Aaron C. Weinschenk's research while affiliated with University of Wisconsin - Green Bay and other places

Publications (56)

Article
Contemporary U.S. politics is characterized by a high degree of political polarization and conflict. Consequently, scholars have become increasingly interested in understanding how political factors and events impact different dimensions of health, such as anxiety. Using data from a nationally-representative, two-wave panel survey conducted before...
Article
By most accounts, an important prerequisite for a well-functioning democracy is engaged citizens. A very prominent explanation of variation in political engagement suggests that parental transmission through socialization accounts for individual-level differences in political engagement. In this paper, we show, using a large Danish twin survey ( N...
Article
A bstract In this article, we examine whether there is genetic overlap between personality traits and political participation, interest, and efficacy. We make several contributions to the literature. First, we use new data from a large sample of twins from Denmark to examine the link between genes, the Big Five traits, and political behavior. Previ...
Article
Recent research indicates that political developments and events can have important implications for health. In this study, we use data from a large, nationally representative survey ( N = 1750) fielded in December 2020 to understand how the 2020 Presidential Election impacted self-reported health ratings. Several important findings emerge. First,...
Article
While previous studies have shown that the traits in the FFM are moderately heritable, it is important to examine whether earlier results hold across different contexts. To date, few studies from the Scandinavian context have estimated the heritability of the FFM. We remedy this shortcoming by making use of a large sample of Danish twins who comple...
Article
Full-text available
The 2020 presidential election was unparalleled. President Donald Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, indicated that he would not accept the election results, and alleged that there was widespread voter fraud. In addition, on January 6, 2021, Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn his defeat. In thi...
Article
Scholars have demonstrated that the U.S. presidential vote is increasingly correlated with voting patterns in House, Senate, gubernatorial, state legislative, and state judicial elections, a phenomenon called nationalization. In this article, I examine the relationship between vote share in presidential and school superintendent elections. I conduc...
Article
Many studies have shown that there is a positive relationship between education and political knowledge. However, some scholars have recently challenged this idea, arguing that the positive correlation between education and knowledge may disappear once confounding variables are considered. In this paper, we replicate a recent study that used the di...
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Full-text available
We examine individuals’ views about democratic norm violations related to the peaceful transfer of power and acceptance of election results and the link between those views and broader perceptions about support for social election norms in the American public. Using data from an original national survey fielded after the 2020 presidential election,...
Preprint
By most accounts, an important prerequisite for a well-functioning democracy is engaged citizens. A very prominentexplanation of variation in political engagement suggests that parental transmission through socialization accountsfor individual-level differences in political engagement. In this paper, we show that classic formulations of parentaltra...
Article
In this article, we examine the nature of the relationship between educational attainment and ideology. Some scholars have argued that the effect of education on political variables like ideology is inflated due to unaccounted-for family factors, such as genetic predispositions and parental socialization. Using the discordant twin design and data f...
Article
Full-text available
Many studies have shown that political efficacy, interest in politics, and political knowledge are strongly related to political participation. In most analyses, these variables are described as having a causal effect on participation. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the relationship between political attitudes and participation is co...
Article
This article examines the effect of high school civic education on voter turnout in adulthood by integrating extensive academic transcript data on social studies and civic coursework into a large-scale, longitudinal survey of a nationally representative sample of adolescents. In an initial series of regression models, civics courses appear to have...
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In this article, we examine the role that campaign visits by spouses and surrogates play in modern presidential campaigns. Specifically, we analyze the strategy and effectiveness of Bill Clinton’s campaign visits in 2016. Given the former president’s widespread name recognition and reputation as a legendary campaigner, we argue that he represents a...
Article
In this article, we examine the extent to which Americans view contributing money to political campaigns as a civic duty. Using data from an original survey (N = 1,269), we find that roughly 15% of the public thinks that for anyone who can afford to contribute, it is a civic duty to contribute financially to political campaigns. Interestingly, we f...
Article
Scholars have long been interested in the underpinnings of political ideology. Over the past fifteen years or so, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and economists have started to take seriously the idea that ideology might be influenced by genes. In this article, we review the literature on the genetics of ideology. We begin by des...
Article
Faculty members are increasingly recognizing the value of integrating high impact practices, such as undergraduate research, into the college experience. In this paper, I argue that one way of getting undergraduate students involved in political science research is to develop undergraduate research labs, wherein a small group of undergraduate stude...
Article
We examined the association between intelligence, party identification, and political orientations using genetically informative data gathered from German twins and their families (n = 9553 individuals including 1524 adolescent and young-adult twin pairs). The results indicated that supporters of the Pirate Party and the Green Party had levels of i...
Article
Over the past several years, scholars of political behavior have become increasingly interested in the nationalization of U.S. elections. Research has shown that there is now a strong connection between presidential vote patterns and voting in House, Senate, gubernatorial, and state legislative elections. In this article, we extend previous researc...
Article
Why do some people feel a strong sense of civic duty to vote while others feel no obligation at all? One factor that has been identified as an important antecedent of the sense of civic duty is education. In The American Voter, Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes (1960) note that the sense of civic duty appears to “depend substantially on educatio...
Article
Using two unique surveys, one that includes over 6,000 respondents interviewed across 39 cities and another that includes over 47,000 respondents interviewed across 26 U.S. cities, we investigate the extent to which perceptions of local conditions—the state of the local economy, the quality of local schools, and local crime—reflect actual local con...
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In this research note, we test an assumption that is often made in the literature on local retrospective voting—that peoples’ perceptions of local conditions are well-grounded in reality. To do so, we examine the relationship between objective measures of local conditions and aggregated survey measures of perceptions of those conditions. We focus o...
Article
Objective Research on political socialization has shown that political and civic experiences during high school can impact later political engagement. However, political scientists are increasingly realizing that nonpolitical experiences, dispositions, and attributes in childhood and adolescence can play a role in shaping political participation. B...
Article
We examine the role of moral foundations and system justification in explaining support for Donald Trump in the 2016 general election using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. A number of important findings emerge. First, we find that there are important partisan and ideological differences when it comes to moral foundatio...
Article
We investigate the link between genes, psychological traits, and political engagement using a new data set containing information on a large sample of young German twins. The TwinLife Study enables us to examine the predominant model of personality, the Big Five framework, as well as traits that fall outside the Big Five, such as cognitive ability,...
Article
Political scientists have long been interested in the determinants of political knowledge. In many studies, education is the strongest predictor of political knowledge. However, some studies have found that education has no effect on knowledge once confounding variables are taken into account. In addition, some recent work suggests that education r...
Article
In this paper, we investigate the genetic and psychological underpinnings of generalized social trust, an orientation that refers to one's expectations about the trustworthiness of strangers. We make a number of contributions to the literature. First, using a new dataset containing information on a large sample of German twin pairs (N = 1980 pairs)...
Article
I examine the relationship between demographics and vote choice using pre-election tracking polls, exit polls, and data on the American states. A number of important findings emerge: (1) there was a fair amount of preference stability in 2016; (2) Clinton underperformed Obama in 83% of demographic groups examined; (3) at the state level, the percen...
Article
Using daily polling data collected during the 2016 election, we examine the impact of fundamental conditions, campaign events, media coverage, and other relevant events and announcement on preference dynamics. We observe shifts in voter preferences for president over the course of the campaign and find evidence that these dynamics can be explained...
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This report examines accuracy and bias in national- and state-level preelection polls conducted during the 2016 U.S. general election cycle. Overall, national polls in 2016 were somewhat more accurate than in 2012, but statewide polls were less accurate. Patterns across the board suggest polls underestimated Republican support in the presidential,...
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In this paper, we re-analyze data from a large-scale field experiment (N = 344,084) on voter turnout in order to determine whether men and women respond differently to social pressure aimed at voter mobilization. To date, there have been mixed results regarding the interaction between a person’s gender and receptivity to social influence. On the wh...
Chapter
Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional district is a battleground area within a battleground state. In the past, the district has been very competitive, rotating between Democratic and Republican representatives every few election cycles. In recent years, the district has leaned Republican, though it is still usually seen as “up for grabs” by both major pol...
Article
Political scientists have long known that the sense of civic duty is one of the strongest predictors of individual voter turnout, yet scholars are only just starting to study and understand the origins of this orientation. Recent genopolitics research has indicated that the sense of civic duty is heritable, and recent research in political psycholo...
Article
Political interest is one of the strongest predictors of individual political engagement, but little is known about the origins of this political orientation. The goal of this paper is to clarify the role that biological and psychological factors play in the formation of political interest. A series of recent studies in genetics have illustrated th...
Article
Debates about whether presidential nominating conventions are useful institutions in American politics have emerged in recent presidential elections. Are they needless events or do they serve an important democratic purpose? Do potential voters gain anything from the conventions? In this article, I use panel data collected around presidential conve...
Article
Objective Recently, researchers interested in the psychological antecedents of political behavior have started to integrate individual personality traits into models of political participation and civic engagement. Thus far, there have not been any large‐scale, cross‐national analyses of the relationship between personality and participation. In th...
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We ask whether and how US presidential nominating conventions matter in contemporary US elections. Using individual-level panel data, we find evidence that the conventions exert important effects on the electorate by influencing post-convention intentions to participate in electoral politics, knowledge about the candidates, and candidate favorabili...
Article
During the last several presidential elections, much attention has been paid to campaign field offices. A number of analyses have investigated the impact of field offices on vote choice, but there have been very few investigations of whether and to what extent campaign field offices influence voter turnout. Using data from the 2012 election, I exam...
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This article illustrates that trust in state government varies considerably across states. Using newly available public opinion data, the authors investigate the effects of political polarization, corruption, income inequality, unemployment, state fiscal conditions, median income, ideology, state size, tax rates, and social capital on differences i...
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Scholars have recently started to integrate personality traits into models of political participation. In this paper, we present the results of a survey experiment (N = 724) designed to test whether negative political messages differentially impact people with different personality traits. We found evidence that individuals with high scores on agre...
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Research on local turnout has focused on institutions, with little attention devoted to examining the impact of campaigns. Using an original data set containing information from 144 large U.S. cities and 340 separate mayoral elections over time, our contributions to the scholarship in this field are manifold: we focus the literature more squarely o...
Article
Recently, a burgeoning literature has developed around the idea that personality traits influence political attitudes and orientations. There has also been increasing recognition that orientations like the sense of civic duty exert a powerful influence on voting behavior. Despite the theoretical and empirical importance of civic duty, little resear...
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Full-text available
The integration of the Big Five personality traits into models of political participation represents an important advance in the political behavior literature. However, because national surveys that include political and personality measures are not widespread, such analyses have been limited in number. In addition, there have been inconsistencies...
Article
Despite the debate about mass polarization, most scholars agree that parties in Congress have become increasingly polarized over time. Scholars have sought to connect party polarization to the beliefs and perceptions of individual citizens, but little work exists on the relationship between polarization and the vote choices made by ordinary citizen...
Article
In this article, I update Bartels' (2000) analysis of the impact of partisanship on voting behavior in U.S. presidential and congressional elections, which extended from 1952 to 1996. I show that Bartels' findings nicely replicate and that between 1952 and 2008, the high point of partisan voting in presidential elections occurred in 2004. The level...
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We examine why levels of campaign spending vary across U.S. mayoral elections. Although there has been debate about the extent to which spending is damaging or beneficial, few analyses have sought to understand the factors that inhibit or promote campaign spending. We focus on the impact of city-level attributes, political institutions, and contest...
Article
Objective In this article, I apply the concept of partisan biases to personal financial evaluations. I ask whether there are systematic differences in partisans’ evaluations of their personal finances that depend on whether their preferred party occupies the White House. I argue that when there is a Democratic president in office, Democrats will vi...
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Despite prevailing negative conditions, initial analyses of the 2008 presidential election, including this one, find significant but not particularly strong economic voting effects during the fall campaign. In this article, the authors pay special attention to how the economic information context changed during the campaign and how those changes af...
Article
Past research demonstrates that presidential nominating conventions can exercise effects on individual-level opinion; consumption of convention speeches yields opinion favorable to the convening candidate, while exposure to partisan messaging in the surrounding information environment can trigger a general partisan bias. In this article, we demonst...
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Our understanding of the impact of party conventions on opinion regarding presidential candidates is based largely on aggregate-level analysis. Extant individual-level investigation has been limited by the assumption that conventions are monolithic information events that exercise uniform effects. Using panel data, we show for the first time that c...
Article
Recently, Lewis-Beck etal. (The American Voter Revisited, 2008b) re-created The American Voter using contemporary data. Although these scholars ultimately conclude that voters today behave in ways that are consistent with the account of voting behavior presented in The American Voter, their work nonetheless highlights the importance and value of re...
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In this paper we compare single level voter turnout models to multilevel voter turnout models. Then we use a fully specified multilevel model with cross level interaction effects to estimate individual vote probability. We argue that including con-textual variables, such as district expenditures, into a single level turnout model violates assumptio...

Citations

... Past researchers have reported a positive association between education and political knowledge, an issue recently revisited by a Danish team (Weinschenk et al., 2021). In their article, the researchers cited an earlier study of discordant MZ twins from the United States showing that, after removing familial factors shared by MZ twins raised together, the correlation between education and political knowledge was small and not statistically significant, suggesting confounding of variables. ...
... However, Trump supporters exposed to such treatments are more likely to believe that U.S. elections are rigged. This finding is also discussed in Weinschenk et al. (2021). 2. Note, our study finds a positive associative relationship between Trump approval and support for political violence. ...
... A similar literature also exists on the relationship between education and ideology (Dunn 2011, Rasmussen et al. 2021, Weakliem 2002. It has been argued that since education confers resources, and scarcity of resources (level of inequality) varies between contexts, we should expect effects of education to also be contextually contingent. ...
... They often argue that civic education prepares students to become responsible and participatory citizens by teaching them civic knowledge (e.g., voting processes and electoral systems), values, and skills (National Council for the Social Studies, 2013). A growing body of research has evaluated that claim by examining the effect (or lack thereof) of civic education (operationalized as enrollment in AP History/Government courses or high school civic coursework) in schools on voter turnout (Holbein & Hillygus, 2020;Weinschenk & Dawes, 2022). Uneven access to and enrollment in AP courses and advanced civic coursework across the country (Xu et al., 2021), along with significant selection effects into who enrolls in such courses has precluded a causal evaluation of civic education on youth voter turnout. ...
... First, we use an identification strategy that reveals an effect that approaches a causal effect by estimating family fixed effects (FFE) models on data on identical twins (Neale and Cardon 1992;Allison 2005). The use of twin data for studying causal effects on political outcomes is becoming a more widely utilized methodological approach (Dinesen et al. 2016;Robinson 2019;Ahlskog and Brännlund 2021;Weinschenk et al. 2021). However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that tests compensation and reinforcement effects of education on political participation using this approach. ...
... On the other hand, voters might give money to candidates because they want to express their political support for candidates or participate in the political process (Barber, 2016;Gordon et al., 2007). Even, voters may perceive contributing money to political campaigns as a civic duty (Weinschenk & Panagopoulos, 2020). Regardless of the reason why people give money to candidates, there is no doubt that political donation comes into play in elections because it could provide candidates with significant financial resources to take political advertising and mobilize voters to cast ballots for them. ...
... The Values facet denotes readiness to re-examine social, political, and religious values and assesses liberal versus conservative sociopolitical attitudes (Costa & Mc-Crae, 1992). Thus, our results could be seen as in line with recent findings that the link between g and political orientation is attributed to genetic effects (Bell et al., 2020). Additionally, some authors assume that coping with previously unfamiliar perspectives requires the cognitive flexibility to imagine different ways of living and take the perspective of others (Mesulam, 2002), which could be linked to Values. ...
... The second change has been the general polarization of politics in the United States, which is also evident in state supreme court elections. Since at least 1980, state supreme court elections of all types-partisan, semi-partisan (nomination by party processes but nonpartisan general elections), nonpartisan, and retention-have become more partisan with the increase most striking in states using ostensibly nonpartisan elections (see Kritzer 2015, 179-200;Kritzer 2018, 412-14;Weinschenk et al. 2020;Kritzer 2021-22). ...
... This is illustrated, for example, in the GWAS by Hatemi et al. [81]. In this realm, also the review work by Dawes and Weinschenk [82] on the genetic relations of political ideology, being closely linked to ideological attitudes, is of interest. It gives an in-depth explanation of promises and perils of genetic association studies in the field of political psychology. ...
... Converse (1964) observes a dearth of systematic belief systems in the American mass public, which also stems from limited exposure to political information. On this background, a wide range of existing studies investigate the modalities and consequences of people's (limited) engagement with information, such as whether they use information effectively to cast correct votes (Lau and Redlawsk, 1997), make good political judgments (Kuklinski et al., 2001), avoid partisan bias (Bartels, 2002), and hold accurate views of political conditions (Holbrook and Weinschenk, 2020). It is important to distinguish the accumulation and use of information at the individual level from the quality of information supply, which is the concern of this article, because it makes a difference, for instance, whether non-rational political choices are individual fallacies rooted in limited exposure to information or the result of poor information quality. ...