Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Why The Kaine Vs. Pence Vice Presidential Debate Matters, Kyle C. Kopko, Christopher J. Devine

Political Science Faculty Publications

Tim Kaine and Mike Pence both have been described as boring.

Many Americans still don’t know who they are, and they share their parties’ tickets with two of the most controversial and unpopular presidential candidates in modern political history. So, it’s a safe bet that their first and only debate on Tuesday night will not draw the record-setting ratings of last week’s first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – or even come close.

With the possible exception of 2008, when Joe Biden and Sarah Palin were vice presidential candidates, running mates simply are not the focal point …

Social Issues, Authoritarianism, And Ideological Conceptualization: How Policy Dimensions And Psychological Factors Influence Ideological Labeling, Christopher J. Devine

Political Science Faculty Publications

Ideology's crucial theoretical and empirical role in explaining political behavior makes it imperative that scholars understand how individuals conceptualize and apply ideological labels. The existing literature on this topic is quite limited, however, because it relies almost exclusively upon data from the 1970s and 1980s, and it does not examine how psychological factors influence conceptualizations of ideological labels. This article uses data from two original laboratory experiments to test the relative impact of four major policy dimensions on participants' evaluations of candidate ideology and to test authoritarianism's role in shaping ideological conceptualization. These analyses indicate that individuals most often define …