to the extent observational studies identify negativity bias, it is more likely to reflect asymmetries in political communication than in political psychology.

‘Biased Economic Perception across Elections’ (with Gabriel Madeira and Mark Pickup). 

This chapter presents an updated investigation of the influence of partisanship on Canadian economic perception through an analysis of economic evaluations during the general elections from 2004 to 2015. These are significant elections for analysis of partisan differences in political perceptions, given the increasing polarization of the country’s parties. It is also important that our analysis covers the election of 2008, which was fought amidst the onset of the Great Recession, the most severe global economic crisis since the 1930s. Such circumstances of acute economic stress provide an instructive setting in which to observe partisan differences in economic perception. Are perceptions of the economy, as a result, more constrained by economic reality? In other words, do strongly negative economic conditions limit the scope for partisan bias in economic perception? We also investigate, in an exploratory fashion, a cross-sectional version of this question – whether demographic groups more likely to have directly experienced economic hardship evince greater perceptual constraint in response to economic realities.

Under review as a chapter in Allison Harell, Patrick Fournier and Laura Stephenson, eds., Polarization in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (Revise-and-resubmit decision: October, 2022)

On Policy Attitudes:

‘Central Banks and Fiscal Policy Attitudes’ (with Christopher Abbott, Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, Kyle Hanniman, and Olivier Jacques).

Many mainstream economists believe we are on the cusp of a new fiscal paradigm. The macroeconomic consensus of the 1990s and early 2000s is struggling under the weight of “secular stagnation.” Desired savings persistently exceed desired levels of investment, leading to a permanent state of low inflation, growth and interest rates. Central banks cannot revive struggling economies in this context, because their principal stimulant, the interest rate, is already at zero. Only larger budget deficits can deliver the stimulus shocked economies need. But a new fiscal policy paradigm is not a foregone conclusion. Many observers, including the IMF, worry that developed economies will prematurely withdraw stimulus after the pandemic, much in the way they did after the Global Financial Crisis. Some central banks have also anticipated this and have begun warning against a return to austerity. The hope, for some, is that central banks can leverage their expertise and political independence to move public opinion on deficits. But can central banks convince voters of the merits of a resurgent Keynesianism? Or will their efforts merely undermine their hard-won reputations for independence? This study relies on two survey experiments (one in Canada and the other in the United States) designed to address these questions. The surveys will examine the impacts of central bank endorsements of government deficits on two outcomes: support for expansionary fiscal policy and perceptions of central bank independence. It will also examine whether the effects of endorsements interact with voters’ partisanship and opposition parties’ attacks on the central bank’s political independence. 

‘Testing Negative: The Non-Consequences of COVID-19 on Mass Political Attitudes’ (with Jack Blumenau, Timothy Hicks, Alan Jacobs and Tom O’Grady).

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have implemented economic and social policies that, outside of war time, are unprecedented in scale and scope. These interventions make apparent that the state has the capacity to act as an extremely powerful guarantor of economic and health security -- a view that has not always been so prominent in western democracies of late. Moreover, the economic and health threats posed by COVID-19 reach far beyond the demographic groups that are more typically beneficiaries of state support. As such, a plausible hypothesis is that the pandemic and its policy responses may have yielded notable changes in mass ideology -- e.g. attitudes regarding the role of government in the economy; the `deservingness' of beneficiaries of state support; the extent to which economic inequality is normatively acceptable; and the value of contributing taxes to state-provided public goods. In this paper, we test this expectation using data from the long-running (2014--present) British Election Study Internet Panel, as well as from a unique panel survey fielded to existing BES respondents in April and September 2020. Our panel makes it possible to track individuals on a rich set of variables both before and during the pandemic. We find that exposure to covid-related economic shocks had some effects on `political' attitudes such as trust and approval of the government, but much more limited effects on ideological beliefs about the appropriate role and scope of government in economic and social policy.

Accepted at Journal of Politics. 

‘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. 

'Economic Inequality, Information, and Political Support for Public Goods: Survey Experimental Evidence' (with Timothy Hicks and Alan Jacobs)

Economic inequality has steeply increased over the past four decades across the high-income, established democracies. The literature on public responses to inequality has tended to focus on whether inequality provokes demands for the state to do more by boosting redistribution. In this paper, we instead pursue the possibility that rising inequality undermines the popular foundations of state action. Building on findings in diverse literatures in political science, economics, and psychology, we hypothesize that one important effect of the steep rise in inequality may be to undermine support for public investment in costly public goods among the non-rich. We theorize that economic inequality may reduce lower- and middle-income citizens’ willingness to pay for public goods through three  possible mechanisms: by changing evaluations of the fairness of the political-economic system in the broad sense (“system fairness”); by changing evaluations of the distributive fairness of the tax measures required  to finance public goods (“policy fairness”); and by reducing the perceived likelihood that politicians will deliver promised public goods after taxes are paid (“political trust”). Via any of these mechanisms, citizens who receive or attend to information indicating that they are on the losing side of rising inequality would be expected to become less willing to pay higher taxes to finance additional public goods. We evaluate these conjectures through a series of online survey experiments, administered to large samples of voting-age citizens in the U.S., in which the key treatment is the presentation of information about rising inequality. While results vary to some degree across experiments, we find considerable evidence that providing and making salient information about rising concentrations of income at the top reduces non-rich respondents’ willingness to pay for public goods, and that it does so through our hypothesized system-fairness and political-trust mechanisms, with no evidence of the operation of a policy-fairness mechanism. The findings shed light on the nature of modern democratic states’ capacity to deliver collective goods that are foundational to social wellbeing and economic prosperity, while clarifying the political ramifications of rising inequality beyond the politics of redistribution.

‘Negation Framing: How a Losing Consideration Can Be a Winning Message’.

While a large literature investigates the influence of frames, existing research has focused entirely on “affirmative frames”: issue interpretations that assert, or affirm, that a given consideration is relevant to formation of a given attitude. We know little about “negation frames,” i.e., frames that negate the relevance of a given consideration to opinion on an issue. This paper proposes a theory of negation frames and evaluates this theory in two experimental studies of Americans’ attitudes regarding hydraulic fracturing (or fracking). The results indicate that, in the presence of compelling justifying arguments and alternative affirmative frames, negation frames reduce the judgmental weight of the considerations they negate. These frames can also increase the weight of other salient considerations relevant to the attitude in question, although this evidence is less consistent. The findings have important implications for the politics and psychology of political communication.

On Campaign Effects:

‘Clarity of Responsibility and the Mediating Role of Political Campaigns’ (with Austin Hart).

Why does the clarity of responsibility thesis account so well for aggregate-level patterns of economic voting when, at the micro level, voters typically fail to act as the theory predicts? This paper begins to address the discordant findings between cross-national and individual-level studies of clarity of responsibility. Specifically, we argue that the political and economic structures thought to shape economic voting behavior do so only indirectly, via their influence on political elites. Specifically, simple campaign cues about the economy, and not complex signal-extraction calculations, mediate the oft-identified clarity of responsibility effect. We evaluate this argument empirically using survey data from 49 elections across 26 countries.

Other On-going Research:

Transformative Teaching and Community Conversations through Photovoice (with Fiona MacDonald)

Drawing on Friere’s theory of “education for critical consciousness” and feminist pedagogical practices, photovoice projects have been used by researchers and activists with various community groups for the last four to five decades. In general, photovoice is a structured use of photographs to identify and analyze salient issues from standpoints that are often unheard or underrepresented, particularly youth. This research project will design and pilot survey research methods to investigate the impact(s) of photovoice projects. The goal is to observe changes, if any, in attitudes and beliefs following students’ photovoice experiences.

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.

Updated: April 3, 2024