"Will Rejected Mail-In Ballots Decide the Election? QSS Faculty Michael Herron Weighs In"
Date: 10/23/2020
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Math curricula are designed to shepherd students toward calculus. Some mathematicians think this path is outdated. Read more here.
How do Americans feel when the winner of a Presidential election loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College? QSS Affiliates John Carey and Brendan Nyhan write about their research in the Washington Post. Click here for more.
QSS Major Hannah Lang recently published an Op-Ed in the New York Daily News, arguing that Gen Z/ Millenials are not to be blamed for the spread of COVID-19. To read Hannah's piece, click here.
Alexander Agadjanian '18, who majored in Quantitative Social Science and Government at Dartmouth College, has published his college honors thesis in Political Communication, a peer-reviewed journal at the nexus of political science and communication studies. In the article, titled "When Do Partisans Stop Following the Leader?", Alexander asks to what extent individuals form their political opinions in response to cues from political party elites. The abstract of his new article and a link to the full text is below:
Evidence of public opinion blindly following political leader rhetoric has important implications for the scope of elite influence and normative democratic concerns. Past research, however, does not test the strength of real world leader cues amid signals that conflict with a leader's policy message, and thus has not gauged the robustness of the "follow-the-leader" dynamic. The current study explores whether two different conflicting signals – 1) opposing intra-party Congressional elite cues and 2) negative policy information that gives compelling reasons to oppose a policy – attenuate leader influence in support of a realistic counter-stereotypical policy. A national survey experiment with two parallel partisan designs shows that individuals follow their leader to a substantial degree whether or not conflicting signals are present. Conflicting co-party elite cues do not attenuate leader influence among Republicans. For Democrats, although they weaken amid opposition, leader cues still shape mass opinion sizably. Providing substantially more information about the policy at hand does not make either partisan group much less likely to follow their leader, a finding that holds regardless of individuals' preexisting ideology in the policy area. Results demonstrate the broad conditions under which "follow-the-leader" behavior holds and reveal a stronger nature of elite influence than previously understood. Party elites and information fail to effectively constrain the sway of prominent leaders, who have considerable latitude in positions they can take without losing mass support.
To read the full article click here.
After finishing at Dartmouth, Alexander was a research associate in the MIT Election Lab for two years, working under MIT Professor Charles Stewart III. At MIT, he led the lab's effort to collect, clean, and disseminate data from U.S elections from 1976 to 2018 across various geographic levels. This fall, Alexander will start a doctoral program in political science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Outside of his QSS thesis, Alexander has published papers in Political Behavior (on the causes of foreign public opinion toward the U.S.) and Research & Politics (on whether fact-checking information can promote politician accountability).