Are you American? What do you think about when you answer this question? Do you think in terms of citizenship? Cultural attributes? Certain values? When Grinnell College, where we are both faculty members, polled Americans on what they most associate with being a “real” American, the vast majority of respondents […] Read more »
Liberals and conservatives see sexual harassment claims very differently. This explains why.
Over this past year, the #MeToo movement has put sexual harassment claims front and center in the news. … We wanted to know whether conservatives and liberals reacted differently when sexual misconduct allegations were made about one of “their own.” Drawing on previous research, we hypothesized that conservatives would express […] Read more »
The Psychology of Political Polarization
Many stories can be told about the 2018 midterm elections, but their mixed results make one thing clear: We are a country divided. Pundits have attributed our historically high levels of polarization to a variety of sources, including the isolating effects of social media, the corrupting influence of dark money […] Read more »
The Trump Legions: Despite their sudden rise, they didn’t come out of nowhere
… In “The Silent Revolution in Reverse: Trump and the Xenophobic Authoritarian Populist Parties,” Inglehart, Jon Miller and Logan Woods provide fresh insight on a subject to which Inglehart, at times writing with Pippa Norris of Harvard, has devoted much of his career: the ongoing tension between materialist and post-materialist […] Read more »
Americans Still Tilt Toward Favoring Less Active Gov’t Role
Americans for decades have shown a broad tendency to say the government is doing too much that should be left to individuals and businesses, as opposed to the belief that the government should do more to help solve the nation’s problems. The only times over the past quarter-century when Americans […] Read more »
Trump-Driven Polarization Reflects Divergent Views of America’s Future
Days before the 2018 midterm elections, a wide-ranging new survey from PRRI finds that partisans see two entirely different American futures. The survey shows Republicans’ vision for the country’s future is increasingly distant from the vision largely shared by Democrats and independents. And in the religious landscape, white evangelicals’ vision […] Read more »