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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Creatures Of Incoherence: Dissecting The Drivers, History, And Cognition Of Attitudinal Incongruence In The American Body Politic, Timothy Collins
Creatures Of Incoherence: Dissecting The Drivers, History, And Cognition Of Attitudinal Incongruence In The American Body Politic, Timothy Collins
Department of Political Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Most American conservatives and liberals wield contradictory political attitudes. This dissertation explores what drives this “attitudinal incongruence.” First, I define and operationalize my terminology and situate the topic within social and political psychology to formulate my central model and theory of ideologically asymmetrical application of (1) individuals’ psychological and cognitive traits, and (2) individuals’ social identity and environmental traits. This leads to the overarching hypothesis that conservatives’ incongruities are more strongly driven by internal forces, and liberals’ by external forces. The central model is then demonstrated in a broad historical overview of attitudinal incongruence in America. The central tenets of …
Emotion And Public Attention To Political Issues, Michael W. Gruszczynski
Emotion And Public Attention To Political Issues, Michael W. Gruszczynski
Department of Political Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Which mechanisms underlie the orientation of public attention to political issues? Though research on media agenda-setting has been one of the most successful enterprises in political communication and behavior, little is known of the actual processes that drive this phenomenon. I hypothesize that inherent in all environmental stimuli is emotional information, and that it is this information that drives the linkages between media and public agendas. Using a combination of large-scale automated content analyses of several political issues in the New York Times and public search attention data, I demonstrate that negatively-valenced and arousing coverage work concurrently with the volume …