Persuasion is a vital part of politics—who wins elections and policy disputes often depends
on which side can persuade more people. Given this centrality, the study of persuasion has …

While many believe that affective polarisation poses a significant threat to democratic
stability, the definition and operationalisation of the concept varies greatly. This leads to …

Since the onset of COVID-19, there has been a surfeit of commentary arguing that 2020 will
have transformative effects on world politics. This paper asks whether, decades from now …

Recent work on the nature of mass polarization has revealed that individuals perceive more
polarization than actually exists, meaning they assume that out-party members are farther …

Social scientists are interested in the effects of low‐dimensional latent treatments within
texts, such as the effect of an attack on a candidate in a political advertisement. We provide a …

Canonical theories of opinion formation attribute an important role to affect. But how and for
whom affect matters is theoretically underdeveloped. We establish the circumplex model in …

This article proposes a simple but powerful framework to measure political sophistication
based on open-ended survey responses. Discursive sophistication uses automated text …

The relationship between anxiety and investor behavior is well known enough to warrant its
own aphorism: a “flight to safety.” We posit that anxiety alters the intensity of voters' …

Research into the role of anxiety in decision-making is fast moving and vibrant, but to be
come fully established it needs to ensure rigor in measurement and research design; this …

In this article, I examine the American public's reaction to two recent infectious disease
outbreaks: Ebola and Zika. Using a set of parallel questions, I investigate the ways in which …