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

... 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. ...