Published
Roberts, Damon C. and Jennifer Wolak. 2022. “Do Voters Care about the Age of their Elected Representatives?” Political Behavior. DOI: 10.1007/s11109-022-09802-5.
On average, members of Congress are significantly older than the constituents they represent, while young people remain under-represented in elected office. Is this because people prefer older politicians and fail to see young people as viable candidates? Drawing on survey and experimental evidence, we explore how the age of a politician affects both candidate evaluations and incumbent approval. We find that people tend to see younger candidates as less experienced, less qualified, and less conservative than older candidates. However, we find few differences in people’s willingness to support a younger candidate than an older candidate. In fact, when looking at patterns of approval in Congress, people report more negative ratings of older members of Congress rather than younger ones. The over-representation of older voices in Washington likely reflects structural factors like incumbency that favor the success of older politicians, rather than the demands of the electorate.
Fahey, James J. and Damon C. Roberts and Stephen M. Utych. 2022. “Principled or Partisan? The Effect of Cancel Culture Framings on Support for Free Speech.” American Politics Research. DOI: 10.1177/1532673X22108760.
Political scientists have long been interested in the effects that media framings have on support or tolerance for controversial speech. In recent years, the concept of cancel culture has complicated our understanding of free speech. In particular, the modern Republican Party under Donald Trump has made “fighting cancel culture” a cornerstone of its electoral strategy. We expect that when extremist groups invoke cancel culture as a reason for their alleged censorship, support for their free speech rights among Republicans should increase. We use a nationally representative survey experiment to assess whether individuals’ opposition to cancel culture is principled or contingent on the ideological identity of the speaker. We show that framing free speech restrictions as the consequence of cancel culture does not increase support for free speech among Republicans. Further, when left-wing groups utilize the cancel culture framing, Republicans become even less supportive of those groups’ free speech rights.
Roberts, Damon C. and Stephen M. Utych. 2022. “A Delicate Hand, or Two Fisted Aggression? How Gendered Language Influences Candidate Perceptions.” American Politics Research. DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211064884.
Gendered language is seemingly found everywhere in American politics. We test the impact that gendered language has on voter support for a candidate, using a validated dictionary of words rated as highly masculine or feminine. In three experimental studies, we find that the use of feminine language causes individuals to perceive political candidates as more liberal. Additionally, liberals tend to prefer candidates who use feminine language, and conservatives prefer candidates who use masculine language, regardless of the sex of the candidate. These effects are mostly mediated, however, by perceptions of candidate ideology caused by the use of language.
Roberts, Damon C. and Stephen M. Utych. 2021. “Polarized social distancing: Residents of Republican‐majority counties spend more time away from home during the COVID‐19 crisis.” Social Science Quarterly. DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.13101.
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented unique challenges across the world in getting citizens to change their behaviors in response to a public health crisis. In the United States, it appears that partisan differences in willingness to comply with these measures have emerged: Democrats are typically more supportive than Republicans in their stated support of and willingness to comply with these measures. However, actual behaviors are notoriously hard to accurately capture with survey items.
Objective
To determine the extent to which county-level partisanship influences average willingness to stay at home, and how these effects are moderated by county level characteristics.
Methods
We use personal device (cell phone) data provided by SafeGraph, aggregated at the county-level, to determine how county-level partisanship is correlated with willigness to stay at home. We additionally test whether these effects are conditional upon the prevalence of COVID-19 in the county, and the percentage of the county under 30 years old.
Results
We find that county-level partisanship predicts aggregate level compliance with social distancing behavior—citizens of counties that are more Republican spend more time away from home than Democratic counties. We find that the number of COVID-19 cases in the county and the percentage of the county under the age of 30 moderate these effects.
Conclusion
Partisanship appears to be a powerful predictor, at the county-level, of willigness to follow stay at home orders in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Roberts, Damon C. and Stephen M. Utych. 2020. “Linking Gender, Language, and Partisanship: Developing a Database of Masculine and Feminine Words.” Political Research Quarterly. DOI: 10.1177/106591291987488
Seemingly, gender, language, and partisanship are intertwined concepts. We believe that the use of gendered language in political settings may be used strategically by political elites. The purpose of this paper is to craft a tool for scholars to test the interconnection between politics, gender, and language—what we refer to as being the gendered language and partisanship nexus. We test our prediction using original word rating data. From our test, we find significant variation across seven hundred words in ratings as masculine and feminine and discover that words rated as masculine are more likely to be rated as dominant and negatively valenced. We additionally find that Republican men are most likely to rate words as more masculine. Using this dictionary, we find that Republican presidents are more likely to use masculine language than Democratic presidents in their State of the Union addresses and that the Republican Party uses more masculine language than the Democratic Party in their official party platform.
Select Working Papers
Roberts, Damon C. “Economic concerns appear to be weak predictors of white political identity.” Working Paper
Do economic or political threats explain reported white identity? Overall, the social identity literature would suggest that white identity would increase in response to economic threats. However, a number of those that study white identity, specifically, argue that it results from concern about political influence. Considering what whiteness means historically and contemporaneously, I argue that we should expect that political threats reflect stronger associations with white identity. Using data from the 2012, 2016, and 2020 American National Election Study, I consider a single model using penalized regression containing proxies of economic and political threats. I find evidence suggesting that in the post-Trump era, white political identity is strongly associated with reported feelings of Whites’ loss of political influence as opposed to economic threats, as some suggest and may expect.
Roberts, Damon C. “Giving the leaves back to the forest: A primer on the use of random forest models as chained equations for imputing missing data.” Working Paper
Though missing data is pervasive in political science datasets, attempting to regain information from it remains a relatively uncommon step in data pre-processing. While there are many options out there, the benefits and drawbacks each provide can make it difficult to discern which to use. This note has two goals. First, to provide a review of the consequences of missing data and to provide a reference for common options used by political scientists. The second goal of the note is to advocate for the uptake of using random forest models in the Multiple Imputation with Chained Equations framework. In doing so, it lays out the intuition of these models and how that fits with the task of imputing missing data while also comparing the use of this implementation to other common approaches used in political science with simulated data that are representative of political science data.
Roberts, Damon C., Courtney J. Nava, and Komal Preet Kaur. “Not absent, just different: The implications of gender on white’s racial attitudes.” Working Paper
Are common measures of racial animus and racial identity sufficient to detect gendered differences? The existing literature on gendered political socialization suggests that a number of predictors for racial attitudes, and the way they are expressed, vary depending on if one identifies as a man or a woman. As these precursors to racial attitudes vary on gender, we should expect that the ways in which men and women express their racial attitudes may vary as well. Without accounting for this variation in our measures of in-and-out-group racial attitudes, we are likely missing important information about how racial attitudes vary between self-identifying men and women. In this project, we argue that current conceptualizations and measures of racial animus and racial identity are strongly correlated with common outcomes to gendered differences in political socialization. Further, we suspect that particular items in these measures vary on gender. We warn that this may lead to a misunderstanding of a gender gap in racial attitudes when we measure and conceptualize those racial attitudes in one form and not the other. We first present data from the American National Election Study that demonstrates some correlation between gender and one’s score on white political identity. Then, we present a pre-analysis plan for an original survey to capture each item response to predict the gender of the respondent.
Book projects
Roberts, Damon C. “The shape and color of politics: How citizens process political information and its consequences.” In progress.
While there is descriptive evidence suggesting that people associate Republicans with the color red and Democrats with the color blue in the United States, we have yet to provide a deep exploration of the consequences of these associations. Building upon theories about information processing in neuroscience, psychology, and political science, the project argues that color is a source of information that has consequences on many important political outcomes such as candidate evaluation and voting, deliberation, persuasion, and it even motivates non-political behavior. The book presents a theory arguing that as color is among one of the first forms of information that we process for anything that we interact with, we are likely processing visual information in political contexts before we even process more traditional forms of information – such as one’s position on taxes. This theory suggests that as a result, it activates “snap-judgments” and generates impressions about political objects. The downstream consequences of these snap-judgments is that we often form attitudes that are hard to change before we have even been confronted with information about one’s policy and issue positions. The implications of such a process explains how the use of the colors red and blue on political yard signs can be effective at attracting votes as citizens make presumptions about the partisan affiliation of a candidate on just that information alone. It additionally explains the potency of things like the red “Make America Great Again Hat” and hanging a Rainbow Flag on citizens’ tendency to avoid conversations with those of other political persuasions and to live in neighborhoods with little variation in partisan affiliation among its residents. It also presents evidence explaining the motivation for increased consistency in the use of the color red and the color blue by politicians, candidates, and the parties in their official branding.
Public Scholarship
Articles
Roberts, Damon C. and Jennifer Wolak. 2022. “Will Biden’s age keep him from being re-elected?” Washington Post.