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To inform the vital conversation among the nation’s political leaders, elections administrators, and scholars about how to hold a safe, accessible, and fair election in November 2020, this article reports how a sample of 5612 eligible American voters, surveyed 8–10 April, wanted to see the election run during the COVID-19 crisis. We embedded a randomized experiment presenting respondents with truthful summaries of the projections of two teams of scientists about the pandemic. Our descriptive findings show that in November 2020, four in 10 eligible voters would have preferred to cast their ballot by mail rather than in person and that a majority of respondents favored policies expanding mail voting. Our experimental findings show that respondents who read the scientific projections were more likely to prefer voting by mail, were more likely to trust that a mail ballot would be counted accurately, and were more likely to favor holding the election entirely by mail.

Can racial and ethnic minorities be mobilized to participate in politics at greater rates?  We theorize that mobilization messages providing information about a group’s underrepresentation in government may increase participation among racial/ethnic minorities.  However, responsiveness to such messages should vary depending on individuals’ prior awareness of their group’s underrepresentation. Using a two-wave panel survey that randomly assigned different get out the vote messages, we find that messages highlighting a racial/ethnic group’s underrepresentation in government do not increase Latinos’, Blacks’, or Asians’ likelihood of voting. We also find that such messages can decrease other forms of political participation among Asians and Latinos who were previously unaware of their group’s underrepresentation. These findings indicate that information about underrepresentation can actually demobilize certain segments of the electorate. Thus, practical efforts to boost participation among underrepresented groups should either communicate information about underrepresentation in other ways or provide a different type of message altogether.

The year 2018 has been dubbed the Year of the Woman because of the increased number of women who ran for office. What helps explain the dramatic increase in the number of women running for office? This paper examines how the political environment shapes white women's emotional reactions to politics and in turn their political ambition. We focus on major aspects of the 2016 election: Trump's treatment of women, Clinton's historic run for office, the Women's March, and the #MeToo movement. We argue that each of these factors leads to distinct emotional reactions, and that some of these reactions can increase political ambition. We explore support for these arguments with an experiment conducted with a sample of highly educated white women, an experiment fielded on the 2019 CCES, and with in-depth interviews conducted with first-time women candidates in 2018. We find that Trump's treatment of women and Clinton's historic run for office inspired political ambition, but through different emotional pathways. Trump's treatment of women increased anger and in turn political ambition, while Clinton's historic run increased ambition through enthusiasm. We find more muted effects for the Women's Marches and the #MeToo movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women who ran for office in 2018 used a variety of strategies on the campaign trail, with some highlighting more masculine traits and others more feminine traits, but the latter was more common than in prior years. We ask how effective these strategies are for trait evaluations, perceptions of leadership and competence, likeability, and vote choice and how this effect varies based on respondent's views about the role of women in society. To explore these relationships, we use data from a two-wave panel conducted in the winter of 2019. Results from our experiment show that female candidates who highlight more masculine traits are perceived as more agentic, less communal, and more competent, and, importantly, they do not appear to suffer from a backlash effect. Those higher in sexism also evaluate women who display these qualities as more competent, though as less warm and likable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During his tenure in office, President Trump made repeated attacks on democratic norms and practices in his public statements, in particular via Twitter. Does this type of anti-democratic rhetoric lead to an erosion of citizens' democratic attitudes? We argue that reactions to Trump's rhetoric are not likely to be uniform given the highly polarized political climate in the United States. In order to test this theoretical proposition, we fielded a survey experiment on a module of the 2019 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Treated respondents were exposed to a range of tweets sent by President Trump attacking three critical institutions of a liberal democracy (the media, Congress, and the Courts). We find limited evidence that Trump's rhetoric leads to an erosion of democratic attitudes. On the contrary, the results suggest there is significant pushback against anti-democratic messages, especially among Democrats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Menacing news inclines individuals to acquire information, and research has explored how emotional reactions such as fear or anger condition this process. While scholars have debated the relevance of fear and anger for levels of attentiveness and learning in politics, fewer studies consider how variation in emotional responses can shape the substance of information searches in times of threat. We posit that heightened fear motivates interest in defense-oriented information among threatened individuals, while heightened anger motivates interest in aggression-oriented information. To test these hypotheses, we focus on international terrorist threat because of its known tendency to elevate both anger and fear. We use data that permit a behavioral measure of information seeking, via an experiment embedded within a Dynamic Process Tracing Environment (DPTE) platform. Within this information-rich context, exposure to terrorist threat motivates a search for relevant information. Furthermore, we find that while an induction to elevate anger prompts more immediate attention to aggression-oriented information, an induction to elevate fear is more effective in steering attention toward defense-oriented information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]