Leonie Huddy

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Stony Brook University

The concept of implicit bias – the idea that the unconscious mind might hold and use negative evaluations of social groups that cannot be documented via explicit measures of prejudice – is a hot topic in the social and behavioral sciences. It has also become a part of popular culture, while interventions to reduce implicit bias have been introduced...

This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, soc...

This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, soc...

This chapter serves as an introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology . It provides an overview of the field, focusing on key theories, topics, and empirical approaches. The chapter begins by defining political psychology as the behavior of individuals within a specific political system. This is followed by a lengthy discussion on t...

This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, soc...

There is a continuing debate over the political importance and durability of partisan attachments in European multi-party systems. Drawing on a nationally representative 5-wave panel, we provide a longitudinal test of the power of partisanship in Italy over the course of the tumultuous 2013 national elections. We find that a strong partisan affilia...

It is the task of political psychology to examine political behaviour from a psychological or socio-psychological perspective. Its topics include the analysis of political elites, especially their personalities, motives and actions, political leadership, foreign policy decision-making processes, international and ethnic conflicts and their pacifica...

In this research, we examine the role of attachment to an ideological group as a source of stability in a volatile multi-party system. In two studies conducted in Israel (N=1,320), we show that a multi-item Attachment to an Ideological Group (AIG) scale is strongly tied to vote choice and political engagement, and its effects are independent of, an...

We examine the political consequence of exposure to widely available video content of terror violence. In a two-wave survey of Americans, we assess who is exposed to, and seeks out, terror-related video content in the first wave and then observe who decides to watch raw video footage of the Boston marathon terror attack in the second. We focus cent...

Hostility between rival political partisans, referred to as affective polarization, has increased in the United States over the last several decades generating considerable interest in its reduction. The current study examines two distinct sets of factors that potentially reduce affective polarization, drawn respectively from a group-based and a po...

Does attachment to a nation enhance or dampen support for the European Union (EU)? Using the 2003 and 2013 ISSP national identity modules, we isolate and provide multi-item measures of two distinct types of national attachment-nationalism and patriotism. We find that they are positively related yet have divergent effects. We validate the measures s...

Many populist parties promote nationalistic country-first policy platforms. In the United States, the Republican Party has increasingly adopted nationalistic policies such as opposition to immigration and multilateralism, culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The increasing salience of nationalism in American politics raises three im...

Theorists of liberal nationalism argue that national identities serve as essential glue binding a nation. However, national identities can create tensions among subgroups of co-nationals and breed suspicion of outsiders. This chapter analyses the psychology of national attachments to better understand the effects of national identity, identifying t...

Theorists of liberal nationalism argue that national identities serve as essential glue holding a nation together. This picture is incomplete, however. National identities also have chauvinistic aspects that undercut or dissolve national glue by creating tensions among subgroups of co-nationals and breeding suspicion of outsiders. We analyze the ps...

De Dreu and Gross's distinction between attack and defense is complicated in real-world conflicts because competing leaders construe their position as one of defense, and power imbalances place status quo challengers in a defensive position. Their account of defense as vigilant avoidance is incomplete because it avoids a reference to anger which tr...

Public support for government welfare programs is grounded in two potentially conflicting factors: a belief in individualism which undermines support for welfare assistance, and the capacity for empathy which potentially enhances support. However, empathy is an expensive psychological commodity subject to pervasive up- and down-regulation. This stu...

In Democracy for Realists, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue provocatively that the public falls far short of ideals of democratic citizenship, and they turn to political psychology to explain the empirics of mass political behavior. But their model of group identity fails to shed much light on the origins of political behavior and gives me...

Partisanship has a powerful influence on political behavior in the United States, but its influence is less certain in European democracies. Part of the debate concerning the influence of partisanship in Europe centers on its nature. From one perspective, partisanship is seen as grounded in factors such as ratings of government performance and agre...

Partisanship has a powerful influence on political behavior in the United States but its influence is less certain in European democracies. Part of the debate concerning the influence of partisanship in Europe centers on its nature. From one perspective, partisanship is seen as grounded in factors such as ratings of government performance and agree...

There is no doubt that partisanship is a powerful influence on democratic political behavior. But there is also a lively debate on its nature and origins: Is it largely instrumental in nature and shaped by party performance and issues stances? Or is it basically a long-standing expressive identity reinforced by motivated reasoning and strong emotio...

The majority of Latinos in the United States identify with the Democratic Party, a tendency with broad political implications as Latinos become an increasingly large segment of the population. Little research, however , has delved into the origins of this preference. In this research, we contrast two explanations for Latinos' Democratic proclivitie...

Globalization, immigration and economic crisis challenge the conceptions of nations, trans-national institutions and post-ethnic societies which are central topics in social sciences' discourses. This book examines in an interdisciplinary and international comparative way structures of national identity which are in conflict with or supporting mult...

Party identification is central to the study of American political behavior yet there remains disagreement over whether it is largely instrumental or expressive in nature. We draw on social identity theory to develop the expressive model and conduct four studies to compare it to an instrumental explanation of campaign involvement. We find strong su...

Karpowitz, Mendelberg, and Mattioli's research [Politics, Groups, and Identities 3 (1): 149-177. doi:10.1080/21565503.2014.999804] on women's limited participation in small discussion groups deserves close scrutiny. In School Board meetings and five-person experimental lab groups, especially those subject to majority rule, the researchers find that...

At odds with Hibbing et al., we argue that political ideology is best explained by at least two dimensions linked to economic and social ideology. In addition, Hibbing et al's claim that conservatism is grounded in a heightened sensitivity to negative outcomes, something closely tied to the personality trait of neuroticism, does not fit with the es...

Past research indicates that diversity at the level of larger geographic units (e.g., counties) is linked to white racial hostility. However, research has not addressed whether diverse local contexts may strengthen or weaken the relationship between racial stereotypes and policy attitudes. In a statewide opinion survey, we find that black-white rac...

The Socially Mediated Internet Survey (SMIS) method is a cost-effective technique used to obtain web-based, adult samples for experimental research in political science. SMIS engages central figures in online social networks to help recruit participants among visitors to these websites, yielding sizable samples for experimental research. We present...

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...

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...

Exploration of a new integrative intellectual enterprise: the cognitive social sciences. Research in the cognitive sciences has advanced significantly in recent decades. Computational cognitive modeling has profoundly changed the ways in which we understand cognition. Empirical research has progressed as well, offering new insights into many psycho...

Some individuals in long-term marriages report intensities of romantic love comparable to individuals newly in love. How common is this? Are correlates of long-term romantic love consistent with theoretical models of love? In a random sample of 274 U.S. married individuals, 40% of those married over 10 years reported being “Very intensely in love.”...

This chapter studies the political consequences of gender differences in public opinion among the American - and global - public, examining what is currently known about the nature, persistence, and origins of different gender gaps in political involvement and attitudes. It then discusses the role that gender stereotypes play in shaping reactions t...

The 9/11 terrorist attacks have had profound effect on U.S. domestic and foreign security policy, leading to several expensive wars and the erosion of civil liberties (under the USA PATRIOT Act). We review evidence on political reactions to the 9/11 attacks and conclude that subjective reactions to terrorism played an important role in shaping supp...

The role of racial prejudice in driving white racial policy opposition has been the subject of a prolonged debate among researchers of American race relations. To a very considerable extent, this debate hinges on an ongoing dispute over the nature and measurement of racial prejudice. Contention centers, to a large degree, on the distinction between...

Political scientists have recognized that the news media serve as an important intervening variable between political issues and public opinion. The media can reinforce existing attitudes (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944), increase the salience of issues (Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Romer, Jamieson, and Aday 2003), and set the agenda for public...

There is still no broad consensus on the extent to which racial prejudice influences white Americans' political attitudes, in part because of an ongoing dispute over the nature and measurement of racial prejudice. We review measures of new, subtle forms of racism toward African-Americans and consider criticism that such views do not clearly constit...

The earliest political behavior researchers documented the powerful effects of group attachments and other socioeconomic factors on vote choice and partisan identification in the 1940s and 1950s (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Campbell et al. 1960). Yet, research interest in the group-based origins of political behavior has waxed and waned...

Men and women differ in their political attitudes and behavior, but these differencesare modest and inconsistent (Sapiro 2003). The much-discussed gender gap in voting choice and partisan preference in which women identify more strongly with the Democratic Party and give greater electoral support to Democratic candidates is real, persistent, and co...

The authors draw on data from a national random digit dial (RDD) telephone sample of 1,549 adult Americans conducted between October 15, 2001, and March 2, 2002, to explore the impact of a need for security on support for national security policies in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They examine support for protective government polici...

Researchers disagree over the definition, measurement, and expected political consequences of American patriotism, a situation that is fueled by the absence of a strong theoretical research foundation. We develop and evaluate a new measure of national attachment that is grounded in social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979), drawing on data fr...

This chapter tries to differentiate between anger and anxiety as distinct negative reactions to the Iraq war and explores their unique political effects. The distinct effects of anger and anxiety make clear the need to better understand their political consequences. The link between negative emotion and deeper levels of thought does not appear to e...

Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster that destroyed New Orleans, a major U.S. city, and it is reasonable to expect all Americans to react with sympathy and support for the disaster's victims and efforts to restore the city. From another vantage point, however, Hurricane Katrina can be seen more narrowly, as a disaster that disproportionatel...

The perception of threat and the experience of anxiety are distinct but related public reactions to terrorism. Anxiety increases risk aversion, potentially undercutting support for dangerous military action, consistent with terrorists' typical aims. Conversely, perceived threat increases a desire for retaliation and promotes animosity toward a thre...

White racial resentment is associated with opposition to a broad range of racial policies but it is unclear whether it derives from racial prejudice or stems from ideological principles. To resolve this ambiguity, we examined the impact of racial resentment on support for a college-scholarship program in which program beneficiaries' race and socioe...

White racial resentment is associated with opposition to a broad range of racial policies but it is unclear whether it derives from racial prejudice or stems from ideological principles. To resolve this ambiguity, we examined the impact of racial resentment on support for a college-scholarship program in which program beneficiaries' race and socioe...

The current forum is designed to assess the strengths and weaknesses of social identity, social dominance, and system justification as theoretical approaches to the study of intergroup relations. Each of these approaches tries to account for variation in the development of ingroup cohesion and outgroup antipathy among individual group members, acro...

1. Fear and anxiety are related emotional states that are frequently regarded as interchangeable. See Costa and McRae (1985); Öhman (2000); Panskepp (1998); LeDoux (1996).

A vibrant debate is a sure sign of a healthy theory. My current exchange with Penelope Oakes (2002) on the application of social identity theory to political phenomena provides clear evidence of the theory's positive vital signs. We may disagree over the extent to which social identity theory holds a specific road map for political research, but we...

This entry examines the conditions under which group identities become politicized, the psychology underlying this process, and the consequences of political identities for political cohesion and engagement. The political consequences of membership in various demographic and religious groups played a central role in the earliest voting studies and...

The events of 11 September 2001 have led to a higher perceived risk of terrorism in the United States. A better understanding of the political consequences of 9/11 requires a more complete accounting of the nature and consequences of perceived threat. Here, the distinction between perceived personal and national risks is examined in terms of two co...

Women politicians are a rare breed in politics, especially at the national level. Consider the makeup of elected representatives in almost any western-style democracy, with the exception of Scandinavian countries, and one discovers the same glaring absence of women. Thirty-six percent of elected representatives in the lower houses of parliament in...

This study examines the existence of compassionate support for old-age programs such as Social Security and Medicare among the non-elderly. Past research has focused on merit and equality as a basis for support of social welfare programs by examining views of recipients’ deservingness; in contrast, this study considers the extent of program support...

Interest in the concept of identity has grown exponentially within both the humanities and social sciences, but the discussion of identity has had less impact than might be expected on the quantitative study of political behavior in general and on political psychology more specifically. One of the approaches that holds the most promise for politica...

This study reevaluates the persuasive impact of emotional visual appeals within politics and examines two different explanations for their effects. One possibility is that the effects of emotive visual images are essentially superficial in nature, consistent with the view that feelings aroused by an affective image are transferred somewhat mechanic...

In this study, we analyze data on public opinion and attitudes toward labor unions from the iPOLL Databank at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (University of Connecticut), the American National Election Study, and the Current Population Survey. Despite recent developments that suggest labor unions are in decline, we find organized labor...

As we reflect on where we have been and where we are headed at the beginning of a new century, the massive changes that have occurred in women's roles in the United States and elsewhere over the last 3-4 decades emerge as perhaps one of the twentieth century's most enduring and basic legacies. A funda- mental and profound shift in public expectatio...

In past studies, researchers have drawn a conceptual distinction between old-fashioned and newer forms of racial prejudice but questions persist about their distinctiveness. We reexamine the differences between these two forms of prejudice, arguing that negative racial stereotypes are the active political ingredient in the new prejudice. We explore...

We examined the existence of gender-of-interviewer effects in two local-area surveys in which male and female interviewers were randomly assigned to interview male and female respondents. Small but consistent gender-of-interviewer effects arose on questions related to the women's movement, women's issues, and gender equality, demonstrating that, as...

Racial prejudice and the protection of realistic interests are examined as two competing explanations for Anglo opposition to bilingual education programs. Past research has left nuclear the extent to which these two theories explain opposition to policies that assist members of minority groups because the two theories generally have been treated i...

The existence of subgroup differentiation and its impact on the development of in-group bias were explored among Latinos. Consistent with prior evidence, Cubans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans were more likely than Anglos to distinguish between Latino subgroups. However, Latinos did not distinguish equally between Cubans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans....

Despite the recent electoral success of female candiates in local, state, and national elections, we find that voters' gender stereotypes have potentially negative implications for women candidates, especially when running for national office. We test the political impact of stereotypes by examining the relative importance of typical "male" and "fe...

We investigate the origins of voters' expectations of greater female competency on ''compassion'' issues, such as dealing with poverty or the aged, and greater male competency on military and defense issues. We contrast two alternative explanations: gender-trait stereotypes, emphasizing a candidate's gender-linked personality traits; and gender-bel...

Bilingual education has become politicized. It is surrounded by controversy, the outcome of which may play a greater role in deciding its future as an educational program than its educational successes. To better understand this political debate and its possible outcome, the present article examines attitudes toward bilingual education among the An...

A study of non-Hispanic attitudes about bilingual education had two goals: (1) to apply symbolic politics theory to bilingual education and (2) to test the theory's assumption that the symbolic meaning of an attitude object determines which symbolic predisposition it evokes. A national sample of 1,170 non-Hispanics were surveyed via telephone inter...

A survey of 368 shopping mall patrons (mean age 37 yrs) showed that 49% listened to radio call-in psychology programs (RCPPs), although listening was usually relatively infrequent. Listeners did not differ from nonlisteners in terms of demographic variables, psychological knowledge or well-being, or previous experience with psychological services....

A survey of 368 shopping mall patrons (mean age 37 yrs) showed that 49% listened to radio call-in psychology programs (RCPPs), although listening was usually relatively infrequent. Listeners did not differ from nonlisteners in terms of demographic variables, psychological knowledge or well-being, or previous experience with psychological services....

The relationship between ADL self-assessments and physical ability was investigated using data compiled on 128 exercise class participants. Compared with community dwelling respondents, institutionalized seniors were not only less accurate in their subjective ADL estimates, but consistently underestimated their capabilities over comparable ranges o...

Threat is a pervasive concept in the study of international relations and the social sciences more generally, and its documented effects are remarkably consistent. Threat promotes intolerance, forges ingroup unity, and promotes some degree of cognitive “shutdown.” In this review, I consider the implications of threat research within the social scie...

We consider the structure of political emotions by examining the distinct political effects of anxiety and anger. We contrast a simple two dimensional valence model that emphasizes the importance of general positive and negative with a more differentiated functional model that allows for the differing effects of distinct positive and negative emoti...

Abstract We consider the structure of political emotions by differentiating between the distinct negative emotions of anger and anxiety. Past research has emphasized a two-dimensional valence model in which positive and negative affect are distinct. But recent research inpsychology challenges that view, arguing instead for a distinction among,diffe...