George E. MarcusWilliams College · Department of Political Science
George E. Marcus
Ph'D. Northwestern 1968
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106
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Introduction
George E. Marcus is emeritus in the Department of Political Science, Williams College. George does research in Political Psychology, Political Methodology and Elections, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior. An earlier focus has been on political tolerance. Currently his research examines the role of emotions in politics, and reimagining democratic theory in light of the insights into the ancient but now archaic opposition of reason and passion provided by neuroscience.
Additional affiliations
July 1967 - present
Publications
Publications (106)
This is the final version. If you have questions, happy to receive them.
All empirical investigations rely on formative presumptions. Over the past 70 plus years, research on emotion has long been reliant on data collected using subjective responses and by experimental exposure to target stimuli, and increasingly with various brain scanning technologies. During this period neuroscience research greatly contributed to ou...
Emotion is an increasingly influential area of research in psychology, political psychology, political science, and other social sciences. Research is best when driven by theory because the absence of theory generates research that can lack coherence and precision of language and meaning from one study to another, from one program
of research to an...
Scholarly interest in the role of emotion in accounting for how people react to political figures, events, and messages has escalated over the past two plus decades in political science and psychology. However, research on the validity of the measurement of subjective self-report of emotional responses is rather limited. We introduce here a new mea...
After a long period of inattention, began to attract greater scrutiny as a key driver of human behavior in the mid-1980s. One approach that has achieved significant influence in political science is affective intelligence theory (AIT). We deploy AIT here to begin to understand the recent rise in support for right-wing populist leaders around the gl...
How open-mindedness and dogmatism each contribute to evolutionary fitness. Which is apt depends on the conditions in which each addresses the then extant ecological challenges. Evidence is offered by experiments that present three conditions, high normtiave violations, high uncertainty, and high successful condtions, across three different topic do...
In a very lucid account, Efrén Pérez and Margit Tavits's Voicing Politics: How Language Shapes Public Opinion reports empirical studies demonstrating that language is an important foundation in nation-building. Their research makes excellent use the considerable percentage of Estonians who are proficient in Estonian and Russian, prominent languages...
The volume Divided: Open-Mindedness and Dogmatism in a Polarized World provides a current scientific understanding of open-mindedness and dogmatism, illuminates the nature and causes of polarization, and provides clues regarding how one might attempt to reduce pernicious forms of polarization. To do so, this volume brings together a diverse group o...
In this paper we present three operationalizations for measuring emotion: valence, i.e., a one bipolar dimensional conception; bivariate, i.e, a two dimensional conception; and, the affective intelligence conception, i.e., a three dimensions conception. Using the ANES's newly introduced nine-item emotion word battery measuring how people feel about...
Three different conceptions of emotion are evident in political science research. Each emerged at a different period of time. Each has persevered, remaining influential to this day. These conceptions differ as to what emotions are, what each proposes as the proper taxonomic configuration of emotion, and what functions emotions serve as influences o...
This is an ongoing (hence partial) bibliography including articles, chapters, and books, that strike me as information on the topic of measuring emotion. Additions are most welcome - just email them to me. The current version is 2.8.
Emotion has become an increasing influential area of research in psychology, political psychology, political science and other social sciences. Normally research is driven by theory. As such it is worth considering how well the current emotion research programs meet the requirements of a full blown theory. Among these, in alphabetical order, are: a...
book review of Gwyneth H. McClendon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 248p.
We are grateful to John Jost for carefully engaging with our work and presenting a different interpretation of our findings on the effects of fear and anger stemming from the November 13, 2015, Paris attacks on the propensity to vote for the far right. Jost advances a model that holds that anger mediates the effect of fear on support for the far ri...
In this Democracy Papers essay, George E. Marcus addresses the important role that emotions play in politics. In a timely contribution to essays on the Anxieties of Democracy, Marcus delves into what we might broadly call the anxieties of citizens, distinguishing between the political consequences of fear and anger. In order to e!ectively address n...
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. To broaden our understanding of these...
The conjecture that negative emotions underpin support for far‐right politics is common among pundits and scholars. The conventional account holds that authoritarian populists catalyze public anxiety about the changing social order and/or deteriorating national economic conditions, and this anxiety subsequently drives up support for the far right....
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. Whe...
The finding that threat increases levels of authoritarianism has been well established in political research. The questions of individual differences and the psychological mechanism behind this switch, however still remain open as current literature offers two contrasting views. One line of research argues that threat increases authoritarianism amo...
2015 APSA Conference Paper - on Disposition, Situation, and Context
![Figure A1. Fear. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]](profile/George-Marcus/publication/314514305/figure/fig3/AS:553391961985025@1508950333511/Figure-A1-Fear-Color-figure-can-be-viewed-at-wileyonlinelibrarycom_Q320.jpg)
![Figure A2. Anger [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]](profile/George-Marcus/publication/314514305/figure/fig4/AS:553391961985026@1508950333913/Figure-A2-Anger-Color-figure-can-be-viewed-at-wileyonlinelibrarycom_Q320.jpg)
The finding that threat increases levels of authoritarianism has been well established in political research. The questions of individual differences and the psychological mechanism behind this switch, however still remain open as current literature offers two contrasting views. One line of research argues that threat increases authoritarianism amo...
Some scholars assert that political ideology is a deep, enduring and fundamental orientation persistent through life. One school of thought holds that the concept of ideological identification can explain why liberals and conservatives display enduring differences not only on substantive issues but also on how they go about making political judgmen...
The shift to attention on emotion and politics takes us back to the early '80s – a time when the cognitive revolution was well ensconced in both political science and psychology. [1] When I began with my interest in emotion, the route I took – to derive theoretical and methodological (broadly defined) guidance from neuroscience research on emotion...
Political psychology applies what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. It examines citizens’ vote choices and public opinion as well as how political leaders deal with threat, mediate political conflicts, and make foreign policy decisions. The second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology gathers together a dist...
Although the rational choice approach toward political behavior has been severely criticized, its adherents claim that competing models have failed to offer a more scientific model of political decisionmaking. This measured but provocative book offers precisely that: an alternative way of understanding political behavior based on cognitive research...
Though I am sympathetic to the program of research that John Hibbing advances, I raise four issues with the claims he presents. I argue that political science has not been slow to adopt an interest in biology. I argue that like all perspectives on how to advance knowledge, neurobiology must win its place by generating demonstrable results central t...
Democracy can take different institutional forms and each has its advocates. All variants, however, rest on shared foundational conceptions. Though not to the same degree, all theories of democracy rely on specific conceptions of thought, action, knowledge, and justice. For each of these concepts, our understanding of reason and emotion is deeply i...
The theory of affective intelligence has emerged as the principal theory of pre-conscious affective appraisal systems. In the early 1980s psychologist Robert Zajonc (1980) argued that preferences arise on mere exposure to stimuli without the necessity of conscious awareness. Shortly thereafter neuroscientists identified the brain systems that have...
One of the major assumptions of John Zaller's RAS model of public opinion is that people need explicit cues from partisan elites in order to evaluate persuasive messages. This puts the public in the position of a passive audience, unable to scrutinize information or make independent decisions. However, there is evidence that people can, under some...
This chapter looks at the role of emotion in public opinion, first discussing how emotion has been understood and theorized by various scholars. Next, it views the present research on the consequences of emotion for political behaviour and public opinion, and ends with a review of the contribution of emotion to the study of certain substantive doma...
The theory of affective intelligence posits that an individual's emotions help govern a reliance on political habits or, alternatively, deliberation and attention to new political information. Some of the evidence adduced draws on the fact that voters who are anxious about their own party's candidate do not rely blindly on their partisanship but in...
In this paper we report on a methodological project to systematically assess a new alternative format for obtaining reliable and valid measures of affective response to stimulated online news stories about terrorist threats. The new method, relies on a slider item format which allows subjects to move an indicator up or down to indicate how much or...
Why do people practice citizenship in a partisan rather than in a deliberative fashion? We argue that they are not intractably disposed to one type of citizenship, but instead adopt one of two different modes depending on the strategic character of current circumstances. While some situations prompt partisan solidarity, other situations encourage p...
Employing a specially designed survey experiment with a large sample size and extensive measurement batteries, we examine and contrast the roles played by personality traits and emotional states in shaping political attention, openness to new ideas, and an inclination toward cooperation. Of particular concern is the possibility that the evident emo...
In this paper we report on a methodological project to systematically assess a new alternative format for obtaining reliable and valid measures of affective response to stimulated online news stories about terrorist threats. The project compares "slider" and "radio button" formats with representative samples of adult respondents in an online survey...
A large body of psychological research on citizen competence has resoundingly suggested that citizens are ill-equipped to meet the demands of sound democratic decision making. This chapter challenges this view, arguing that democratic politics presents a wide array of challenges, each demanding different civic skills. In particular, it contends tha...
In this paper we report on a project to systematically assess alternative item formats for obtaining reliable and valid measures of affective response to political stimuli. The project compares "slider" and "radio button" formats with a sample of adult respondents in an online survey. The slider item format allows subjects to move a labeled indicat...
The theory of affective intelligence dichotomizes challenging situations into threatening and risky ones. When people perceive a familiar threat, they tend to be dogmatic and partisan, since they are mobilizing decisive action based on habitual behaviors and nearly instinctual perceptions that have proved their worth in similar situations. When fac...
Emotions enable people to navigate various 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 article, the authors i...
This chapter, which discusses the varying centrality of emotional concepts in theorizing about political behavior, also addresses the character of the phenomenon of emotion itself, particularly the question of its structure. It then considers the role played by human emotions in a theory of political thinking and behavior, and how affect and cognit...
Passion and emotion run deep in politics, but researchers have only recently begun to study how they influence our political thinking. Contending that the long-standing neglect of such feelings has left unfortunate gaps in our understanding of political behavior, The Affect Effect fills the void by providing a comprehensive overview of current rese...
Emotion, after a modest hiatus during the “cognitive revolution,” has reemerged of late to become a subject of significant attention in political science.1 The other contributions in this volume give ample evidence of the added understanding we gain by including emotion into the theoretical and empirical mix. Our entry in this volume turns to a que...
Common sense recognizes emotion's ability to influence judgments. We argue that affective processes, in addition to generating feeling states, also influence how political cognition is manifested. Drawing on the theory of affective intelligence, we examine the role that anxiety plays in how and when people rely on predispositions and when they rely...
Thinking About Political Psychology. Edited by James H. Kuklinski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 354p. $65.00 - - Volume 1 Issue 2 - George E. Marcus
Understanding emotion has for a very long time been central to the ongoing attempt to understand human nature. And this understanding has also been central in the debate about the proper political regime that human nature can sustain..Indeed some have argued that it was concern about the noxious impact of emotion that gave rise to philosophy in anc...
... from the very outset, political thinkers and historians have drawn on insights from what we now think of as psychology, although as a discipline psychology would not achieve its current status as a scientific field within the university structure until centuries later. Political psychologists seek to answer political questions, to gain an under...
Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology brings together some of the research on citizen decision making. It addresses the questions of citizen political competence from different political psychology perspectives. Some of the authors in this volume look to affect and emotions to determine how people reach political judgements,...
The study of emotion in politics has been active, especially as it relates to the personality of political leaders and as an explanation for how people evaluate significant features around them. Researchers have been divided into two groups - those who study leaders and those who study publics. The research programs have also been divided between t...
There is substantial evidence that intolerance arises from perceptions of difference. A prevailing view holds that even if intolerance is understandable as a defense mechanism, or as an attitude intended to ward of threatening groups and noxious attitudes, it is often the result of human irrationality and indulgence of prejudice. This conclusion is...
With Malice toward Some: How People Make Civil Liberties Judgments addresses an issue integral to democratic societies: how people faced with a complex variety of considerations decide whether or not to tolerate extremist groups. Relying on several survey-experiments, Marcus, Sullivan, Theiss-Morse, and Wood identify and compare the impact on decis...
An edited volume with empirical researchers engaging with political philosophers - chapters and commentaries
By incorporating emotionality, we propose to enrich information-processing models of citizens' behavior during election campaigns. We demonstrate that two distinct dynamic emotional responses play influential roles during election campaigns. Feelings of anxiety, responsive to threat and novelty, stimulate attention toward the campaign, political le...
The article reviews the three major theoretical approaches to emotions in psychology: valence, discrete, and circumplex models. Recent evidence that supports the circumplex model is reviewed. Current applications of circumplex (i.e., two dimensional) emotional response models to voting behavior are reviewed. Underlying the descriptive aspects of th...
Converse developed the concept of ideological constraint to describe the American electorate. His finding that the electorate demonstrates little ideological constraint has been taken, and continues to be taken, as evidence of diminished capacity, a failure to meet the standards democratic theory requires. Converse's article has lead to two challen...
Over the past two decades psychological models of affect have changed from valence (one dimensional) models to multiple dimensional models. The most recent models, circumplex models, are two dimensional. Feeling thermometer measures, which derive their theoretical logic from earlier (valence) models of emotional appraisal, are shown to be confounde...
This path-breaking book reconceptualizes our understanding of political tolerance as well as of its foundations. Previous studies, the authors contend, overemphasized the role of education in explaining the presence of tolerance, while giving insufficient weight to personality and ideological factors. With an innovative methodology for measuring le...
In recent years, political theorists and social scientists have sought to assess the contemporary relevance and validity of a so-called classical doctrine of democracy in light of empirical evidence emphasizing the apathy, ignorance, incompetence, and/or authoritarian inclinations of ordinary citizens. Elite or revisionist theories have urged a dra...
Over the past 25 years a number of conclusions concerning the development of political tolerance have come to be well accepted in the literature on political behavior. There are, however, two persist- ing problems with the studies that have generated thesefindings: they have relied on a content-biased measure of tolerance, and havefailed to examine...
At that time, 1980, most research on political tolerance used invalid measurement of political tolerqance. Using the Least-Liked Method, this commentary shows that there is little difference in the level of political tolrance as one moves from smaller towns to larger cities. Urbanity does not impact the level of political tolerance.
This article proposes an alternative conceptualization of political tolerance, a new measurement strategy consistent with that conceptualization, and some new findings based upon this measurement strategy. Briefly put, we argue that tolerance presumes a political objection to a group or to an idea, and if such an objection does not arise, neither d...
Recent research into the structure of public attitudes suggests that levels of "constraint" in the mass public increased substantially between 1956 and 1964, largely in response to the ideological nature of the 1964 presidential election. This article examines the validity of this interpretation. It suggests that constraint in the mass public proba...
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. Ideological constraint is shown to vary with the degree of c...
This article is an outgrowth of a dissatisfaction with current conceptualizations and operationalizations of political ideology. It is argued that current operationalizations of the structure and the content of belief systems are confounded with one another. Thus, findings that indicate that mass publics have unsophisticated ideologies (i.e., struc...
Questions
Question (1)
I noticed today a paper listed as citing my work (Djupe & Neiheisel - 2021 - Political Behavior - The dimensions and effects of reciprocity in political tolerance study). The paper actually cites three different publications I co-authored. Does that count as one or three citations? I noticed previously other such notices, that I had been cited, wherein it was actually more than one of my publications. So, one, three? What’s the methodology? Thanks, not urgent!
George E. Marcus
