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Changes in average global temperatures attributable to climate change may be enabling the spread of “neglected tropical diseases” (such as Dengue Fever) to new areas; including the United States. Efforts to promote both climate and health policy attitudes that mitigate the public health threats presented by climate-induced disease spread is therefore an important task for strategic communication research. Correspondingly, our work tests the effectiveness of what we refer to as we refer to as co-constitutive risk messaging (CCR); communication interventions developed at the intersection of climate and health risk communication. We expect that respondents exposed to CCR messaging should become more likely to support policies that advance pro-vaccine objectives for neglected tropical diseases, as well as policies that aim to mitigate the effects of climate change. Further, we suspect that the effectiveness of CCR messaging will be moderated by respondents’ cultural worldviews; such that more-individualistic people are particularly receptive to CCR messages that emphasize the personal risks of failing to take climate/health policy action, while more-communitarian respondents are especially receptive to messages that highlight the collective social risks of failing to do so. In this open-ended registration, we pre-register each of these aforementioned expectations as a set of formally stated hypotheses. We then provide the details of an experimental protocol and data collection strategy aimed at testing these expectations, as well as a pre-analysis plan for testing our theoretical expectations on each score. We conclude by outlining what we think our results might look like in the event that the pre-registered study design and analysis plan were to support our theoretical expectations.

In a five country study, we test the effect(s) of priming individuals to think about popular COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories on their reported intention to receive the coronavirus vaccine. We allow for heterogeneous effects based on conspiracy theory belief.

Replication data for the Frontiers publication

Supplemental material, sj-docx-8-hpq-10.1177_13591053221082770 for Religious affiliation and philosophical and moral beliefs about vaccines: A longitudinal study by Ozan Kuru, Man-pui Sally Chan, Hang Lu, Dominik Andrzej Stecula, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Dolores Albarrac��n in Journal of Health Psychology

sj-docx-2-hpq-10.1177_13591053221082770 for Religious affiliation and philosophical and moral beliefs about vaccines: A longitudinal study by Ozan Kuru, Man-pui Sally Chan, Hang Lu, Dominik Andrzej Stecula, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Dolores Albarrac��n in Journal of Health Psychology

In recent weeks, several academic and journalistic outlets have documented widespread misinformation about the origins and potential treatment for COVID-19. This misinformation could have important public health consequences if misinformed people are less likely to heed the advice of public health experts. While some have anecdotally tied the prevalence of misinformation to misleading or inaccurate media coverage of the pandemic in its early stages, few have rigorously tested this claim empirically. In this paper, we report the results of an automated content analysis showing that right-leaning news outlets (e.g., Fox News, Breitbart) were more than 2.5 times more likely than mainstream outlets to discuss COVID-19 misinformation during the early stages of the U.S. pandemic response. In a nationally representative survey (N = 8,914) conducted from 3/10-3/16, we then show that people who consumed more right-leaning news during this timeframe were more than twice as likely to endorse COVID-related misinformation. Alarmingly, survey data further suggest that misinformation endorsement has negative public health consequences, as misinformed people are more likely to believe that the CDC is exaggerating COVID-related health risks.

This working paper discusses the process of designing your first political science course. It covers the preparation of a diverse syllabus, developing learning objectives, structuring lectures and class activities, designing assignments, and setting up an efficient mode of course communication between the instructor and students.

Americans polarized on climate change despite decreasing uncertainty in climate science. Explanations focused on organized climate skeptics and ideologically driven motivated reasoning are likely insufficient. Instead, Americans may have formed their attitudes by using party elite cues. We conduct analyses on over 8,000 print, broadcast, and cable news stories. We find that coverage became increasingly partisan as climate change rose in salience, but climate skeptics received scant attention. Democratic messages were more voluminous and consistently pro–climate science, while Republican messages have been scarcer and ambiguous until recently. This suggests Republican voters took cues from Democratic elites to reject climate science.

This dissertation is composed of three papers broadly examining the relationship between the mass media and political polarization in the United States. The first paper examines whether the media might have played a role in the polarization of the American public. Using an automated content analysis of almost 600,000 news articles and transcripts from a variety of prominent news media sources over the past four decades, the paper analyzes whether coverage of ten issues has changed over time along several dimensions of tone (affect, incivility, conflict) and source cues (in particular, whether the media cover increasingly more extreme politicians). The results indicate that the media likely contributed to the process of partisan sorting by increasingly providing the public with partisan signals in the news coverage. There is also some evidence that the media contributed to the affective polarization of the public. The second paper focuses on the nature of media coverage of climate change and its effect on public opinion polarization of climate change attitudes, finding that despite the common perception, the media, including conservative media, did not overwhelmingly promote climate change skeptics, industry groups, or denialist organizations. Instead, the coverage featured an increasing number of partisan cues as the issue rose in salience, which polarized the public. In the third paper, I examine the relationship between climate change attitudes and news media diets. Previous work has focused extensively on Fox News and posits that Fox has been a dominant player in turning the Americans, and especially Republicans, into climate skeptics. Utilizing a large national survey, I find that the relationship is more nuanced than previously argued. Fox News does seem to have a negative effect on supporting governmental action in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, though that effect is limited to a small group of purists stuck in the conservative echo chamber. Most people, and importantly, most Republicans, are not very likely to be members of that group.