Peer-Reviewed Articles
Americans’ Responses to COVID-19 and the Conditional Role of Dispositional Needs for Security: A Replication and Extension
Conditionally Accepted. Public Opinion Quarterly (with Adam Panish and Joe Vitriol).
A predominant theory in political psychology proposes that the political right is more threat sensitive than the political left due to differences in needs for security. Yet in a prototypical case study of the threat-politics link, Americans’ responses to COVID-19 deviated from this expectation. In this research note, we demonstrate that this phenomenon can be understood by accounting for the role of partisan sorting and political engagement in translating dispositional needs for security into political preferences. Across six national surveys (N = 8177), we demonstrate that psychological needs for security are indeed associated with protective COVID-19 responses, but only among politically disengaged Americans. For politically engaged Americans, increased security needs were associated with sorting into right-wing discourses that, in turn, promoted lax COVID-19 responses. Our findings demonstrate that dispositional security needs conditionally affect political attitudes, but casts doubt on the claim that attitudinal differences will necessarily manifest behaviorally.
Observable Bounds of Rationality and Credibility in International Relations
Forthcoming. Journal of Politics (with Andrew Kenealy and So Jin Lee).
In crisis bargaining scenarios, resolved states send costly signals to demonstrate a willingness to fight. Yet public signals of resolve are issued by specific leaders, who operate with cognitive limitations in challenging decision environments. Drawing upon theories of behavioral economics, we develop a series of observable indicators plausibly connected to leader ability and difficulty of decision environment that we expect shape perceived signaler credibility. Effects, we argue, are due to perceived variation in the signaler’s uncertainty over the future costs at stake. We find that almost all indicators shape threat credibility, and find suggestive support for the proposed mechanism. By bridging behavioral economics and foundational scholarship on costly signaling in IR in novel ways, this registered report shows how individual and environmental decision restrictions set the bounds of observable leader rationality, and in turn shape credibility in IR.
Affective polarization and the destabilization of core political values
2025. Political Science Research and Methods.
Analyses of US panel surveys from 1992 to 1996 have found extremity in political values was associated with increased affective polarization, but that affective polarization was not associated with changes in value extremity during this period (Enders and Lupton, 2021). This note reevaluates the relationships between political value extremity and affective polarization using a 2016–2020 panel survey. Replicating Enders and Lupton's analytical procedures as closely as possible with this more recent sample, I find value extremity is sometimes associated with increased affective polarization. In contrast to Enders and Lupton (2021), however, affective polarization is strongly associated with increased value extremity between 2016 and 2020. These findings suggest that the relationships between political values and affective polarization may have changed since the 1990s, and that values are now influenced by Americans' evaluations of salient political objects, such as parties, presidential candidates, and ideological groups.
2024. Political Behavior.
A large literature contends that conservatives differ from liberals in their dispositional sensitivity to threat and needs for social order and security. Thus, a puzzle emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic when American conservatives, despite their purported threat sensitivity, responded to the pandemic in ways that evinced little concern toward the risks posed by COVID-19. Threat tolerant liberals present an equally interesting case, having fervently masked, isolated, and advocated for stringent public health restrictions when facing down COVID-19. Why did so many Americans adopt health behaviors and policy preferences at odds with their dispositional orientations toward threat and needs for security during the COVID-19 pandemic? In this paper, I analyze three national surveys to evaluate how psychological dispositions affected Americans’ responses to COVID-19. I find that authoritarianism, a common measure of dispositional threat sensitivity and needs for security, conditionally affected Americans’ responses to the pandemic. Directly, authoritarianism was associated with greater concern over COVID-19 and, in turn, increased willingness to engage in protective health behaviors, support restrictive public health measures, and support economic interventions amidst the pandemic-induced downturn. Indirectly, however, authoritarianism promoted identification with and cue-taking from right-wing elites who frequently downplayed the severity of COVID-19; attention to such rhetoric reduced politically engaged authoritarians’ concern over COVID-19 and, in turn, their willingness to adopt protective health behaviors and support public health restrictions or economic interventionism. Attention to political discourse thus appears to have countervailed Americans’ dispositional orientations toward threat and security during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Asymmetric Polarization of Immigration Opinion in the United States
2023. Public Opinion Quarterly (with Ashley Jardina).
In this paper, we analyze trends in Americans’ immigration attitudes and policy preferences nationally and across partisan and racial/ethnic groups. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Democrats and Republicans shared similarly negative attitudes toward immigrants and high levels of support for restrictionist immigration policies. Beginning in the 2010s and continuing through the early 2020s, however, Democrats’ aggregate immigration opinions liberalized considerably. We observed increasingly liberal immigration preferences among Democrats of all racial and ethnic backgrounds after 2016, but this trend was especially pronounced among white Democrats. Among Republicans, opinion on immigration remained mostly stable over this period, although in some cases it became more conservative (e.g., border security) and more liberal on others (e.g., amnesty). The marked liberalization in immigration opinion among Democrats has left partisans more divided on immigration than at any point since national surveys began consistently measuring immigration opinion in the late twentieth century.
Authoritarianism and support for Trump and Clinton in the 2016 primaries
2023. Research & Politics.
Research in the wake of the contentious 2016 presidential primaries contends both Democrats and Republicans were internally divided along psychological lines. Specifically, MacWilliams (2016) finds authoritarian personality was strongly related to Trump support among Republican primary voters, and Wronski et al. (2018) finds authoritarianism was strongly related to Clinton support among Democratic primary voters. In this paper, I reassess the relationships between authoritarianism and 2016 primary candidate preferences for both Republicans and Democrats. I analyze two new large, probability-based surveys and generate random effects estimates using these surveys and two national surveys from Wronski et al. (2018). Overall, I find authoritarianism was moderately associated with support for Clinton over Sanders among Democratic primary voters, but weakly associated with support for Trump among Republican primary voters. My findings indicate authoritarianism may have played a more limited role in shaping Americans’ candidate preferences in the 2016 presidential primary elections than past studies have suggested.
2022. Public Opinion Quarterly (with Ashley Jardina).
Public opinion research has long demonstrated that white Americans are generally resistant to racially egalitarian policies. Using decades of national public opinion data, we re-examine opinion on race policy in the wake of considerable polarization and shifts in racial attitudes across white partisans. We find that white Democrats have in recent years shown both increasingly liberal racial attitudes and a marked increase in support for policies promoting racial equality that at times rivals the levels of support expressed by Black Americans. We also find, however, that these trends among white Democrats are tempered by heightened levels of racial resentment and continued opposition to racially egalitarian policies among white Republicans. Today, partisans appear to be far more polarized on matters of race and racism than at any point in the last three decades.
2022. Public Opinion Quarterly (with Christopher D. Johnston).
We offer novel tests of hypotheses regarding the conditional relationship of psychological needs to political ideology. Using five personality measures and a large national sample, our findings affirm that political engagement plays an important moderating role in the relationship between needs for certainty and security and political identification, values, and policy preferences. We find that needs for certainty and security are strongly associated with right-wing political identification and cultural values and policy preferences, particularly among politically engaged citizens. In the economic domain, however, we find that needs for certainty and security are typically associated with left-wing values and policy preferences among politically unengaged citizens. It is only among politically engaged citizens that such needs are associated with right-wing economic values and policy preferences. Our findings confirm the importance of heterogeneity across both ideological domain and political engagement for how psychological needs translate into political ideology in the American mass public.
How different are cultural and economic ideology?
2020. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences (with Christopher D. Johnston).
While a single left-right dimension is often used for elites, many scholars have found it useful to distinguish mass political ideology along two dimensions: an ‘economic’ dimension concerning issues of redistribution, regulation, and social insurance, and a ‘cultural’ (or ‘social’) dimension concerning issues of national boundaries and traditional morality. While economic and cultural ideology do not reduce to a single left-right dimension, they are often moderately — and sometimes strongly — correlated. These correlations vary in magnitude and direction across individuals and countries. The association of these dimensions is due, in part, to shared antecedents in psychological needs for security and certainty. However, these needs explain more variance in cultural than economic ideology, and their relationship with the latter varies across individuals and countries. Traits related to empathy, compassion, and agreeableness are an additional source of variation in mass ideology and are especially important to orientations toward inequality and thus to economic ideology.
Book Chapters
White Racial Polarization Before and After the Election of Donald Trump (2025)
in The Changing Character of the American Right, Volume I: Ideology, Politics and Policy in the Era of Trump (with Ashley Jardina).
This chapter traces white attitudinal polarization on issues of race and ethnicity before and after the 2016 election. In 2015, Donald Trump mounted an unconventional presidential campaign. Unlike predecessors from the post-Civil Rights Era, Trump’s campaign rhetoric was littered with overtly xenophobic and racist statements—a strategy that politicians had long thought was likely to backfire on a national stage. Drawing on decades of public opinion data, we demonstrate that whites’ attitudes about immigration and race were profoundly polarized by Trump’s presidential campaign. Specifically, although white Americans entered the 2016 election already somewhat polarized along partisan lines in terms of their racial, ethnic, and immigration attitudes, polarization in these areas widened after 2016. As a result, white Americans’ candidate preferences have become increasingly correlated with their racial, ethnic, and immigration attitudes.
Revise and Resubmits
New Evidence and Design Considerations for Repeated Measure Experiments in Survey Research.
R&R at American Political Science Review. (with Diana Jordan and Andrew Trexler).
We re-examine recent influential claims that repeated measure experimental designs do not introduce bias and offer large precision gains in survey research (Clifford, Sheagley, and Piston 2021). We test these claims by experimentally varying the design of six classic political science experiments across three distinct large samples of U.S. adults (total N = 13,163). In contrast to the original study, we observe consistent attenuation of treatment effects in repeated measure designs. However, this average design effect is small enough, and the precision gains large enough, that we largely affirm the recommendation to employ repeated measure designs in many practical research applications. We additionally extend the literature on repeated measure designs by exploring how several design considerations affect the bias-precision trade-off, such as the use of within-subject versus between-groups designs, the relative separation of repeated measures within single surveys, and differences in respondent characteristics across sample types.
The Heterogeneous Associations of Rural Consciousness and Political Preferences.
R&R at Political Behavior.
Although rural Americans’ sense of place-based consciousness has been an influential explanation for their right-wing politics, recent studies have often found rural consciousness is weakly associated with Republican partisanship and conservatism. Analyzing the 2020 American National Election Study (n=3,154) and reanalyzing three recent studies of rural consciousness (n=3,203), I show this incongruity is explained by heterogeneity in how rural consciousness is associated with political preferences. For politically engaged Americans, rural consciousness is associated with right-wing partisan-ideological identification and economic conservatism, as theories of rural consciousness predict. For disengaged Americans, however, rural consciousness is associated with left-wing partisan-ideological identification and economic liberalism. I contend these heterogeneous associations are consistent with politically engaged rural Americans subordinating their instrumental (material) interests relative to their symbolic (identity-based) interests. Thus, how rural consciousness translates into political preferences is contingent on rural Americans’ weighting of competing instrumental and symbolic motivations, which push the rurally-conscious in opposite directions with respect to political identification and economic preferences.
Working Papers
Available upon request: tollerenshaw@uh.edu
Unequal Punishment? Equality Before the Law, Partisanship, and Race in the United States. (with James Druckman, Rongbo Jin, Paul Lendway, and Arjun Vishwanath).
Change and More of the Same: New Racism Revisited.” (with Ashley Jardina).
Difference-in-Differences Estimates of Survey Mode Effects.
Partisan Differences in Self-Rated Health after the Onset of COVID-19.
Most Americans Understand “Liberal” and “Conservative”: Re-evaluating Self-Reported Political Ideology. (with Paul Lendway).
American Guilt and Support for Foreign Aid. (with Andrew Kenealy).