People are less myopic about future than past collective outcomes.

Myopia involves giving disproportionate weight to outcomes that occur close to the present. Myopia in people's evaluations of political outcomes and proposals threatens effective policymaking. It can lead to inefficient spending just before elections, cause inaction on important future policy challenges, and create incentives for government interventions aimed at boosting short-term performance at the expense of long-term welfare. But, are people generally myopic? Existing evidence comes mostly from studies that disregard either the future or collective outcomes. Political science characterizes people as myopic based on how they retrospectively evaluate collective outcomes, such as the state of the economy. Behavioral economics and psychology find that people make myopic choices involving future individual outcomes, such as money or personal health. To characterize myopia more generally, we offer two innovations: First, we adapt measurement approaches from behavioral economics and psychology to precisely gauge myopia over politically relevant collective outcomes. Second, we estimate myopia using the same approach for collective political outcomes in both past and future. We conduct two surveys on three different samples (including a large probability-based sample) asking respondents to evaluate national conditions randomly described as past or future while holding constant the domain, information about conditions, and the elicitation method. Results show that prospective evaluations are significantly less myopic than retrospective evaluations. People are often not myopic at all when looking to the future. This surprising pattern calls for more research to probe its robustness and spell out how low prospective myopia might lead to forward-looking policy.

The genetic underpinnings of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation explain political attitudes beyond Big Five personality.

OBJECTIVE: Political attitudes are predicted by the key ideological variables of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO), as well as some of the Big Five personality traits. Past research indicates that personality and ideological traits are correlated for genetic reasons. A question that has yet to be tested concerns whether the genetic variation underlying the ideological traits of RWA and SDO has distinct contributions to political attitudes, or if genetic variation in political attitudes is subsumed under the genetic variation underlying standard Big Five personality traits. METHOD: We use data from a sample of 1987 Norwegian twins to assess the genetic and environmental relationships between the Big Five personality traits, RWA, SDO, and their separate contributions to political policy attitudes. RESULTS: RWA and SDO exhibit very high genetic correlation (r = 0.78) with each other and some genetic overlap with the personality traits of openness and agreeableness. Importantly, they share a larger genetic substrate with political attitudes (e.g., deporting an ethnic minority) than do Big Five personality traits, a relationship that persists even when controlling for the genetic foundations underlying personality traits. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that the genetic foundations of ideological traits and political attitudes are largely non-overlapping with the genetic foundations of Big Five personality traits.

Hegemonic masculinity predicts 2016 and 2020 voting and candidate evaluations.

This work examined whether the endorsement of the culturally idealized form of masculinity-hegemonic masculinity (HM)-accounted for unique variance in men's and women's support for Donald Trump across seven studies (n = 2,007). Consistent with our theoretical backdrop, in the days (Studies 1 and 2) and months (Studies 3 through 6) following the 2016 American presidential election, women's and men's endorsement of HM predicted voting for and evaluations of Trump, over and above political party affiliation, gender, race, and education. These effects held when controlling for respondents' trust in the government, in contrast to a populist explanation of support for Trump. In addition, as conceptualized, HM was associated with less trust in the government (Study 3), more sexism (Study 4), more racism (Study 5), and more xenophobia (Study 6) but continued to predict unique variance in evaluations of Trump when controlling for each of these factors. Whereas HM predicted evaluations of Trump, across studies, social and prejudiced attitudes predicted evaluations of his democratic challengers: Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. We replicate the findings of Studies 1 through 6 using a nationally representative sample of the United States (Study 7) 50 days prior to the 2020 presidential election. The findings highlight the importance of psychological examinations of masculinity as a cultural ideology to understand how men's and women's endorsement of HM legitimizes patriarchal dominance and reinforces gender, race, and class-based hierarchies via candidate support.

Social penumbras predict political attitudes.

To explain the political clout of different social groups, traditional accounts typically focus on the group's size, resources, or commonality and intensity of its members' interests. We contend that a group's penumbra-the set of individuals who are personally familiar with people in that group-is another important explanatory factor that merits systematic analysis. To this end, we designed a panel study that allows us to learn about the characteristics of the penumbras of politically relevant groups such as gay people, the unemployed, or recent immigrants. Our study reveals major and systematic differences in the penumbras of various social groups, even ones of similar size. Moreover, we find evidence that entering a group's penumbra is associated with a change in attitude on group-related policy questions. Taken together, our findings suggest that penumbras are pertinent for understanding variation in the political standing of different groups in society.

Searching for a democratic equalizer: Citizenship education's moderating effect on the relationship between a political home and internal political efficacy.

Internal political efficacy (IPE) is an important yet unequally distributed driver of political action. Following cultural sociological explanations for political disengagement, we study how students' political home environment reproduces inequalities in IPE and how citizenship education moderates this. We test whether citizenship education compensates, reproduces, or accelerates inequalities in IPE due to differences in one's political home environment. These moderating effects are tested for three components of citizenship education; the number of civic learning experiences, open classroom climate for discussion, and active student participation at school. We consider the school a potential equalizer and a segregated breeding ground for democracy. Based on multilevel analyses employing cross-sectional data (3838 students across 147 schools) gathered to test the attainment targets in citizenship education among Flemish senior high school students (Belgium), we show that privileged students receive more citizenship education. However, each citizenship education component increases IPE and has a small yet significant compensation effect. This paper makes theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature on inequalities in political socialization processes while critically investigating the school's functioning as a democratic equalizer.

Willingness to pay, familiarity and political attitudes: The case of integrating people with intellectual disabilities.

BACKGROUND: Integrating people with intellectual disabilities into the community has become a major goal in improving society in general. Our study adds an important layer to discussions of how to achieve this goal. METHOD: We examine both the willingness to integrate people into the community and their willingness to pay for this integration. Using a representative sample of 813 Israeli respondents, we consider two factors in these attitudes: familiarity with the issue and people's political attitudes. RESULTS: We found that most people are willing to integrate people with intellectual disabilities into the community and some people are willing to pay for this integration. Those who are familiar with people with intellectual disabilities and those from the left side of the political map are more willing to pay to achieve this goal. CONCLUSIONS: Familiarity and political attitudes matter in the willingness to pay to integrate people with intellectual disabilities into the community.

Is there a "childless vote" in Europe?

We examined associations between childlessness and voting in Europe. We used cross-sectional European Social Survey data from 20 countries (n = 37,623). Our results suggest that there is a "childless vote" in Europe. Supporting our pre-registered hypothesis, childless individuals voted for parties that had visibly positioned themselves at the Green-Alternative-Libertarian (GAL) pole of the GAL-TAN (GAL vs. Traditional-Authoritarian-Nationalist) ideological dimension. The pre-registered explorative analyses of associations between childlessness and economic left-right ideology or other policy positions of the party for which the individual had voted did not yield results. Explorative analyses suggested in the review process showed that self-rated religiosity was independently associated with childlessness, but ideological left-right self-placement or self-ratings of political attitudes were not. Our results suggest a new demographic prognostic of vote choice, thus adding to the literature on demographic processes associated with political dynamics.

In sight, in mind: Spatial proximity to protest sites and changes in peoples' political attitudes.

Occupying public spaces can be an effective tactic for conveying a semantic message of protest and gaining wider support; however, it may also severely disrupt the everyday lives of non-participants and causes a backfire. Therefore, it remains unclear whether and how the occupy movements have shifted political attitudes among the general public. Bringing a social-spatial perspective to the case of the Occupy Central Movement (OCM) in Hong Kong, this study investigates how the attitudinal impact of occupation has varied according to people's spatial proximity to the protest sites. Using two waves of individual-level panel data collected right before and after the OCM and detailed geo-information on the respondents' home addresses and the occupied areas, we apply a difference-in-differences (DIDs) design to identify the causal link between space and attitudes. In addition, propensity score matching (PSM) methods are used to ensure the comparability of nearby and faraway residents. The results show that after the OCM, residents living near the occupied areas not only maintained their support for the pro-democracy camp but also became more liberal as compared to faraway residents. This phenomenon can be explained by the "on-site" effect, which suggests that the direct exposure to protestors' solidarity and the repressive actions of authorities arouse bystanders' sympathy for the protestors and support for their political cause. Such influence appears to be long-lasting and can be evidenced by the local election results after the protest.

Governmental Restrictions and Real Estate Investor Risk Perception.

We investigate the impact of governmental restrictions on the short-term risk perception, as proxied by the going-in cap rate, of investors in regional and neighborhood shopping centers. We use the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment and proxy for the length and severity of COVID-19 restrictions with the political affiliation of state governors. Using a sample of 40 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) across 27 states over the period of 2018 to 2021, we find that for states with Republican governors, which proxy for shorter and fewer COVID-19 restrictions, investors in regional malls required a lower going-in cap rate in the pandemic period than for states with Democratic governors. This effect does not exist for neighborhood shopping centers, whose tenants were not as affected by COVID-19 restrictions. Robustness checks suggest that our findings can be explained with mask mandates as one type of governmental restrictions, and that COVID-19 related restrictions do not impact the long-term risk perception of retail real estate investors. We furthermore find that the political attitudes of an MSA have an impact on investor risk perception.

Experimental and cross-cultural evidence that parenthood and parental care motives increase social conservatism.

Differences in attitudes on social issues such as abortion, immigration and sex are hugely divisive, and understanding their origins is among the most important tasks facing human behavioural sciences. Despite the clear psychological importance of parenthood and the motivation to provide care for children, researchers have only recently begun investigating their influence on social and political attitudes. Because socially conservative values ostensibly prioritize safety, stability and family values, we hypothesized that being more invested in parental care might make socially conservative policies more appealing. Studies 1 (preregistered; n = 376) and 2 (n = 1924) find novel evidence of conditional experimental effects of a parenthood prime, such that people who engaged strongly with a childcare manipulation showed an increase in social conservatism. Studies 3 (n = 2610, novel data from 10 countries) and 4 (n = 426 444, World Values Survey data) find evidence that both parenthood and parental care motivation are associated with increased social conservatism around the globe. Further, most of the positive association globally between age and social conservatism is accounted for by parenthood. These findings support the hypothesis that parenthood and parental care motivation increase social conservatism.

Mapping political trust and involvement in the personality space-A meta-analysis and new evidence.

OBJECTIVE: Relations between the Big Five personality dispositions and individual differences in political trust and involvement in politics have been investigated in many studies. We aimed to systematically integrate these findings and further explore the correlations at different hierarchical levels of the Big Five and political trust and involvement. METHOD: We conducted a meta-analysis of 43 publications (N1  = 207,360 participants) and estimated latent correlations at different hierarchical levels using two additional samples (N2  = 988 and N3  = 795). RESULTS: The meta-analysis revealed substantial correlations between involvement and openness (+), extraversion (+), and neuroticism (-), but only small correlations between trust and the Big Five. We also found a substantial amount of inconsistency in findings across studies. Our additional analyses showed that (a) correlations with the Big Five were larger for higher-order factors of general political trust (as opposed to subdimensions such as trust in politicians) and general political involvement (as opposed to subdimensions such as political interest) and (b) correlational patterns within each Big Five domain differed across facets. CONCLUSION: Our analyses indicate that political involvement is more strongly linked to the Big Five than political trust. We discuss the theoretical and empirical relevance of hierarchical constructs.

Correlations between social dominance orientation and political attitudes reflect common genetic underpinnings.

A foundational question in the social sciences concerns the interplay of underlying causes in the formation of people's political beliefs and prejudices. What role, if any, do genes, environmental influences, or personality dispositions play? Social dominance orientation (SDO), an influential index of people's general attitudes toward intergroup hierarchy, correlates robustly with political beliefs. SDO consists of the subdimensions SDO-dominance (SDO-D), which is the desire people have for some groups to be actively oppressed by others, and SDO-egalitarianism (SDO-E), a preference for intergroup inequality. Using a twin design (n = 1,987), we investigate whether the desire for intergroup dominance and inequality makes up a genetically grounded behavioral syndrome. Specifically, we investigate the heritability of SDO, in addition to whether it genetically correlates with support for political policies concerning the distribution of power and resources to different social groups. In addition to moderate heritability estimates for SDO-D and SDO-E (37% and 24%, respectively), we find that the genetic correlation between these subdimensions and political attitudes was overall high (mean genetic correlation 0.51), while the environmental correlation was very low (mean environmental correlation 0.08). This suggests that the relationship between political attitudes and SDO-D and SDO-E is grounded in common genetics, such that the desire for (versus opposition to) intergroup inequality and support for political attitudes that serve to enhance (versus attenuate) societal disparities form convergent strategies for navigating group-based dominance hierarchies.

The relationship between closed-mindedness and militant extremism in a post-conflict society.

This study aimed to examine the role of socio-political attitudes and motivational tendencies supposed to mark closed-mindedness, as well as other relevant variables of individual differences (Disintegration, i.e., proneness to psychotic-like experiences/behaviors and Death Anxiety), in the Militant Extremist Mindset (MEM). A community sample of 600 young respondents (Serbs, Bosniaks, and Albanians, aged 18-30) was recruited within a multiethnic region of Serbia that experienced armed conflict during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. The best-fitted SEM model, incorporating measurement and structural relationships between the variables, showed that the latent factor of Closed-mindedness predicted all three aspects of MEM as well as Neighborhood Grudge, that is, resentment toward neighboring ethnicities. The effects of Disintegration and Death Anxiety on MEM were entirely mediated by Closed-mindedness. Compared to previous findings, Closed-mindedness appears to represent the most important set of cognitive and motivational tendencies that channel protracted intergroup tensions into militant extremism.

Clinical symptoms of anxiety disorders as predictors of political attitudes: A prospective cohort study.

Conservative political ideologies have been suggested to correlate with elevated sensitivity to threat. However, it is unclear whether the associations between threat sensitivity and political attitudes can be observed with clinical measures of mental health. We examined how anxiety disorders predicted attitudes on several political issues. Participants were 7253 individuals from the 1958 British Birth Cohort study. Symptoms of generalised anxiety disorder, phobia and panic were assessed in a clinical interview at age 44, and opinions about political issues were self-reported by the participants 6 years later. Anxiety symptoms were associated with higher concerns about economic inequality, preservation of the environment, distrust in politics and lower work ethic. No associations were observed with racist or authoritarian attitudes, or support for traditional family values. We also assessed how political attitudes at ages 33 and 42 predicted anxiety disorder symptoms at age 44, revealing a possible bidirectional association between concern for economic inequality and anxiety disorder symptoms. These findings do not support an association between conservative political attitudes and elevated threat sensitivity. Rather, elevated anxiety may increase concerns about social inequality and the environment.

Dimensions of class identification? On the roots and effects of class identity.

Throughout the 20th century, objective class position was a strong predictor of both class identity, political preferences and party choice, but since the 1980s, the relationship between objective and subjective dimensions of class has supposedly vanished-according to some as the result of a fundamental blurring of class relations. However, others suggest that this result may be partly due to the use of outdated class schemes. Although still basically focused on inequality of life chances, class relations today are complex and include more than labor market position, such as different forms of cultural resources (e.g., education). As a result, class identity may also have become more complex, and possibly dependent upon the salience of different resources and types of group relations-both in itself and in its relationship with political preferences. Very few contributions, though, test such claims. Using two independent Danish surveys, this paper investigates to what extent class identification is multidimensional and how any such dimensionality is related to, on the one hand, different dimensions of objective class relations and, on the other hand, different dimensions of political conflict. The analyses show that despite changes at the overall, societal level, class identity remains a primarily unidimensional concept both in its structural origins and its relationship with politics.

Do the political attitudes of students change during their time in higher education?

Experience of higher education (HE) has come to characterise many contemporary political divisions, including those related to Brexit, Trump and coronavirus policy. However, the academic literature is unclear whether HE plays a causal role in changing peoples' political attitudes or is simply a proxy. Furthermore, in many contexts, there is limited descriptive evidence on whether students' political attitudes change during HE. This paper focuses on the UK, using data from the British Election Study, to make a twofold contribution. Firstly, the paper introduces recent political science theorising on the nature of contemporary political divisions, which has remained largely outside the HE literature to date. This theorising is illustrated through a cross-sectional analysis, comparing the political attitudes of those with and without experience of HE, showing that the former tend to be more left-leaning and less ethnocentric. Secondly, a longitudinal analysis is performed to assess how students' political attitudes change during their time in HE. While in HE, students tend to make small movements to the left and become less ethnocentric, representing approximately 20-33% of the overall division between those with and without experience of HE. These findings are interpreted through a critical realist lens-they evidence that HE could have a causal role to play in creating contemporary political divisions. However, to establish whether HE does play a causal role, further intensive research is needed to explore how particular aspects of HE might bring about these changes and how this varies for different students in different contexts.

Parent Contributions to the Development of Political Attitudes in Adoptive and Biological Families.

Where do our political attitudes originate? Although early research attributed the formation of such beliefs to parent and peer socialization, genetically sensitive designs later clarified the substantial role of genes in the development of sociopolitical attitudes. However, it has remained unclear whether parental influence on offspring attitudes persists beyond adolescence. In a unique sample of 394 adoptive and biological families with offspring more than 30 years old, biometric modeling revealed significant evidence for genetic and nongenetic transmission from both parents for the majority of seven political-attitude phenotypes. We found the largest genetic effects for religiousness and social liberalism, whereas the largest influence of parental environment was seen for political orientation and egalitarianism. Together, these findings indicate that genes, environment, and the gene-environment correlation all contribute significantly to sociopolitical attitudes held in adulthood, and the etiology and development of those attitudes may be more important than ever in today's rapidly changing sociopolitical landscape.

Who's in power matters: System justification and system derogation in Hungary between 2002 and 2018.

The present study employed European Social Survey (ESS) data collected between 2002 and 2018 to investigate system justification versus derogation in Hungary. In all nine ESS rounds, system derogation was stronger than system justification. System justification was consistently at its strongest among those who had voted for the ruling party, be it left-wing MSZP (until 2008) or right-wing Fidesz (2010 onward). This pattern can be explained by ego and group justification motives alone, with no need to posit an autonomous system justification motive. Voters of Jobbik, who were as right-wing as Fidesz voters, but whose party was not in power, did not believe the system to be any more just than did left-wing voters. Much of the research supporting system justification theory has been conducted in stable Western democracies. Our results highlight the need for research in more politically volatile contexts.

Sociopolitical Attitudes Through the Lens of Behavioral Genetics: Contributions from Dr Nicholas Martin.

Professor Nicholas (Nick) Martin spearheaded initial investigations into the genetic basis of political attitudes and behaviors, demonstrating that behaviors that are perceived as socially constructed could have a biological basis. As he showed, the typical mode of inheritance for political attitudes consists of approximately equal proportions of variance from additive genetic, shared environmental and unique environmental sources. This differs from other psychological variables, such as personality traits, which tend to be characterized by genetic and unique environmental sources of variation. By treating political attitudes as a model phenotype, Nick Martin was able to leverage the unique pattern of observed intergenerational transmission for political attitudes to reexamine the quintessential assumptions of the classical twin model. Specifically, by creatively leveraging the nuances of the genetic architecture of political attitudes, he was able to demonstrate the robustness of the equal environments assumption and suggest corrections to account for assortative mating. These advances have had a substantial impact on both the fields of political science, as well as behavioral and quantitative genetics.

The effect of mortality salience on the attitudes toward state control: The case of Russia.

Our study examined the effects of mortality salience (MS) on attitudes toward state control in different domains in Russia. Using the theory of Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition (CMSC) and the Terror Management Theory (TMT), we put forward two alternative hypotheses. Based on the CMSC, MS would enhance the approval of state control in different spheres, while, in line with TMT, the MS effect would be dependent on pre-existing views. The participants in the study were 450 Russian students who completed a questionnaire to measure attitudes toward state control in six spheres of life (the economy, the mass media, political parties, social organisations, science and education). After a week, they were randomly assigned one of three conditions-MS, frightening, and a neutral condition-and again completed the questionnaire on political attitudes. Our results showed that MS mostly provokes "control shifting," confirming the CMSC's hypothesis. However, a separate analysis conducted among people with different pre-existing political attitudes has revealed that "control shifting" is more pronounced for freedom-oriented participants. We discuss these findings in line with alternative views on the nature of the MS effect and specifics of socio-political context.