Research

Peer-Reviewed Articles

  • Moniz, Philip, and William B. Swann. Forthcoming. “The Power of Trump’s Big Lie: Identity Fusion, Internalizing Misinformation, and Support for Trump.” PS: Political Science & Politics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096524001203

Former president Trump has maintained broad support despite falsely contending he was the victim of electoral fraud, also known as the “big lie.” We consider both the antecedents of this phenomenon and its consequences. We propose that Trump supporters’ already established deep personal alignment—identity fusion—with their leader predisposed them to believe the lie. Accepting it then set the foundation for other identity-protecting beliefs and attitudes. Using a three-wave panel of Trump supporters, we found the more fused they were before the 2020 election, the stronger their belief in the big lie grew between 2021 and 2024. Accepting the big lie helped solidify fusion with Trump and had consequences for related attitudes. Belief in the big lie predicted downplaying the criminal charges against Trump and supporting his authoritarian policy agenda. Fueled by and fueling further fusion, belief in the big lie is a key aspect of a larger narrative that emboldens Trump and justifies antidemocratic behavior.

Survey experiments on probability samples are a popular method for investigating population-level causal questions due to their strong internal validity. However, lower survey response rates and an increased reliance on online convenience samples raise questions about the generalizability of survey experiments. We examine this concern using data from a collection of 50 survey experiments which represent a wide range of social science studies. Recruitment for these studies employed a unique double sampling strategy that first obtains a sample of “eager” respondents and then employs much more aggressive recruitment methods with the goal of adding “reluctant” respondents to the sample in a second sampling wave. This approach substantially increases the number of reluctant respondents who participate and also allows for straightforward categorization of eager and reluctant survey respondents within each sample. We find no evidence that treatment effects for eager and reluctant respondents differ substantially. Within demographic categories often used for weighting surveys, there is also little evidence of response heterogeneity between eager and reluctant respondents. Our results suggest that social science findings based on survey experiments, even in the modern era of very low response rates, provide reasonable estimates of population average treatment effects among a deeper pool of survey respondents in a wide range of settings.

The recent surge in political authoritarianism has triggered interest in the factors that regulate its rise and fall. We explored these phenomena in the time around the January 6, 2021, insurrection in the United States. Identity fusion (synergistic union) with Trump predicted the perception that Democrats represented an existential threat to the American way of life; higher perceived threat, in turn, predicted endorsement of authoritarian actions against Democrats. Biden supporters did not display analogous effects. Among Trump supporters and, to a lesser extent, Biden supporters, fusion with the United States negatively predicted both the perception that out-party members represented an existential threat and endorsement of authoritarian actions against them. These findings provide unique insight into the role of identity in the nation’s closest brush with authoritarian takeover in over a century.

How does policy-relevant information change citizens’ policy attitudes? Though giving numerical information about social conditions has been found, at times, to change policy attitudes, why it works (or doesn’t) is poorly understood. I argue new or corrective information may not translate into policy-attitude change in part because it fails to instill a sense of need for change. Perceived problem seriousness, affect-laden judgment about the acceptability of the status quo, is therefore an important psychological mechanism through which information may change people’s minds. To perceive a problem conditions must be worse than they ought be. Previous research, however, presents numerical information without a point of reference from which to base their judgments. By contextualizing facts with reference points from the past (time) as well as other countries (space), four survey experiments show that numerical information about a range of social problems can change policy attitudes by first changing their perceived seriousness. 

In spite of its immense global impact, Republicans and Democrats disagree on how serious a problem the coronavirus pandemic is. One likely reason is the political elites to whom partisans listen. As a means of shoring up support, President Trump largely downplayed but at times hyped the severity of the virus. Do these messages influence the perceived seriousness of the virus’s death toll, how the president is evaluated as well as support for and compliance with social distancing guidelines? Results suggest that Republican identifiers had by early June crystallized their views on the virus’s seriousness, the president’s perfor- mance, and social distancing policies and behaviors. Unexpectedly, information critical of President Trump’s policy decisions produced a backlash causing people to show less concern about the virus’s death toll and rate the president’s performance even more highly.

Members of Congress take more than 2,000 trips sponsored by private organizations and interest groups every congress. Using a new data set of gift travel from 2007 to 2019 and interviews with former members of Congress, current and former congressional staffers, and staffers from interest groups that fund trips, we attempt to answer two core questions about this increasingly frequent behavior. Why do members take privately sponsored trips and what types of groups are driving this behavior? We argue that members of Congress take trips because they believe it makes them more effective legislators by exposing them to real-world consequences of their policy decisions and forcing them to build relationships with their fellow members. Trip sponsors, alternatively, seek to persuade and build relationships with members of Congress that ultimately shape their legislative coalitions. We find that trip-taking is associated with greater legislative effectiveness, in particular for Democrats, and that the provision of policy-specific information is a valuable benefit from taking these trips.

Book Chapters

Salience refers to the extent to which people cognitively and behaviorally engage with a political issue (or other object), although it has meant different things to different scholars studying different phenomena. The word originally was used in the social sciences to refer to the importance of political issues to individuals’ vote choice. It also has been used to designate attention being paid to issues by policy makers and the news media, yet it can pertain to voters as well. Thus, salience sometimes refers to importance and other times to attention—two related but distinct concepts—and is applied to different actors. The large and growing body of research on the subject has produced real knowledge about policies and policy, but the understanding is limited in several ways. First, the conceptualization of salience is not always clear, which is of obvious relevance to theorizing and limits assessment of how (even whether) research builds on and extends existing literature. Second, the match between conceptualization and measurement is not always clear, which is of consequence for analysis and impacts the contribution research makes. Third, partly by implication, but also because the connections between research in different areas—the public, the media, and policy—are not always clear, the consequences of salience for representative democracy remain unsettled.