Extensive survey and experimental research on citizens’ inattentiveness to political news has bui... more Extensive survey and experimental research on citizens’ inattentiveness to political news has built a theoretical base for understanding political judgment in the American electorate. The research, however, has a strong cognitive orientation with surprisingly little attention to the dynamic interaction between emotional and attentional factors. When emotions are addressed there has been a marked emphasis on issues of negativity and incivility and relative neglect of other emotional dimensions. Further, when explicit news stories are part of the research design they have tended to focus on unusually dramatic events or the more vitriolic electoral battles. To broaden our understanding of these potential emotional influences we assessed levels of enthusiasm, aversion and anxiety in response to brief summaries of 50 news stories of diverse character and provenance selected to be representative of quotidian news. The analysis reveals dramatic variation across news stories and across subjects responding to the same story on all three of these emotional dimensions. We also examine an unexpected inverse correlation between education and level of emotional response to news.
The sentimental citizen: emotion in democratic politics
Choice Reviews Online, 2003
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Marcus, George E., 1943-The sentimental citix... more Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Marcus, George E., 1943-The sentimental citixen: emotion in democratic politics/George E. Marcus. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-271-02211-6 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-271-02212-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) ...
The Theory of Affective Intelligence and Liberal Politics
Political competence and ideological constraint
Social Science Research, 1975
Converse's definition of ideological contraint is expanded to provide for various respondent... more Converse's definition of ideological contraint is expanded to provide for various respondent identified ideological dimensions rather than an all encompassing liberal-conservative dimension. Using this redefinition a sample of adults is shown to have high levels of ideological constraint. ...
How Voters Feel by Stephen Coleman. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2013. 275 pp. $90.00
Emotions help people navigate political environments, differentiating familiar situations where s... more Emotions help people navigate political environments, differentiating familiar situations where standard operating procedures are suitable from unfamiliar terrain when more attention is needed. While previous research identifies consequences of emotion, we know less about what triggers affective response. In this paper, we investigate what role personality has in the operation of the systems of affective intelligence. Using experimental data as well as responses from the 2000 and 2004 American National Election Studies, we first consider whether personality affects the activation of emotional response. Next, we explore the degree to which citizen attitudes like openness to information and compromise are explained by personality characteristics and subconscious emotional response. Finally, we consider the implications of these results for our normative understanding of democratic citizenship.
Page 206. 9 Disjunction and Ambivalence in Citizens' Political Outlooks Jennifer... more Page 206. 9 Disjunction and Ambivalence in Citizens' Political Outlooks Jennifer L. Hochschild In the 1950s, political scientists and pundits rediscovered the question that so worried James Madison and his companions: Is the ...
Course Title: Political Affect: the Emotional Foundation of Thinking and Feeling in Politics
The Color of Emotion and Public Attention to Economic and Terrorist Danger
The social sciences, as does science more broadly, offer a method for constructing and testing ma... more The social sciences, as does science more broadly, offer a method for constructing and testing materialist accounts of our world. The accounts we construct stand in sharp contrast to the "natural" accounts, primarily narratives, which enfold us and offer both explanation and justification. 1 Political psychology of course shares the same epistemological foundations. And, we take great comfort in our reliance on the rigors of scientific methods, analyses, the social organization of the discipline that enshrines doubt and collective criticism. 2 As my title announces, I offer an argument about the state of our discipline-what it has attempted, where it is now, and how it ought to go forward. It is my purpose to suggest that a considered inquiry ought to lead us to redirect, and thus enrich, the discipline of political psychology. My argument is that political psychology has been limited by a series of unexamined, indeed often unseen, presumptions and that in our work as scholars we would greatly benefit from a more open vision.
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