Yphtach Lelkes

University of Pennsylvania | UP · Annenberg School for Communication

Families are not only the first institution ever created, they are also, for most people, the first institution ever encountered. The preindustrial family structure, which was a function of local ecology and cooperation needs, instilled family members with different values, such as trust in strangers and respect for elders. These values passed thro...

Algorithms play a critical role in steering online attention on social media. Many have alleged that algorithms can perpetuate bias. This study audited shadowbanning, where a user or their content is temporarily hidden on Twitter. We repeatedly tested whether a stratified random sample of American Twitter accounts (n ≈ 25,000) had been subject to v...

We evaluate the empirical evidence interrogating the question of whether social media erodes social cohesion. We look at how networks, information exchange, and norms operate on these platforms. We also evaluate the conditions under which social media can be conducive to forming social capital and encouraging prosocial behavior. We discuss the psyc...

The dominant narrative among scholars and political pundits characterizes American partisanship as overwhelmingly negative, portraying citizens as more repelled by the opposing party than attached to their own party. To assess the valence of partisan identity, we use various measures collected from several new and existing nationally representative...

Prior research suggests that Twitter users in the United States are more politically engaged and more partisan than the American citizenry, who are generally characterized by low levels of political knowledge and disinterest in political affairs. This study seeks to understand this disconnect by conducting an observational analysis of the most popu...

Ideology is a central concept in political psychology. Here, we synthesize the scholarly debate's major themes. We first examine the ways in which ideology has been operationalized and discuss its prevalence (or lack thereof) in the mass public. This is followed by a discussion of the top-down and bottom-up forces that shape citizens' ideology. Top...

Significance How can a pluralistic republic combat dangers of tyrannical factions? In Federalist No. 10 , James Madison proposed that the problem of factions could be mitigated by expanding the political sphere. Over 200 y later, however, polarization plagues the United States, despite the likely greater diversity of issues considered in the realm...

Significance Polarization is rising while political debates are moving to online social platforms. In such settings, algorithms are used to recommend new connections to users, through so-called link recommendation algorithms. Users are often recommended based on structural similarity (e.g., nodes sharing many neighbors are similar). We show that pr...

Significance Political polarization threatens democracy in America. This article helps illuminate what drives it, as well as what factors account for its asymmetric nature. In particular, we focus on positive feedback among members of Congress as the key mechanism of polarization. We show how public opinion, which responds to the laws legislators m...

Negative partisanship is one of the most popular explanations for current levels of dysfunction in American politics. Yet, the term is used inconsistently in both academic research and the popular press. It is sometimes referred to as negative affect towards the out-party that is a more important predictor of political behavior than positive affect...

The online sphere allows people to be personally anonymous while simultaneously being socially identifiable. Twitter users can use a pseudonym but signal allegiance to a political party in their profile (e.g., #MAGA). We explore the interplay of these two dimensions of anonymity on a custom-built social media platform that allowed us to examine the...

Recent contributions have questioned the credibility of quantitative communication research. While questionable research practices (QRPs) are believed to be widespread, evidence for this belief is, primarily, derived from other disciplines. Therefore, it is largely unknown to what extent QRPs are used in quantitative communication research and whet...

Research on personality and political preferences generally assumes unidirectional causal influence of the former on the latter. However, there are reasons to believe that citizens might adopt what they perceive as politically congruent psychological attributes, or at least be motivated to view themselves as having these attributes. We test this hy...

Previous studies generally assume that barriers to internet access are largely passive. That is, exclusion from the Internet is a consequence of poorly resourced individuals, communities, and institutions. This study complicates that assumption by focusing on the active policing and gatekeeping of internet access. Specifically, we estimate the caus...

Prior research suggests that Twitter users in the United States are more politically engaged and more partisan compared to the American citizenry -- a public that is otherwise characterized by low levels of political knowledge and disinterest in political affairs. This study seeks to understand this disconnect by conducting an observational analysi...

Research on personality and political preferences generally assumes unidirectional causal influence of the former on the latter. However, there are reasons to believe that citizens might adopt what they perceive as politically congruent psychological attributes, or at least be motivated to view themselves as having these attributes. We test this hy...

Democrats and Republicans clearly dislike one another. Yet, scholars debate whether policy disagreement or partisan identity, per se, drives interparty animus. Past studies suggest the relationship between partisanship and interpersonal affect is spurious, driven by inferred policy preferences. We argue, instead, that policy preferences signal part...

There are mounting concerns that the information environment on Twitter isfragmented along ideological lines, with users ensconced into echo chambers withlimited exposure to cross-cutting views. Previous studies have typically relied on small populations of political elites or opinion leaders to appraise this level of fragmentation.This study makes...

Local news outlets have struggled to stay open in the more competitive market of digital media. Some have noted that this decline may be due to the ways in which digital platforms direct attention to some news outlets and not others. To test this theory, we collected 12.29 million responses to Google News searches within all US counties for a set o...

Recent contributions have questioned the credibility of quantitative communication research. While questionable research practices are believed to be widespread, evidence for this claim is primarily derived from other disciplines. Before change in communication research can happen, it is important to document the extent to which QRPs are used and w...

Recent events have raised concern about potential threats to democracy within Western countries. If Western citizens who are open to authoritarian governance share a common set of political preferences, then authoritarian elites can attract mass coalitions that are willing to subvert democracy to achieve shared ideological goals. With this in mind,...

Recent events have raised concern about potential threats to democracy within Western countries. If Western citizens who are open to authoritarian governance share a common set of political preferences, then authoritarian elites can attract mass coalitions that are willing to subvert democracy to achieve shared ideological goals. With this in mind...

Why do citizens rely on partisan cues when forming political judgments? We assessed the relative importance of two motives for partisan cue-following using a series of survey experiments. The paper is accepted for publication in The Journal of Politics

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...

Many hoped that social networking sites would allow for the open exchange of information and a revival of the public sphere. Unfortunately, conversations on social media are often toxic and not conducive to healthy political discussions. Twitter, the most widely used social network for political discussions, doubled the limit of characters in a twe...

The right-left dimension is ubiquitous in politics, but prior perspectives provide conflicting accounts of whether cultural and economic attitudes are typically aligned on this dimension within mass publics around the world. Using survey data from 99 nations, we find not only that right-left attitude organization is uncommon, but that it is more co...

Race of interviewer effects are presumed to occur in surveys because respondents answer questions differently depending on interviewer race. This article explored an alternative explanation: differential respondent recruitment. Data from telephone interviews conducted during the 2008 U.S. Presidential election campaign by major survey organizations...

At least two theories have been offered that explain the rise of affective polarization. Some scholars, relying on social identity theory, argue that as the relevance of party identification increased, Americans became more likely to see their in-party in positive terms and the out-party in negative terms. Other scholars argue that affective polari...

Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became our Identity. By Lilliana Mason. University of Chicago Press, 2018. 192p. $105.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. - Volume 16 Issue 4 - Yphtach Lelkes

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...

Political scientists who study the interplay between personality and politics overwhelmingly rely on short personality scales. We explore whether the length of the employed personality scales affects the criterion validity of the scales. We show that need for cognition (NfC) increases reliance on party cues, but only when a longer measure is employ...

American partisans are far more hostile towards out-party members than they were 40 years ago. While this phenomenon, often called affective polarization, is well-documented, political scientists disagree on its cause. One group of scholars believes that affective polarization is driven by processes related to social identity theory. In particular,...

Political scientists who study the interplay between personality and politics overwhelmingly rely on short personality scales. We explore whether the length of theemployed personality scales affects the criterion validity of the scales. We show that Need for Cognition (NfC) increases reliance on party cues, but only when a longermeasure is employed...

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...

Moral foundations theory (MFT) posits that binding moral foundations (purity, authority, and ingroup loyalty) are rooted in the need for groups to promote order and cohesion, and that they therefore underlie political conservatism. We present evidence that binding foundations (and the related construct of disgust sensitivity) are associated with lo...

We examine three under-studied factors in selective exposure research. Linking issue publics and motivated reasoning literatures, we argue that selectivity patterns depend on (a) whether an individual is an issue public member; (b) the availability of balanced, pro-, and counter-attitudinal content; and (c) the evidence for a message claim (numeric...

The debate on mass polarization is itself polarized. Some argue that the United States is in the midst of a culture war; others argue that the claims are exaggerated. As polarization is a multifaceted concept, both sides can be correct. I review four distinct manifestations of polarization that have appeared in the public opinion literature—ideolog...

Recent work has explored how individual and institutional factors affect the gap in perceptions of political legitimacy between electoral winners and electoral losers, but has ignored the role that the political information environment, in general, and ideologically biased media, in particular, plays in exacerbating or diminishing this gap. By comb...

Over the last two decades, as the number of media choices available to consumers has exploded, so too have worries over self-selection into media audiences. Some fear greater apathy, others heightened polarization. In this article, we shed light on the latter possibility. We identify the impact of access to broadband Internet on affective polarizat...

Israel is viewed unfavorably among wide segments of the public within several European democracies, despite being regarded itself as a Western democracy. Does drawing attention to Israel's democratic attributes improve views toward Israel? In two surveys with Dutch national samples, anti-Semitic affect, low anti-Arab/Muslim affect, and left-wing po...

Acquiescence response bias, or the tendency to agree with questions regardless of content, is a prominent concern in survey design. An often proposed solution, and one that was recently implemented in the American National Election Study, is to rewrite response options so that they tap directly into the dimensions of the construct of interest. Howe...

Most Americans support liberal policies on the social welfare agenda, the dominant policy cleavage in American politics. Yet a striking feature of the US party system is its tendency to equilibrium. How, then, does the Republican Party minimize defection on the social welfare agenda? The results of this study illustrate a deep ideological asymmetry...

We examine whether individual differences in needs for security and certainty predict conservative (vs. liberal) position on both cultural and economic political issues, and whether these effects are conditional on nation-level characteristics and individual-level political engagement. Analyses with cross-national data from 51 nations reveal that v...

We examine whether individual differences in needs for security and certainty predict conservative (vs. liberal) position on both cultural and economic political issues and whether these effects are conditional on nation-level characteristics and individual-level political engagement. Analyses with cross-national data from 51 nations reveal that va...

Recent work has explored how individual and institutional factors affect the gap in perceptions of political legitimacy between electoral winners and electoral losers, but has ignored the role that the political information environment, in general, and partisan media, in particular, plays in exacerbating or diminishing this gap. By combining indivi...

Studies have shown that allowing people to answer questionnaires completely anonymously yields more reports of socially inappropriate attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, and researchers have often assumed that this is evidence of increased honesty. But such evidence does not demonstrate that reports gathered under completely anonymous conditions are...

The current debate over the extent of polarization in the American mass public focuses on the extent to which partisans' policy preferences have moved. Whereas "maximalists" claim that partisans' views on policies have become more extreme over time (Abramowitz 2010), "minimalists" (Fiorina and Abrams 2009) contend that the majority of Americans rem...

Some argue that there is an organic connection between being religious and being politically conservative. We evaluate an alternative thesis that the relation between religiosity and political conservatism largely results from engagement with political discourse that indicates that these characteristics go together. In a combined sample of national...

The present study explores the dramatic projection of one's own views onto those of Jesus among conservative and liberal American Christians. In a large-scale survey, the relevant views that each group attributed to a contemporary Jesus differed almost as much as their own views. Despite such dissonance-reducing projection, however, conservatives a...

To many commentators and social scientists, Americans’ stances on political issues are to an important extent driven by an underlying conservative–liberal ideological dimension. Self-identification as conservative vs. liberal is regarded as a marker of this dimension. However, past research has not thoroughly distinguished between ideological ident...

The 2008 US presidential election was an unprecedented opportunity to study the role of racial prejudice in political decision making. Although explicitly expressed prejudice has declined dramatically during the last four decades, more subtle implicit forms of prejudice (which come to mind automatically and may influence behavior unintentionally) m...

The presence of an African-American candidate on the ballot running for President in 2008 raises the possibility that the election outcome might have been influenced by anti-African-American racism among voters. This paper uses data from the Associated Press-Yahoo! News-Stanford University survey to explore this possibility, using measures of both...

Abstract will be provided by author.