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1. When election expectations fail: Polarized perceptions of election legitimacy increase with accumulating evidence of election outcomes and with polarized media

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259473  

   Grant, Marrissa D. ; Flores, Alexandra ; Pedersen, Eric J. ; Sherman, David K. ; Van Boven, Leaf ( December 2021 , PLOS ONE)

   Galak, Jeff (Ed.)

   The present study, conducted immediately after the 2020 presidential election in the United States, examined whether Democrats’ and Republicans’ polarized assessments of election legitimacy increased over time. In a naturalistic survey experiment, people ( N = 1,236) were randomly surveyed either during the week following Election Day, with votes cast but the outcome unknown, or during the following week, after President Joseph Biden was widely declared the winner. The design unconfounded the election outcome announcement from the vote itself, allowing more precise testing of predictions derived from cognitive dissonance theory. As predicted, perceived election legitimacy increased among Democrats, from the first to the second week following Election Day, as their expected Biden win was confirmed, whereas perceived election legitimacy decreased among Republicans as their expected President Trump win was disconfirmed. From the first to the second week following Election Day, Republicans reported stronger negative emotions and weaker positive emotions while Democrats reported stronger positive emotions and weaker negative emotions. The polarized perceptions of election legitimacy were correlated with the tendencies to trust and consume polarized media. Consumption of Fox News was associated with lowered perceptions of election legitimacy over time whereas consumption of other outlets was associated with higher perceptions of election legitimacy over time. Discussion centers on the role of the media in the experience of cognitive dissonance and the implications of polarized perceptions of election legitimacy for psychology, political science, and the future of democratic society. 

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2. Examining long-term trends in politics and culture through language of political leaders and cultural institutions

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1811987116  

   Jordan, Kayla N. ; Sterling, Joanna ; Pennebaker, James W. ; Boyd, Ryan L. ( February 2019 , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   From many perspectives, the election of Donald Trump was seen as a departure from long-standing political norms. An analysis of Trump’s word use in the presidential debates and speeches indicated that he was exceptionally informal but at the same time, spoke with a sense of certainty. Indeed, he is lower in analytic thinking and higher in confidence than almost any previous American president. Closer analyses of linguistic trends of presidential language indicate that Trump’s language is consistent with long-term linear trends, demonstrating that he is not as much an outlier as he initially seems. Across multiple corpora from the American presidents, non-US leaders, and legislative bodies spanning decades, there has been a general decline in analytic thinking and a rise in confidence in most political contexts, with the largest and most consistent changes found in the American presidency. The results suggest that certain aspects of the language style of Donald Trump and other recent leaders reflect long-evolving political trends. Implications of the changing nature of popular elections and the role of media are discussed.

    

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3. Auditing Google's Search Headlines as a Potential Gateway to Misleading Content: Evidence from the 2020 US Election

   https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v1i4.72  

   Zade, Himanshu ; Wack, Morgan ; Zhang, Yuanrui ; Starbird, Kate ; Calo, Ryan ; Young, Jason ; West, Jevin D. ( September 2022 , Journal of Online Trust and Safety)

   The prevalence and spread of online misinformation during the 2020 US presidential election served to perpetuate a false belief in widespread election fraud. Though much research has focused on how social media platforms connected people to election-related rumors and conspiracy theories, less is known about the search engine pathways that linked users to news content with the potential to undermine trust in elections. In this paper, we present novel data related to the content of political headlines during the 2020 US election period. We scraped over 800,000 headlines from Google's search engine results pages (SERP) in response to 20 election-related keywords—10 general (e.g., "Ballots") and 10 conspiratorial (e.g., "Voter fraud")—when searched from 20 cities across 16 states. We present results from qualitative coding of 5,600 headlines focused on the prevalence of delegitimizing information. Our results reveal that videos (as compared to stories, search results, and advertisements) are the most problematic in terms of exposing users to delegitimizing headlines. We also illustrate how headline content varies when searching from a swing state, adopting a conspiratorial search keyword, or reading from media domains with higher political bias. We conclude with policy recommendations on data transparency that allow researchers to continue to monitor search engines during elections. 

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4. Historical Mob Violence and the 2016 Presidential Election

   https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162211017437  

   Abbott, Rebecca ; Bailey, Amy Kate ( July 2021 , The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science)

   As a 2016 presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump invoked racially charged rhetoric to galvanize conservative white voters who felt left behind in the “new economy.” In this article, we ask whether Trump’s ability to attract electoral support in that way was linked to local histories of racist mob violence. We use county-level data on threatened and completed lynchings of Black people to predict support for Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary and general election across eleven southern states. We find that fewer voters cast their ballots for Trump in counties that had suppressed a comparatively larger share of potentially lethal episodes of racist mob violence. Supplementary analyses suggest that counties’ histories of violence are also related to their electoral support for Republican presidential candidates more broadly. We posit that this correlation points to the durable effects of racist violence on local cultures and the imprint of community histories on the social environment.

    

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5. Measuring Agenda Setting in Interactive Political Communication

   https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12653  

   Rossiter, Erin L. ( September 2021 , American Journal of Political Science)

   null (Ed.)

   Although strategies exist to measure actors' efforts to set policy, media, and lawmaking agendas, political scientists lack a method for identifying and accurately measuring another form of agenda setting that lies under the surface anytime two people talk. Within interactions, such as debates, deliberations, and discussions, actors can set the agenda by shifting others' attention to their preferred topics. In this article, I use a topic model that locates where topic shifts occur within an interaction in order to measure the relative agenda-setting power of actors. Validation exercises show that the model accurately identifies topic shifts and infers coherent topics. Three empirical applications also validate the agenda-setting measure within different political settings: U.S. presidential debates, in-person deliberations, and online discussions. These applications show that successfully setting the agenda can shape an interaction's outcomes, demonstrating the importance of continued research on this form of agenda setting. 

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