Bethany L. Albertson

University of Texas at Austin | UT · Department of Government

Researchers face difficult decisions about whether to ask potential moderators before or after a survey experiment. Competing concerns exist about priming respondents before the experiment and about introducing post-treatment bias. We replicate the classic “welfare” versus “assistance to the poor” survey experiment, randomly assigning respondents t...

Contemporary politics is noteworthy for its emotional character. Emotions shape and, in turn, are elicited by partisan polarization, public opinion, and political attitudes. In this article, we outline recent work in the field of emotion and politics with an emphasis on the relationship between emotion and polarization, issue attitudes, information...

Under what conditions does conspiratorial rhetoric about election rigging change attitudes? We investigated this question using a survey experiment the day before and the morning of the 2016 US presidential election. We hypothesized that exposure to conspiratorial rhetoric about election interference would significantly heighten negative emotions (...

Emotions research in political psychology has paid insufficient attention to race, and this symposium on emotion and Black politics is a promising step forward. Race and politics scholars call attention to emotion-laden issues outside of elections and show how different life experiences interact with emotions to affect politics. At the most basic l...

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Politics is often frightening, whether because of a terrorist attack, a public health outbreak, or an immigration crisis. In this essay, we argue that when politics is threatening, an anxious public wants to feel protected. In turn, the public support leaders and policies they believe will keep them safe. In a world made threatening by terrorism, p...

The appropriateness of experiments for studying causal mechanisms is well established. However, the ability of an experiment to isolate the effect of emotion has received less attention, and in this letter we lay out a guide to manipulating and tracing the impact of emotions. Some experimental manipulations are straightforward. Manipulating an emot...

Emotions matter in politics — enthusiastic supporters return politicians to office, angry citizens march in the streets, a fearful public demands protection from the government. Anxious Politics explores the emotional life of politics, with particular emphasis on how political anxieties affect public life. When the world is scary, when politics is...

This article sheds light on what kinds of appeals persuade the US public on climate change. Using an experimental design, we assign a diverse sample of 330 participants to one of four conditions: an economic self-interest appeal, a moral appeal, a mixed appeal combining self-interest and morality and a control condition with no persuasive appeal.1...

In this article, we use the issue of immigration to explore the role of anxiety in responses to political appeals. According to previous literature, anxiety motivates citizens to learn and pay more attention to news coverage. Literature in psychology demonstrates that anxiety is associated with a tendency to pay closer attention to threatening info...

Collection and especially analysis of open-ended survey responses are relatively rare in the discipline and when conducted are almost exclusively done through human coding. We present an alternative, semiautomated approach, the structural topic model (STM) (Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi 2013; Roberts et al. 2013), that draws on recent developments...

This paper explores how multivocal appeals, meaning appeals that have distinct meanings to different audiences, work with respect to religious language. Religious language is common in politics, but there is great variation in its effectiveness. I argue that multivocal appeals can resonate as religious with select audiences but have no religious co...

What kinds of people do the public find persuasive for global causes like climate change? Are experts more persuasive than famous people or ministers? The causal mechanisms by which transnational advocacy movements are able to generate political support for their campaigns are poorly specified in the literature in international relations and public...

This article explores the effects of religious appeals by politicians on attitudes and behavior. Although politicians frequently make religious appeals, the effectiveness of these appeals and the mechanisms of persuasion are unknown. This article explores the possibility that religious language can affect political attitudes through implicit proces...

What kinds of appeals does the public find persuasive for global causes? Are arguments that appeal to so-called rational self-interest more persuasive than those that appeal to morality? The causal mechanisms by which transnational advocacy movements are able to generate political support for their campaigns are poorly specified in the literature i...

Drawing on literature on emotion and information processing, we argue there is a reciprocal effect between anxiety over the economy and the search for economic news. We expect that citizens concerned over the economic crisis should seek more news about the economy than citizens unconcerned about the economy but pay closer attention to negative news...

Television has replaced the newspaper as the major source of news for most people, and thus has the potential to inform the public and influence attitudes. A growing literature has demonstrated the immediate effects of television viewing, but the ability of a particular program to have lasting effects is less clear. In this article, we report on tw...

In the year 2000, nearly 30% of African American respondents to a national survey expressed the belief that Blacks are doing better economically than Whites. There is no evidence to suggest that African Americans are in a better economic position than Whites. Striking gaps in income, employment, and wealth continue to distinguish Black economic rea...

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