Sean Westwood

Dartmouth College · Department of Government

Political elites increasingly express interest in evidence-based policymaking, but transparent research collaborations necessary to generate relevant evidence pose political risks, including the discovery of sub-par performance and misconduct. If aversion to collaboration is non-random, collaborations may produce evidence that fails to generalize....

Scholars warn that affective polarization undermines democratic norms and accountability. They speculate that if citizens were less affectively polarized, they would be less likely to endorse norm violations, overlook copartisan politicians’ shortcomings, oppose compromise, adopt their party's views, or misperceive economic conditions. We advance r...

Significance Recent political events show that members of extreme political groups support partisan violence, and survey evidence supposedly shows widespread public support. We show, however, that, after accounting for survey-based measurement error, support for partisan violence is far more limited. Prior estimates overstate support for political...

Multiracial self-classifiers are the fastest-growing racial population in the United States. While their rise signals a departure from norms of hypodescent, little is known about the sociopolitical meanings attached to multiracial labels. Here, we develop a theoretical framework for understanding multiracials’ sense of racial group identity, linked...

Political scientists, pundits, and citizens worry that America is entering a new period of violent partisan conflict. Provocative survey data show that up to 44% of the public support politically motivated violence in hypothetical scenarios. Yet, despite media attention, political violence is rare, amounting to a little more than 1% of violent hate...

While partisan cues tend to dominate political choice, prior work shows that competing information can rival the effects of partisanship if it relates to salient political issues. But what are the limits of partisan loyalty? How much electoral leeway do co-partisan candidates have to deviate from the party line on important issues? We answer this q...

Experimental political science has changed. In two short decades, it evolved from an emergent method to an accepted method to a primary method. The challenge now is to ensure that experimentalists design sound studies and implement them in ways that illuminate cause and effect. Ethical boundaries must also be respected, results interpreted in a tra...

How do representatives reconcile public expectations of bipartisan lawmaking with the lack of compromise in recent congresses? Representatives—constrained by the actual content of legislation—position partisan legislation to increase public support. Because constituents reward this behavior, representatives reap the rewards associated with bipartis...

Scholars warn that affective polarization undermines democratic norms and accountability. If citizens increasingly detest the other party’s supporters, are they more likely to endorse norm violations, overlook copartisan politicians’ shortcomings, oppose compromise, adopt their party’s views, or misperceive economic and public health conditions? A...

Many recent studies consider the overlapping nature of major political identities. Drawing on this research, we posit that partisanship and race are so enmeshed in the public mind that events which independently trigger one of these identities can also activate the other. We find support for this in three behavioral game experiments with 5496 respo...

Partisan affective polarization is believed, by some, to stem from vitriolic elite political discourse. We explore this account by replicating several 2014 studies that examine partisan prejudice. Despite claims of elevated partisan affective polarization from pundits, this extensive replication offers no evidence of an increase in the public’s par...

While previously polarization was primarily seen only in issue-based terms, a new type of division has emerged in the mass public in recent years: Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party. Democrats and Republicans both say that the other party’s members are hypocritical, selfish, and closed-minded, and they a...

As Republican candidate for president and later 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly and vociferously that the 2016 General Election was tainted by massive voter fraud. Here we use aggregate election statistics to study Trump's claims and focus on non-citizen populations across the country, state-specific allegat...

Randomized experiments are increasingly used to study political phenomena because they can credibly estimate the average effect of a treatment on a population of interest. But political scientists are often interested in how effects vary across subpopulations—heterogeneous treatment effects—and how differences in the content of the treatment affect...

Using evidence from Great Britain, the United States, Belgium and Spain, it is demonstrated in this article that in integrated and divided nations alike, citizens are more strongly attached to political parties than to the social groups that the parties represent. In all four nations, partisans discriminate against their opponents to a degree that...

Partisanship increasingly factors into the behavior of Americans in both political and nonpolitical situations, yet the bounds of partisan prejudice are largely unknown. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the limits of partisan prejudice using a series of five studies situated within a typology of prejudice. We find that partisan prejudice p...

How does discussion lead to opinion change during deliberation? I formulate and test hypotheses based on theories of persuasion, and examine them against other possible sources of deliberative opinion change. Through detailed analysis of a nationally representative deliberative event I create a full discussion network for each small group that deli...

Chronic multitaskers perform worse on core multitasking skills: memory management, cognitive filtering and task switching, likely due to their inability to filter irrelevant stimuli [17]. Our experiment examines effects of chronic multitasking with task-relevant and irrelevant distractors on analytical writing quality. We found a general switch cos...

When defined in terms of social identity and affect toward copartisans and opposing partisans, the polarization of the American electorate has dramatically increased. We document the scope and consequences of affective polarization of partisans using implicit, explicit, and behavioral indicators. Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for...

This chapter characterizes legislators' credit-claiming efforts, demonstrating how often legislators claim credit for spending, what legislators claim credit for securing, and the amount legislators publicize. It develops accurate measures of legislators' credit-claiming rates and then shows how legislators' credit-claiming strategies reflect the t...

Constituents often fail to hold their representatives accountable for federal spending decisions—even though those very choices have a pervasive influence on American life. Why does this happen? Breaking new ground in the study of representation, this book demonstrates how legislators skillfully inform constituents with strategic communication and...

This concluding chapter provides more details about the classification of the nearly 170,000 House press releases used in this study as credit claiming or not. Making use of recent Text as Data methods, the study begins with 800 triple-hand-coded documents, providing a label for each of the press releases. The idea is to learn a relationship betwee...

This chapter examines how the emergence of the Tea Party movement corresponds with a spike in antispending rhetoric among congressional Republicans, who criticized particularistic projects that other legislators use to cultivate a personal vote. After Barack Obama's election, Republican activists mobilized to oppose the Obama administration's polic...

This chapter discusses how credit-claiming messages cause larger increase in support. It presents the results of a series of experiments that show constituents are more responsive to the action that legislators report and the type of expenditure they claim and less responsive to the amount of money legislators claim credit for securing. Indeed, Con...

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how political representation occurs on government spending decisions—one of the most consequential powers of government. Political representation in Congress is, in large part, about how elected officials decide how to spend federal money. While a large literature analyzes how district expenditures...

This chapter shows how legislators—with the help of a subtle linguistic deception and strategic bureaucrats—claim credit for grants that the representative had only an indirect role in securing. Bureaucrats create credit-claiming opportunities to cultivate support for their program, particularly when the bureaucrats are otherwise unable to manipula...

This chapter explains when strategic legislators will associate themselves with spending and how constituents are likely to allocate credit in response to legislators' credit claiming messages. The complicated appropriations process makes it nearly impossible for constituents, on their own, to track their legislators' activities. This complexity cr...

This chapter explores the implications of this study's argument for representation. The credit-claiming, credit allocation process that this study characterizes enables accountability, but it also forces one to reconsider one's priorities in representation and how one might privilege transparent communication at the expense of efficient policy outc...

This chapter demonstrates that legislators' credit-claiming efforts do more than simply bolster name recognition—they also cultivate an impression of influence over federal funds. It examines the results of an experiment conducted on a major social media website—a setting where constituents regularly receive messages like the ones used in this book...

Constituents often fail to hold their representatives accountable for federal spending decisions-even though those very choices have a pervasive influence on American life. Why does this happen? Breaking new ground in the study of representation, The Impression of Influence demonstrates how legislators skillfully inform constituents with strategic...

Much of the literature on polarization and selective exposure presumes that the internet exacerbates the fragmentation of the media and the citizenry. Yet this ignores how the widespread use of social media changes news consumption. Social media provide readers a choice of stories from different sources that come recommended from politically he...

Particularistic spending, a large literature argues, builds support for incumbents. This literature equates money spent in the district with the credit constituents allocate. Yet, constituents lack the necessary information and motivation to allocate credit this way. We use extensive observational and experimental evidence to show how legislators’...

This inquiry developed during the process of “quantitizing” qualitative data the authors had gathered for a mixed methods curriculum efficacy study. Rather than providing the intended rigor to their data coding process, their use of an intercoder reliability metric prompted their investigation of the multiplicity and messiness that, as they suggest...

the district—affect how constituents allocate credit. Legislators use credit claiming messages to influence the expenditures they receive credit for and to affect how closely they are associated with spending in the district. Constituents are responsive to credit claiming messages—they build more support than other nonpartisan messages. But contrar...

We offer a nuanced examination of the way that realism can impact internal and external validity in HCI experiments. We show that if an HCI experiment lacks realism across any of four dimensions--appearance, content, task and setting--the lack of realism can confound the study by interacting with the treatment and weakening internal or external val...

Curiously, while the efficacy of the arts for the development of multicultural understandings has long been theorized, empirical studies of this effect have been lacking. This essay recounts our combined empirical and philosophical study of this issue. We explicate the philosophical considerations that shaped the development of the arts course we s...

The rise of the internet has transformed information acquisition from a top-down process originating from media elites to a process of self-selection and searching. This raises a fundamental question about the relationship between information acquisition and opinion formation: do the processes occur in parallel or as part of a self-directed feedba...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

A major concern with internet news and social media in particular is the faction-alization of the news audience along partisan, ethnic, and/or socio-demographic lines. We explore the role of recommender traits in the selection of content and psychological processing of news stories. We present the results of a web-experiment that shows how tie stre...