Interdisciplinary Workshops on Politics and Policy

Online misinformation attracts intense concern yet makes up only a small fraction of people’s media diets. Many overestimate their exposure, a misperception linked to important democratic attitudes such as cynicism and media mistrust. This talk will describe misinformation misperceptions and experiments that reduce them. A longitudinal experiment with local newsroom partners led people to calibrate their estimates of misinformation exposure while increasing news trust. A second online experiment tested lighter-touch interventions, including a brief social media audit and a corrective article, that also affected misinformation exposure assessments, as well as misinformation concern and, for some, support for restrictive policies. The talk will summarize what we’ve learned and set the stage for a discussion of what remains to be investigated.

This talk draws on a book in progress that argues affective polarization emerges from a series of nested environments in which political identities are constructed, reinforced, or challenged. Rather than treating polarization as the product of a single force, the book shows how political experience unfolds across interconnected spatial, social, and mediated contexts. It examines four interlocking domains of political experience: local political context, social media use, interpersonal discussion, and social infrastructure. Together, these reveal how feeling politically out of place in one’s community can drive people online, how everyday social media use fosters ambient polarization, and how in-person interaction across political lines can push back against those forces by constraining hostility toward the opposing party. The talk centers on the social infrastructure chapter, which introduces a novel measure and demonstrates how it moderates political perceptions and polarization. 

Political scientists have devoted increasing attention to studying urban-rural polarization, but they have focused disproportionately on understanding the rise of Republicanism in rural and postindustrial contexts. This is despite the fact that the rightward turn in rural American is partly caused by changes in economic geography that have simultaneously drawn urban and suburban American to the Left: the rise of the knowledge economy that has disproportionately benefited some urban areas at the expense of formerly thriving industrial and rural communities. These changes have exacerbated demographic and political differences between rural and urban America by concentrating highly-educated, socially liberal workers in metro areas and drawing them away from outlying communities. This suggests that one group of people sits at the center of these trends in political and economic geography: rural high schoolers. When they attend college, they are more likely to move to cities and identify as Democrats, and when they stay behind, they are more likely to become Republicans. In this talk I will propose a new study designed to understand the political socialization experiences of this group of people, through repeated, in-depth interviews as they enter college (or not) and beyond. As such, this project will shed light on longstanding questions about how college life shapes students’ politics, and how rural Americans’ decisions about education and migration contribute to urban vs. rural polarization.

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There is worldwide concern about political violence, especially in advanced democracies where its rise threatens democratic stability. This study experimentally tests a preregistered social influence approach to reducing support for political violence among individuals who already support such violence. Because it is difficult and rare to recruit supporters of political violence for behavioral research, we ask opponents of political violence to recruit a real-world social tie who supports political violence and randomly assign these dyads to discuss political violence or not. We find that, while supporters of political violence are resistant to peer persuasion in conversation, they can influence opponents to soften their stance, despite opponents receiving pre-conversation guidance drawn from tested persuasion strategies. These results demonstrate that efforts to increase civic dialogue about political violence may inadvertently soften opposition to violence, highlighting the importance of evaluating deradicalization interventions among the populations such interventions are intended to affect. 

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Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are the fastest-growing racial group in the U.S., but their political engagement lags that of other groups. The lack of AAPI representation in educational and media accounts of American political history represents one potential reason for these disparities. We argue that civics materials including the experiences of AAPIs are empowering and increase political engagement by countering stereotypes placing this community on the sidelines of politics. We test this using three survey experiments across AAPI adult and college student samples. We find inclusive AAPI civics content of various forms increases political engagement and support for inclusive curricula among Asian American adults but not AAPI college students. While generic civics materials also increase participation among AAPI adults, inclusive content is more broadly mobilizing and affects education policy views. Our research offers insight on the impact of inclusive civics, a major topic of political debate.

How do transnational information environments shape political attitudes and behavior? I argue that individuals embedded in cross-border social networks encounter distinct information environments that shape what political information they are exposed to and, under certain conditions, what they come to believe. I develop this theory through the case of growing Latino support for Donald Trump. Latinos are disproportionately embedded in transnational information environments sustained by cross-border social ties. These environments expand exposure to political information circulating across national borders, including political misinformation. Social media conditions whether that misinformation is accepted as credible. Belief in misinformation, in turn, is associated with more favorable evaluations of Trump and a greater likelihood of reporting a 2020 vote for Trump or intended support in 2024. I test the theory using an original 2024 YouGov survey with a Latino oversample. Transnational ties are robustly linked to misinformation exposure, and misinformation belief is robustly linked to Trump support and 2020 Trump vote. The conditional role of social media in shaping belief is consistent with the theory but sensitive to model specification. These findings suggest that transnational information environments are an important source of heterogeneity in political information exposure and demonstrate the value of distinguishing exposure from belief in theories of political behavior and political communication. 

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