Shana Kushner Gadarian

Syracuse University | SU · Department of Political Science

In addition to social determinants of health, such as economic resources, education, access to care and various environmental factors, there is growing evidence that political polarization poses a substantial risk to individual and collective well-being. Here we review the impact of political polarization on public health. We describe the different...

A wide range of empirical scholarship has documented a partisan gap in health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, but the political foundations and temporal dynamics of these partisan gaps remain poorly understood. Using an original six-wave individual panel study (n = 3,000) of Americans throughout the course of the COVID-...

How does the public assess the Supreme Court and its work? Using data from three surveys conducted over a span of ten years, we show that individuals’ policy preferences drive evaluations of the Court and its willingness to reform the Court. We find strong evidence that the Court’s hybrid legal-political nature enables a unique form of policy-motiv...

Several studies demonstrate gender and partisan differences among Americans in COVID-19 socioeconomic consequences, attitudes, and behaviors. Using six waves of panel survey data, this article explores the intersection of gender and party across COVID-19 mitigation behaviors, concerns, and policy preferences. We observe small gender gaps on several...

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...

For many years political psychology and scholars of politics in general neglected the study of emotion. Whatever the reasons for neglect, it no longer holds true. Emotions are best understood as reactions to signals about the significance that circumstances hold for an individual’s goals and well-being. The source of those signals can be external o...

Travel bans were a globally prevalent policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, travel bans against China and European countries proved a broadly popular mitigation tool among Americans. Why did Americans support COVID-19 travel bans? We fielded two novel survey experiments, surveying 3000 American citizens across five waves (...

Electoral rules can affect who wins and who loses elections. Most cities select office holders through plurality rule, but an alternative, ranked-choice voting (RCV), has become increasingly popular. RCV requires voters to rank candidates, instead of simply selecting their most preferred candidate. Observers debate whether RCV will cure a variety o...

It is widely agreed that dissatisfaction with Supreme Court decisions harms the Court’s standing among the public. However, we do not yet know how or why Court performance affects legitimacy. We examine the role that mass perceptions of the Supreme Court’s institutional nature—particularly how “political” it is—plays in assessments of its legitimac...

Policy Points Mass vaccination is essential for bringing the COVID-19 pandemic to a close, yet substantial disparities remain between whites and racial and ethnic minorities within the United States. Online messaging campaigns featuring expert endorsements are a low-cost way to increase vaccine awareness among minoritized populations, yet the effic...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has affected the lives of all Americans, but the severity of the pandemic has been experienced unevenly across space and time. Some states saw sharp rises in COVID‐19 cases in early March, whereas case counts rose much later in the rest of the country. In this article, we examine the relationship between exposure to COVID‐19 a...

The partisan politics and polarized messaging surrounding COVID-19 have attracted wide interest. We present the findings of a novel survey experiment, fielded March 21-23, 2020, on a nationally-representative sample of Americans. We found no statistically significant effects of partisan endorsements or messaging from President Trump on a wide range...

Objective To study the U.S. public’s health behaviors, attitudes, and policy opinions about COVID-19 in the earliest weeks of the national health crisis (March 20–23, 2020). Method We designed and fielded an original representative survey of 3,000 American adults between March 20–23, 2020 to collect data on a battery of 38 health-related behaviors...

Acts of terror lead to both a rise of an extended sense of fear that goes beyond the physical location of the attacks and to increased expressions of online hate. In this longitudinal study, we analyzed dynamics between the exposure to online hate and the fear of terrorism after the Paris attacks in November 13, 2015. We hypothesized that exposure...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of all Americans, but the severity of the pandemic has been experienced unevenly across space and time. Some states saw sharp rises in COVID-19 cases in early March, whereas case counts rose much later in the rest of the country. In this article, we examine the relationship between exposure to COVID-19 a...

The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics. By Davin Phoenix. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 282 pp., $29.99 paperback - Shana Kushner Gadarian

Terrorist attacks can instigate widespread and long-lasting fear. Mass media can enforce fear by framing the events and affecting their perceptions. We implemented a news experiment to investigate the fear-triggering effects of different types of terrorist threats. We manipulated the type of terrorist group in three scenarios: a homegrown Islamist...

Voters use heuristics to help them make decisions when they lack information about political choices. Candidate appearance operates as a powerful low-information cue. However, widely held stereotypes mean that reliance on such a heuristic can reduce support for candidates of color. We argue that racial prejudices are more likely to dominate decisio...

This article examines the potentially buffering effect of generalized social trust on fear in the aftermath of terrorist attacks and in situations of terrorist threat. It draws on comparative, longitudinal survey data, examining the cases of the 2011 Utøya terrorist attack in Norway, the 2016 Nice attack in France and the 2017 Barcelona attack in S...

Many U.S. elections provide voters with precious little information about candidates on the ballot. In local contests, party labels are often absent. In primary elections, party labels are not useful. Indeed, much of the time, voters have only the name of the candidate to go by. In these contexts, how do voters make decisions? Using several experim...

Prospective parents have long been able to learn details about their offspring's DNA, and social scientists have demonstrated that this form of genetic information influences reproductive decision-making. Now, new tests offer adults information about their own genetic risk for common diseases that begin later in life, raising new questions about wh...

Political scientists have increasingly looked to the role that disgust plays in shaping public opinion and attitudes. This emotion plays an important role in building and reinforcing boundaries in the polity. It is particularly important in shaping attitudes toward gay rights. We analyze data from the 1993 American National Election Studies (ANES)...

A key curiosity in the operation of the American regulatory state lies with its hybrid structure, defined by centralized, bureaucratic approaches but also more decentralized actions such as lawsuits brought by private citizens in the courts. While current research on these two pathways focuses at the elite level—exploring how and why political acto...

While higher education is associated with healthy lifestyles and health literacy, it remains unclear whether education shapes reactions to varying levels of genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this study, participants (N = 701) in the National Genetic Risk Survey Experiment (NGRISE) received a hypothetical genetic risk assessment for AD (...

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...

Despite dramatic progress in winning election to political office, women remain underrepresented at all levels of government in the USA. A great deal of research has focused on institutional barriers to equal representation, particularly at the city level. Yet, the findings have been inconsistent across studies and little attention has been paid to...

Medical sociologists contend that we are living in an era of surveillance medicine, in which the emphasis on risk blurs the lines between health and disease. Yet, data to examine these claims are generally drawn from patients, raising questions about whether this modern experience of medical risk extends beyond the clinic to healthy people in the l...

Journalists, candidates, and scholars believe that images, particularly images of war, affect the way that the public evaluates political leaders and foreign policy itself, but there is little direct evidence on the circumstances under which political elites can use imagery to enhance their electoral chances. Using National Election Studies (NES) p...

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...

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine public opinion on major policy issues in genetics and genomics, including federal spending on genetic research, the perceived significance of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, and whether clinicians should be involved in direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Methods: This was a sur...

This paper uses the elections of 1980 to 2004 to illustrate that political candidates from opposing parties face different incentives in mentioning foreign policy during campaigns and in taking foreign policy positions. The paper demonstrates that citizens connect their own foreign policy views clearly to their evaluations of Republican candidates,...

In this project, we examine the effect of anxiety over the H1N1 flu on trust and learning. We hypothesize that anxiety will increase trust in government, and we measure trust in a variety of governmental and non-governmental sources in order to see if the relationship between anxiety and trust is indiscriminate, or confined to certain actors. We al...

In this paper, I argue that the features of the media environment after 9/11, particularly the media’s emphasis on threatening information and evocative imagery, increased the public’s probability of supporting the policies advocated by political leaders, principally the president. Using the National Election Studies 2000–2004 panel and a controlle...

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...

We suggest that the 2003 war in Iraq received high levels of public support because the Bush administration successfully framed the conflict as an extension of the war on terror, which was a response to the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our analysis of Bush's speeches reveals that the administration con...

Abstract will be provided by author.

In times of crisis, citizens turn to political leaders and the media to make sense of new and threatening events. In this paper, I argue that the features of the media environment after 9/11, particularly the media’s emphasis on threatening information and evocative imagery, increased the public’s probability of supporting the policies advocated by...