Kevin J. Mullinix

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of Kansas

Objectives Discourse about criminal justice in the USA increasingly revolves around wrongful convictions. Research has documented the emergence of the “innocence frame,” but relatively little is known about its effects on public opinion. We utilize framing theory to examine how various presentations of wrongful conviction information affect attitud...

What impacts people’s willingness to restrict the civil liberties of suspected terrorists? For decades, social scientists have studied the dynamics that shape political tolerance, and increasingly, scholars examine the effects of terrorism for people’s willingness to limit civil liberties in pursuit of security. We argue that the social categorizat...

The American public has affectively polarized such that partisans increasingly dislike the “other side,” and this may have deleterious consequences for a representative democracy. Yet, efforts to reduce partisan hostility arrive at mixed results. We propose a new approach that involves strategically priming civic norms with language tailored to a t...

A voluminous literature examines whether empathy—the capacity to share other people’s perspectives and feelings—mitigates prejudice and improves intergroup relations. We know less about the impact of empathy for policy preferences. We theorize that the effects of empathy on policy attitudes are, at times, contingent on partisanship. Social identity...

Since 1989, more than 3000 people are known to have been exonerated after being wrongly convicted in the United States. Each one of these cases represents a gross miscarriage of justice; they are stories of lives upended by a criminal legal system gone awry. Yet, this number just scratches the surface and does not capture the full breadth of wrongf...

Controversial cases of police use of force against minority civilians have become a ubiquitous feature of news headlines, and videos of these interactions between citizens and government actors have placed them in the public sphere. In this paper, we examine the feedback effects of these publicized incidents. Using a unique survey-experiment implem...

Wrongful convictions are an increasing salient feature of criminal justice discourse in the United States. Many states have adopted reforms to mitigate the likelihood of wrongful convictions, discover errors, and provide redress in the wake of exonerations, yet we know little about why some are seemingly more committed to reducing such errors than...

Compulsory voting is known to increase turnout and produce a more representative electorate, but there is considerable debate about whether it stimulates political learning. Analyses of political knowledge using cross‐national and intranational observational data arrive at mixed conclusions. Experimental research is similarly inconclusive. We attem...

Significance In experiments, the degree to which results generalize to other populations depends critically on the degree of treatment effect heterogeneity. We replicated 27 survey experiments (encompassing 101,745 individual survey responses) originally conducted on nationally representative samples using online convenience samples, finding very h...

Past research has found that citizens will support either side of a policy debate if their party endorses it, regardless of the policy details. Such results cast doubt on the electorate’s ability to direct and constrain public officials. Yet other studies find that people give priority to policy information in their decision-making. We hypothesize...

A growing literature documents racial disparities throughout the American criminal justice system. Yet, even as this evidence accumulates and garners increasing media attention, we know relatively little about the consequences of this type of information for public opinion. We incorporate insights from attribution theory to suggest that people diff...

Party identification may shape interpretations of election integrity and vote counting. We use a nationally representative survey experiment to not only test this expectation but, more importantly, to assess the broader political conditions that accentuate or attenuate partisanship’s influence. Consistent with hypotheses, partisans’ views of electi...

Survey and laboratory experiments are increasingly common in political science. Investment in experimental data collection comes with costs and benefits, particularly for graduate students and advisers. This article describes a set of institutionalized procedures we have adopted with the goal of capitalizing on the advantages that come with experim...

While a sense of civic duty has long been perceived as important for political participation, little is known about its implications for political preference formation. I argue that civic duty has salubrious effects for opinion formation by dampening partisan distortions in decision making. I theorize that a heightened sense of civic duty stimulate...

An enduring and increasingly acute concern—in an age of polarized parties—is that people’s partisan attachments distort preference formation at the expense of relevant information. For example, research suggests that a Democrat may support a policy proposed by Democrats, but oppose the same policy if proposed by Republicans. However, a related body...

Survey experiments have become a central methodology across the social sciences. Researchers can combine experiments’ causal power with the generalizability of population-based samples. Yet, due to the expense of population-based samples, much research relies on convenience samples (e.g. students, online opt-in samples). The emergence of affordable...

Elite polarization has reshaped American politics and is an increasingly salient aspect of news coverage within the United States. As a consequence, a burgeoning body of research attempts to unravel the effects of elite polarization on the mass public. However, we know very little about how polarization is communicated to the public by news media....

How does the public evaluate candidates in presidential debates? Previous literature often points to attitude reinforcement, but much of this research ignores heterogeneous effects between individuals. This article builds upon research on debate evaluations and motivated reasoning to isolate which individuals—beyond basic partisan differences—are a...

This article focuses on four policies that a number of cities are using to make businesses more accountable for the development subsidies that they receive (cost–benefit analysis, effectiveness measurement, performance agreements, and clawback clauses). Using data from International City Management Association’s 2009 Economic Development Survey sup...

The intersection of public policy and public opinion has fostered the development of an extensive body of scholarly literature. Much of the research strives to disentangle the relationship between policy and opinion. For this rich area of study to continue to flourish, it is imperative that innovations in public opinion are grasped and utilized. In...