The 2023 CPAC will explore the behavioral and emotional underpinnings of modern politics. The invited speakers are Graeme Robertson (UNC Chapel Hill), Adeline Lo (Wisconsin-Madison), Stephanie Zonszein (UC Berkeley), Jonathan Renshon (Wisconsin-Madison), Jessica Gottlieb (Houston), Ana Bracic (Michigan State), and Chagai Weiss (Stanford). This event will be held in person at the Department of Political Science, Seigle 248.
The graduate student organizers for this year’s CPAC are Ipek Sener and Jeremy Siow.
You can view the conference program from this link.
Ana Bracic (Michigan State)
Title:
Give Me Your Christian, Your Manly, Your Abled: Exclusionary Visions of Nationality and Belonging
Abstract:
Are people likely to support some refugees, but not others, in their bid for entry into the country? In this paper, we argue that ascriptive nationalism — or views about categorical imperatives for membership as a model citizen — shapes support for granting entry to refugees such that we see systematic discrimination against refugees with particular attributes. We hypothesize that respondents will express different levels of support towards refugees based on their gender, sexuality, marital status, country of origin, religion, English proficiency, age, and ability status. We examine these expectations using a pre-registered conjoint survey experiment with diverse national samples in two countries: the United States and Australia. Our findings support our expectations that people use various ascriptive definitions of nationalism to form their support for refugee entry, and we show that these effects are consistent across partisanship. Our results suggest that categorical exclusion stemming from ascriptive nationalism attitudes are more widespread than prior studies have shown.
Jessica Gottlieb (Houston)
Title:
Depolarizing Within the Comfort of Your Party: Experimental Evidence from Online Workshops
Abstract:
Democrats and Republicans have increasingly sorted into homogeneous physical and online spaces. While organizations and interventions have simultaneously been working to reduce partisan polarization, many of them – and virtually all that involve interpersonal relationships – rely on cross-partisan contact. In this study, we evaluate one type of depolarizing intervention that entirely sidesteps the challenge of bringing out-partisans together. An online workshop aims to change behaviors within rather than across partisan groups, teaching participants to recognize one’s own tendency toward outgroup animus and skills to challenge ingroup members when they use polarizing language. We compare effects of this intervention to another, more typical skill-building intervention focusing on cross-group behaviors. Field experimental evidence shows that only the first intervention works; good news that it is possible to reduce partisan animus without leaving the comfort of your own group, and that the opportunity to practice skills daily may be what makes the difference.
Adeline Lo (Wisconsin-Madison)
Title:
Refugees in Modern Media
Abstract:
The effects of refugee migration permeate most aspects of a recipient society, not least native inclusionary attitudes and behaviors towards refugees. While recent research has emphasized measuring the extent to which direct exposure to refugees affects inclusion, much less is known about the more frequent type of refugee exposure natives experience: exposure to refugees through media representation. This project establishes key patterns to how much and in what ways modern media represents refugee stories, how this has changed over time, and explores how major shifts in the ways refugee stories have changed affect native inclusion. We collect and study a unique television corpus from 2014-2019 covering the daily universe of a publicly broadcasted news channel in Germany throughout the period leading up to and following the globally renowned “Open Door” announcement in the Syrian refugee crisis and analyze it using image, text and sentiment analyses and conduct a nationally representative randomized survey experiment in Germany to causally identify how aspects of refugee stories impact native inclusion.
Jonathan Renshon (Wisconsin-Madison)
Title: Can Praise From Peers Promote Empathetic Behavior Towards Racial or Ethnic Outgroups?
Abstract:
Outgroup bias is a well-documented and pernicious phenomenon, manifesting in negative attitudes and behavior towards outgroups. Empathy — taking the perspective and understanding the experiences of others — holds considerable promise for attenuating outgroup bias. Yet, engaging in empathy is costly and existing interventions to encourage it are expensive and difficult to scale. Through six pilots, we develop a non-invasive, low-cost, peer praise intervention that encourages empathetic behavior towards generalized “others” by stimulating positive emotions. This research tests the hypothesis that our peer praise intervention promotes empathetic behavior among white respondents in the U.S. towards black and Latino/a Americans, a context where racial/ethnic outgroup bias is particularly durable and pernicious. We (1) measure real choice to engage in empathy with outgroups, (2) test whether effects of peer praise are durable using a panel design, and (3) explore downstream effects on attitudinal/behavioral support for historical civil rights and advocacy groups.
Graeme Robertson (UNC Chapel Hill)
Title:
Anxiety and Information: Lessons from the Covid Pandemic in Russia
Abstract:
When do consumers of pro-regime media in authoritarian settings broaden their media choices and break out of the state-sponsored bubble, potentially exposing themselves to new information that might be challenging to the regime? We address this question and the broader issue of what changes existing patterns of media consumption through the lens of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using observational data from an online survey and an emotion induction experiment conducted face-to-face with a nationally representative sample, we investigate how anxiety and associated emotions generated by the pandemic affect the information citizens consume. We find that heightened anxiety leads people to seek out more information about the virus, to consume sources other than the ones they usually turn to, and even to engage with sources with which they might normally expect to disagree. Interestingly, however, findings suggest that anxiety may make consumers of independent media more likely to cross the political divide than consumers of state media. Our findings thus contribute to understanding the role of emotions in cueing citizens’ behavior in novel or changing situations and could imply an emotional basis for pro-regime bias in source selection during crises such a pandemics or wars.
Chagai Weiss (Stanford)
Title:
Compulsory Military Service Reduces Affective Polarization: Evidence from Conscription Reforms in Europe
Abstract:
Research on remedies for affective polarization has primarily focused on psychological interventions, and limited studies consider how state institutions might depolarize voters. I argue that compulsory military service — a central state institution — can depolarize voters because it prevents early partisan sorting and increases the likelihood of contact between partisans during their impressionable years. Leveraging the staggered abolition of mandatory conscription laws in fifteen European countries and employing a regression discontinuity design, I show that men exempt from mandatory conscription report higher levels of affective polarization than men who were subject to mass conscription. This effect is mainly driven by partisan parochialism among men exempt from service and is unrelated to ideological change. My findings emphasize the potential depolarizing effects of state institutions and illustrate how the abolition of mandatory service contributed to intensified patterns of affective polarization in Europe, contributing to the literature on the institutional origins of affective polarization.
Stephanie Zonszein (UC Berkeley)
Title:
Immigrant Personal Narratives Reduce Exclusionary Attitudes Towards Immigration
Abstract:
Developing countries have increasingly become the final destination for many international migrants, with about one third living in low or middle-income countries. The arrival of new immigrants has triggered a series of material concerns among host populations, provoking anti-immigrant sentiment. In this context, we investigate how to reduce exclusionary attitudes towards immigrants in the Global South. In a series of three experimental studies in Colombia, we implement perspective-getting interventions through which participants learn about the lived experience of a Venezuelan immigrant, to assess whether personal narratives affect attitudes toward immigration policy and prejudice against immigrants. We compare two different types of narratives: portrayals that underscore immigrant strategies overcoming harsh circumstances in the host-country, and narratives that emphasize conditions of a home-country humanitarian crisis. While these types of narratives are typically used in the literature, we know little about their differential effects on outcomes. We find that narratives underscoring immigrant strategies reduce anti-immigrant prejudice and exclusionary policy attitudes, while narratives on home-country humanitarian crises only affect prejudice. We conjecture that portrayals of immigrant strategies affect policy attitudes because they counter concerns about the economic effects of migration. Additionally, we find suggestive evidence that the narratives’ effects are mediated, in part, by an increase in empathy towards immigrants.