Authors:Mónica Ferrín, Gema García-Albacete, Irene Sánchez-Vítores Abstract: Research & Politics, Volume 9, Issue 3, July-September 2022. The implications of the persistent gender gap in political knowledge are a puzzle that the literature is still disentangling; and research has evidenced important differences in the way women and men respond to survey questions. We argue in this article that political knowledge survey items not only inform about differences in cognition but also about other latent traits related to gender stereotyping. Gender stereotypes around political knowledge push men to be knowledgeable but not so much women, which we expect to affect men and women’s survey responses differently. To test this expectation, we explore response times of do not know answers to political knowledge items. Our results show that men, particularly those who declare being interested in politics, take longer than women to admit that they do not know the answer to political knowledge items. Citation: Research & Politics PubDate: 2022-08-05T07:14:37Z DOI: 10.1177/20531680221117454 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 3 (2022)
Authors:Christoph G. Nguyen, Sabrina J. Mayer, Susanne Veit Abstract: Research & Politics, Volume 9, Issue 3, July-September 2022. When does anger lead to greater polarization' As societal polarization and political polarization increase so does academic interest in its antecedents. One important cause of polarization appears to be anger. However, existing research linking anger and political polarization has focused primarily on the context of partisanship and did not distinguish between different types of anger nor different forms of polarization. To address this gap in the literature, we analyze how generalized versus issue-specific anger amplify issue-based and affective polarization in the highly charged context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We test these relationships through a survey experiment embedded in a national German sample (n = 2857) and show that anger is linked to polarization. However, we also show that different forms of anger influence different aspects of polarization. Issue polarization is driven primarily by generalized anger, while corona-specific anger increases affective polarization. Together, these results underline the importance of understanding the emotional nuances of polarization. More generally, the results illustrate the problems policy makers face when navigating heavily contested and emotionally charged topics. While increased anger may be helpful for mobilizing support among already supportive citizens, it does little to convince skeptical citizens and carries the cost of increasing societal polarization. Citation: Research & Politics PubDate: 2022-08-05T06:09:39Z DOI: 10.1177/20531680221116571 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 3 (2022)
Authors:Owura Kuffuor, Giancarlo Visconti, Kayla M Young Abstract: Research & Politics, Volume 9, Issue 3, July-September 2022. A natural experiment is a real-world situation that generates as-if random or haphazard assignment to treatment. Geographic or administrative boundaries can be exploited as natural experiments to construct treated and control groups. Previous research has demonstrated that matching can help enhance these designs by reducing imbalances on observed covariates. An important limitation of this empirical approach, however, is that the results are inherently local. While the treated and control groups may be quite similar to each other, they could be substantially different from the target population of interest (e.g., a country). We propose a simple design inspired by the idea of template matching to construct generalizable geographic natural experiments. By matching our treated and control groups to a template (i.e., the target population), we obtain groups that are similar to the target population of interest and to each other, which can increase both the internal and external validity of the study. Citation: Research & Politics PubDate: 2022-07-13T03:35:43Z DOI: 10.1177/20531680221113763 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 3 (2022)
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