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This document is a reflection on the teachings and insights of Todd Gitlin, a prominent activist and intellectual. The author, who was one of Gitlin's doctoral students, discusses the challenges faced by social movements in balancing expressive action and strategic action. They explore the role of digital platforms in facilitating this balance, using the Spanish Indignados movement as a case study. Gitlin's views on the importance of collaboration between insiders and outsiders in activism, as well as the need for tangible results, are highlighted. The document also touches on debates between Gitlin and other scholars regarding the organizational philosophy of movements like Occupy Wall Street. Overall, the document provides valuable guidance for social movements in utilizing digital tools while maintaining their core values and achieving meaningful change. [Extracted from the article]

The 2011 revolution provided the Egyptian 'third way' between Islamism and secularism with an opportunity to enter the political scene. Following the 2012 presidential election, this current was divided into a wasaty trend following a 'possibilist' strategy within the Mursī administration, and another trend gathered around the figure of 'Abd al-Mun'im Abūl-Futūh and following a 'revolutionary' strategy with the aim to overcome the secular/Islamist cleavage by mobilizing revolutionaries from both sides against the remnants of Mubārak's regime. This article shows how the difference between these two trends – both born from the reformist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood – is rooted in a generational divide. While the wasaty leaders left the Islamist organization in the mid-1990s, when their project was about to enter official politics, the younger generation did so only after the departure of Mubārak, with the objective to pursue the 'revolution's goals'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the partnership between Higher Ground Productions, the production company founded by Barack and Michelle Obama, and streaming platforms like Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon. It discusses how these partnerships allow the platforms to position themselves as politically aware and attract a diverse audience by curating agreeably centrist-liberal programming. The article also examines the concept of "massness" in streaming entertainment and how major streamers aim to present themselves as mainstream services while accommodating individualized tastes. It highlights the impact of Higher Ground in the entertainment industry, producing documentaries and family programs that highlight marginalized artists and communities. The Obamas' partnership with these platforms reflects their commitment to diversity and education, but also raises questions about the authenticity of their progressivism. [Extracted from the article]

Like other Asian democracies, family politics is not unknown to South Korea. The triumph of Park Geun–hye, daughter of former authoritarian ruler Park Chung–hee, in the 2012 presidential election was in particular interpreted as a precursor of 'dynastization' in Korean politics. Nevertheless, up to the present day, political families in South Korea have been significantly less successful in securing offices through electoral competition than their Asian counterparts. Using extensive evidence from statistical and documentary sources, I argue the following: First, South Korean family politicians are more likely to face unfavorable popular sentiment towards their candidacies in elections than family politicians in other Asian democracies. Second, in addition to inheriting their predecessors' political advantages, they are required to enhance their own electoral appeal by properly justifying that their electoral participation is compatible with popular demands for meritocracy and procedural fairness. This argument highlighting politico–cultural requirements, or what I call justifiable narratives, for dynastic succession is empirically supported by case studies of four South Korean family politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media coverage has long been thought crucial to shaping the electoral fortunes of presidential primary candidates in the post-reform era, making how the media allot coverage a topic of paramount importance. Sides and Vavreck (2013. The Gamble: Choice and Change in the 2012 Presidential Election. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) make a notable contribution to the study of media coverage in primaries with their "discovery, scrutiny, and decline" (DSD) model. This model, based on the 2012 Republican primary, suggests that the media's preference for novelty leads to a cyclical identification of new and interesting candidates, a surge in coverage of that candidate, and a culminating drop of coverage back to baseline levels. But the generalizability of the DSD model beyond the 2012 GOP primary has not yet been thoroughly tested. This paper conducts such a test using the Presidential Primary Communication Corpus (PPCC) which contains news stories by The New York Times and the Washington Post of each candidate in the nine primaries from 2000 to 2020. The evidence is most supportive of the DSD model in the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries and the 2004 and 2020 Democratic primaries but less supportive in the remaining five. This paper concludes with a discussion of why some campaigns don't match the DSD model's expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the first female president of a country is impeached, how does the disgraceful exit shape people's memory of her? Does sexism play a role in such retrospective evaluations? Do the voters who supported her remain loyal, or do they withdraw their support due to disappointment? This article utilizes the impeachment of Park Geun-hye of South Korea as a case to answer these questions. Using a public opinion survey conducted three years after the 2016 impeachment, I demonstrate that hostile sexism played a role in the negative retrospective evaluations of Park, while benevolent sexism did not. Moreover, those who voted for Park in the 2012 presidential election expressed more negative retrospective evaluations of Park than those who did not vote for her, suggesting a backlash effect. Voters who had high expectations of the first female president could experience deep disappointment when the historic first failed to meet their expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the Ukraine crisis, a wave of scholarship resorted to realism and its core assumptions in an attempt to explain Russia's assertiveness. This article challenges these predominant accounts by contending that the co-constitutive link between identity and foreign policy deserves far greater attention to understand Russia's international actions. To this end, it examines the evolution of an underexplored yet central subset of Russia's foreign policy in the post-Soviet space, namely its cultural diplomacy. Concretely, it applies a poststructuralist research design to a textual selection including official documents and Presidential declarations from 2008–2018, semi-structured interviews with policy-makers, cultural operators and experts, and participant observation. The article finds that, between 2008 and 2012, three competing articulations of identity were proposed in Russia's cultural diplomacy, targeting Russian (Russkiy) ethnicity, the country's multi-ethnicity, and its collective memory. However, after the 2012 presidential elections, these were replaced by a new articulation reproducing Russia's identity through a) radicalization of cultural differences (with the West/the EU) and b) negation of alternative identities (within Russia and the post-Soviet space). Amidst increased political contestation with the 2011–12 Russian protests, this hegemonic intervention from the state-level sought to (re-)produce this identity through an antagonistic delimitation of the social and secure the regime's survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essential purpose of the paper is to analyze the tendency of personalization of politics in electoral campaigns as a result of the change within party organizations, understood as institutional arrangements and adjustments that political parties have had to assume to remain present in the electoral system. Mexican parties, by maximizing the media visibility of the candidates and their personal qualities, delegating political experience to the background (Rahat, 2015) and, on the other hand, due to the personal political leadership they have developed. The case studies presented are two. The first is the 2012 presidential election, marking the return to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) with its candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, under a campaign scheme based on the party's structural support, but also due to high media exposure of life personality of a politician with personal charismatic qualities. The second case that is analyzed is the victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, it supposes the rise of a recently created political party; National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) who saw in the figure of his candidate the means to be a protagonist of national political life. Both cases represented government alternations and show two contrasting types of political leadership from their origin and in the way they developed their political careers to reach the presidency of the Republic. It is also important to note that there are exogenous factors that drive partisan change and the emergence of personal political leadership. Among them is the decrease in partisan identities (Moreno, 2009), the volatility of the vote (Díaz and Vivero, 2015) and the increase in the use of digital communication media. All this contributes to the fact that electoral campaigns are in the postmodern stage (Díaz, 2016) characterized by prioritizing the exposure of the personal image of the candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a folded seats‐votes curve, we examine partisan bias in the 2020 presidential election and compare it to partisan bias in the five other presidential elections in the twenty‐first century. 2020 and 2016 are extreme outliers with respect to the absolute magnitude of partisan bias in the Electoral College. In 2016, 2020, and 2000 bias runs in a pro‐Republican direction; in the other three elections in this century, the opposite is true. But partisan bias can vary with where on the seats‐vote curve we look to find bias, and we identify the lowest vote share at which there is no partisan bias (if such exists). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 U.S. general election saw the emergence of a nonpolitician celebrity, Donald Trump, who frequently challenged existing power structures and figures. Trump's electoral win combined with reports of violence at campaign rallies, calls for removal of those in power, the ridicule of opponents, and the use of invectives and name‐calling suggest parallels to Bakhtin's elucidation of the carnivalesque. The authors examined media coverage of the 2016 campaign to uncover evidence of carnivalesque references. Such references were significantly higher for Trump than for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and for the 2012 Republican campaign of Mitt Romney. The implications of presidential campaigns steeped in carnivalesque rhetoric and actions are discussed, with concerns raised regarding the future of media institutions and participatory democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although racial identity is usually assumed to be unchanging, recent research shows otherwise. The role of politics in racial identity change has received little attention. Using panel data with waves around two recent presidential elections, this article reveals survey evidence of racial fluidity and its strong relationship with vote switching patterns. Across several models and robust to various controls, switching from a non-Republican vote in 2012 to a 2016 Republican vote (i.e. non-Romney to Trump) significantly predicts nonwhite to white race change. Among nonwhites who did not vote Republican in 2012, switching to a Republican vote in 2016 increases the probability of adopting a white racial identity from a 0.03 baseline to 0.49, a 1,533 percent increase. Individuals originally identifying as Mixed and Hispanic drive this identity-voting link. A parallel dynamic on the Democratic side—new Democratic voters moving from white to nonwhite identities—does not occur. The systematic relationship between Trump switching and white identity adoption is unlikely to be spurious or due to measurement error, does not appear for the 2008–2012 election period, and makes theoretical sense in light of 2016 campaign rhetoric and trends in political-social identity alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of recent presidential elections emphasize the importance of personal economic evaluations as well as the growing importance of racial attitudes. Less clear, however, is the degree to which economic evaluations are independent of racial considerations. The election of the first African American president offers a unique opportunity to evaluate how elite cues may trigger racial attitudes, a process called "racialization." Once activated, racial attitudes may become a basis for political evaluations. Despite evidence that racial resentment is a predictor of many political attitudes, there is surprisingly little research exploring relationships between racial resentment and economic evaluations. In this investigation, we examine the influence of racial resentment on personal retrospective and prospective economic evaluations in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. These findings have important implications for democratic accountability, particularly in terms of citizens accurately "rewarding or punishing" incumbents based on economic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research note, we argue that a segment of Trump voters may be motivated to demonstrate that they are not racially insensitive by saying they voted for Obama in 2012. As a result, what may appear as a substantial group of swing voters may be—in part—partisan voters who want to avoid perceptions of racial bias. Using data from a survey of a nationally representative nonprobability sample from YouGov, polling data from the 2016 election, and a survey experiment conducted with a convenience sample of American adults, we find that Obama-Trump voters score significantly higher on a social monitoring scale than others and that respondents are significantly more supportive of Trump when they are given the opportunity to mention who they voted for in 2012. The combination of results suggests that the number of Obama-Trump voters may be overestimated due to self-monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined associations between diagnoses with five chronic health conditions (diabetes, cancer, heart disease, asthma, and arthritis) and turnout in the 2012 US presidential election. We used cross‐sectional survey data from 16 states from the 2013 and 2014 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. We estimated a logistic regression model with the main dependent variable as a survey item asking respondents if they voted. We also estimated logistic regression models stratified by race/ethnicity to assess whether the chronic health condition–turnout relationships varied within each racial/ethnic group. Results show that individuals diagnosed with diabetes were 7 percentage‐points more likely to vote that those who were not. Stratified models revealed these diabetes–turnout relationships are particularly strong among those who identified as Hispanic and multiracial. Other health characteristics demonstrated consistency with previous literature, including lower self‐rated health being associated with lower odds of turnout. Our research suggests an intriguing new relationship between the experience of diabetes and a higher propensity to vote and that different chronic health conditions have varying associations with the likelihood to vote, implying that some groups are more vulnerable to being underrepresented in politics. Key Points: • Living with a chronic health condition and dealing with the associated social disadvantages may impact a citizen's ability and proclivity to participate in many aspects of civic and social life, including political activity. • We found that those who reported diagnosis with diabetes were significantly more likely to turn out to vote compared to those who had not been diagnosed, and this relationship varied across racial/ethnic groups. We found no significant differences in the likelihood of voting among any of the other chronic health conditions in the study. • Future research should investigate the social, organizational, and political factors that contribute to political participation and how these vary by different illness identities and racial/ethnic identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization and automation have contributed to deindustrialization and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, yielding important electoral implications across advanced democracies. Coupling insights from economic voting and social identity theory, we consider how different groups in society may construe manufacturing job losses in contrasting ways. We argue that deindustrialization threatens dominant group status, leading some white voters in affected localities to favor candidates they believe will address economic distress and defend racial hierarchy. Examining three US presidential elections, we find white voters were more likely to vote for Republican challengers where manufacturing layoffs were high, whereas Black voters in hard-hit localities were more likely to vote for Democrats. In survey data, white respondents, in contrast to people of color, associated local manufacturing job losses with obstacles to individual upward mobility and with broader American economic decline. Group-based identities help explain divergent political reactions to common economic shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politicians' spouses, usually wives, have received increasing amounts of media attention in recent years. In this paper, the newspaper coverage and photos of two candidates' spouses during the 2012 Finnish presidential campaign are considered. In these elections, campaigns were conducted by a straight couple and a gay couple. Coverage of politicians' spouses has often been observed to perpetuate traditional gender roles, but a gay couple in this context might cause some confusion. This article focuses on what the newspapers reported on the candidates' spouses and on political couples, how balanced the coverage was, and how intimate details of the relationships were discussed publicly. The results show that the spouses' roles were treated in a traditional manner in the newspapers. The woman spouse met conflicting requirements, and the gay spouse was considered in a more stereotypically feminine role than in a masculine role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do supporters of electoral losers and nonvoters maintain lower evaluations of institutions post-election? A sizable literature identifies a divergence in perceptions among winners and losers regarding democratic satisfaction, with few studies extending this to perceptions of other electoral and nonelectoral institutions nor to include nonvoters. The timing of the 2015 Asian Barometer survey in South Korea allows us to identify evaluation prior to Park Geun-Hye's impeachment scandal. Analysis consistently finds that those who supported the losing presidential candidate in 2012 maintained lower evaluations of institutions, with inconsistent results regarding nonvoters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to verify how the Rhetoric of Culture Wars manifests in the immigration debate in two of the largest French daily newspapers, in terms of distribution, Le Figaro and Le Monde, the first on the right and the second on the left of the political spectrum. In the period between two presidential elections with substantially different results (2012 and 2017), all opinion articles that contained the keyword "immigration" were selected, resulting in a total of 433 articles, 345 from Le Figaro, and 88 from Le Monde. The result was a series of rhetorical constants found that would be typical of this type of cultural clash on the immigration debate, which can be tested in other contexts in future researches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we posed several questions: What was the explanatory capacity of inequality and poverty at the state level in the United States presidential elections in 2012 and 2016?; what was the state balance in the presidential elections in the United States? By using the "American National Election Studies Survey", We also investigated the individual level to try to figure what variables could help us understand the vote in favor of the Republican presidential candidates in 2012 and 2016? Thus, to answer our questions, we conducted two analyzes, one at the state level and the other, based on individual voters, in order to explain the contrasting results of 2012 and 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital platform has deeply changed the electoral campaigns, producing a consequent evolution of political consulting. Social networks have become the mainstream media so that the digital strategist and the big data analysts have achieved a special place in the "war room," next to the campaign director and the pollster. In 2012, Obama's election has marked the entrance in the "Fast Politics": resulting, on one hand, in 24 hours news, a large amount of auto-generated contents produced by the voters through digital media, fragmentation, instantaneous transmission of messages and, on the other hand, a reduction of the attention threshold. Once again, similarly to the past, the evolution of the media (2.0) ends up changing the nature of election campaigns and political consulting request. What happens in Europe? The objective is to carry out a comparative analysis on the professionalization of candidates' electoral staff. We wanted to verify if the American model has been imported in Europe with special focus on the techniques and the style of election campaigns management. In particular, within a comparative approach among the European states, the study analyzed the usage of political consulting and the degree of "digitalization" during last general elections: an ancillary practice or, on the contrary, a new tool for consensus? The comparative analysis among European states exploited the data provided by Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS 2013) and constructed synthetic indexes on the professionalization and digitization campaigns, conducting a quantitative and qualitative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political debate research has investigated gender in the contexts of mix-gendered debates and women's political campaigns, but how does gender factor in political debates between men? To address this question, I analyze the three 2012 U.S. General Election debates between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. I find that Obama and Romney described crises for the American family that they sought to resolve by enacting presidential masculinity designed to protect the national family: either as a nurturing father who works with families (Obama) or as a strong father who works on behalf of families (Romney). Both strategies involved enabling families to be more effective social and economic units with appropriate help from the state. Examining these strategies illustrates how debates rhetorically stabilize broader discourses of gender relations and frame the need for and possibility of social justice activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, many proposed that this state-generated, ethnically loaded "nationalist boost" enhanced the state's legitimacy by replacing the previous social contract between the Russian state and the people. This article argues for a more nuanced understanding of nationalism in contemporary Russia by asking how exactly the state leadership has portrayed the Russian nation in 2012-2019. Analyzing presidential speeches in this period, the article traces three distinctive but closely interconnected narratives of "Russianness": the narrative of the victorious nation; the narrative of the moral nation; and the narrative of the multinational but ethnically hierarchical nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Declining telephone response rates have forced several transformations in survey methodology, including cell phone supplements, nonprobability sampling, and increased reliance on model-based inferences. At the same time, advances in statistical methods and vast amounts of new data sources suggest that new methods can combat some of these problems. We focus on one type of data source—voter registration databases—and show how they can improve inferences from political surveys. These databases allow survey methodologists to leverage political variables, such as party registration and past voting behavior, at a large scale and free of overreporting bias or endogeneity between survey responses. We develop a general process to take advantage of this data, which is illustrated through an example where we use multilevel regression and poststratification to produce vote choice estimates for the 2012 presidential election, projecting those estimates to 195 million registered voters in a postelection context. Our inferences are stable and reasonable down to demographic subgroups within small geographies and even down to the county or congressional district level. They can be used to supplement exit polls, which have become increasingly problematic and are not available in all geographies. We discuss problems, limitations, and open areas of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010, the US Supreme Court loosened contribution limits to Political Action Committees (PACs), sparking fears that big donors could exert outsize influence on elections by funding PAC advertising. However, PACs are potentially handicapped when buying advertising time; data from 2012 reveal that PACs pay 32% above regulated campaign rates. I estimate a model of demand for advertising by PACs, exploiting the misalignment of state and media market borders to address price endogeneity. I find that prices reflect willingness‐to‐pay for viewer demographics rather than media bias. The estimates further suggest that network‐owned stations discriminate more successfully than do local affiliates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, with particular focus on their respective uses of the internet and social media communication in mobilizing voters and volunteers and using their way of connecting with voters to emphazise their legitimacy as anti-elitist candidates. In his 2008 campaign, Obama set the precedent for using online strategies to build and support a national movement within the framework of the Democratic Party, Trump, an outsider in the GOP, took the strategy a step further and used social media as his primary tool of voter communication and mobilization with only emphasized his populist message. In their use of online campaigns, both Trump and Obama relied in populism rhetorical tools, though from different sides of the political spectrum, adding to contemporary debates of the nature and purpose of populism in the twenty-first century. However, in both candidates' campaigns mobilization of volunteers through their respective national movement became symbols of their populist appeals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beliefs about the incidence of voter fraud inform how people view the trade-off between electoral integrity and voter accessibility. To better inform such beliefs about the rate of double voting, we develop and apply a method to estimate how many people voted twice in the 2012 presidential election. We estimate that about one in 4,000 voters cast two ballots, although an audit suggests that the true rate may be lower due to small errors in electronic vote records. We corroborate our estimates and extend our analysis using data from a subset of states that share social security numbers, making it easier to quantify who may have voted twice. For this subset of states, we find that one suggested strategy to reduce double voting—removing the registration with an earlier registration date when two share the same name and birthdate—could impede approximately 300 legitimate votes for each double vote prevented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's data-driven campaigns, presidential targeting strategies rely on detailed perceptions about the political leanings and policy positions of Americans to decide which registered voters to contact and which messages to emphasize in their outreach. However, identifying supporters and opponents of a candidate's policy positions is far from foolproof. This reality results in some citizens encountering political message(s) on congruent issues, where their issue stance aligns with the messaging candidate, and others encountering incongruent issue message(s), where the candidate and message recipient do not share the same position. Examining official contact records from the 2012 presidential campaign of Republican Mitt Romney, I find evidence that Romney's campaign had some success when targeting Democrats with congruent issues. Messaging Democrats with an issue where they and Romney share common ground is associated with decreased support for Obama, increased abstention, and increased support for Romney. Contacting Democrats with an incongruent message and contacting Republicans with either an incongruent or congruent issue message had minimal effects on the voting behavior of the recipient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For twenty-four years, since 1996, I have been sharing with readers of Social Education my predictions of presidential election results based on the Keys to the White House. In 2012, I confidently predicted President Barack Obama's victory in a very difficultto- call election. In 2016, I defied the polls and the pundits to show that the Keys were pointing toward the victory of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. So far, at the start of this presidential election year, the Keys are too close to call. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the temporal course of meta-cognition and resistance processes following exposure to counter-attitudinal information in the 2012 Presidential election. Using a unique 3-wave survey panel design, we tracked eligible voters during the last months of the 2012 campaign and experimentally manipulated exposure to negative political messages targeting Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on an online platform. As predicted, we found that politically unengaged (vs. engaged) individuals were less likely to counter-argue a message attacking their favored candidate. Resistance, in turn, led to increased attitudinal certainty, polarization, and correspondence with actual voting behavior over the course of the campaign. These findings provide the first analysis of the longitudinal effects of meta-cognitive processes underlying persuasion for real-world attitude change and behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research finds that exposure to outgroup exemplars reduces prejudice, but it has focused on most-likely cases. We examine whether salient outgroup exemplars can reduce prejudice under more challenging conditions, such as when they are counter-stereotypical but not well-liked, and the audience is heterogeneous and holds strong priors. Specifically, we assess the impact of the Obama exemplar under the less auspicious conditions of the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign. Using panel data, we find that racial prejudice declined during the campaign, especially among Whites with the most exposure to Obama through political television. Liking Obama proved irrelevant to these effects, as did partisanship. Racial prejudice increased slightly after the campaign ended, but the effects remained largely intact weeks later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parties need to win elections, but they also heed the policy preferences of activists to provide the incentive to mobilize. Moving beyond the debate as to whether parties as a whole are policy or office driven, we examine groups within parties and identify different factions that place differential emphasis on office-seeking versus policy-demanding. Using data from the 2012 Convention Delegate Study of Democratic and Republican Party national delegates, we identify distinct factional groups within each party. We map these factions within each party, finding policy-driven and office-driven factions of delegates in both Republican and Democratic parties. We evaluate each group's response to political and party involvement, support for the larger party organization, and response to both intra- and interparty conflict. Finally, we make clear the picture of factional relationships within each party by accounting for how factional goals are integrated into the party organization over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: We explore the effects of trait disgust sensitivity and induced disgust on emotional response to political leaders. We assert that disgust sensitivity, especially in response to pathogen‐based stimuli (e.g., insects, feces, and vomit), will affect an individual's interaction with his or her political environment, including political leaders. Methods: We analyze the effect of individual predispositions in response to stimuli indicating the presence of pathogens on emotional response to President Barack Obama, as well as his Republican challenger during the 2012 election, Mitt Romney. Study 1 utilizes cross‐sectional data to determine how disgust sensitivity relates to how President Obama made respondents feel. Study 2 analyzes experimental data considering the effect of a disgusting odorant (butyric acid) on emotional response to Obama and Romney. Results: Findings suggest disgust plays an important role in emotional response to political leaders both through trait sensitivity and when induced and it is particularly relevant to emotional responses to President Obama. Conclusions: Disgust, both as a trait sensitivity and as experimentally induced by an odorant, influences emotional response to the political environment, including high‐profile political leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides evidence that affective polarization is an important mechanism linking conservative media use to political misperceptions. Partisan media's potential to polarize is well documented, and there are numerous ways in which hostility toward political opponents might promote the endorsement of inaccurate beliefs. We test this mediated model using data collected via nationally representative surveys conducted during two recent U.S. presidential elections. Fixed effects regression models using three-wave panel data collected in 2012 provide evidence that conservative media exposure contributes to more polarized feelings toward major-party presidential candidates, and this growing favorability gap is associated with misperceptions critical of the Democrats. Further, these effects are more pronounced among Republicans than among Democrats. Cross-sectional analyses using data collected in 2016 provide additional evidence of the mediated relationship. The theoretical and real-world significance of these results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]