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AbstractVoting is highly valued in democratic societies. However, in recent years there has been a marked decline in voting. To realign voting behavior with democratic values, we turn to the study of injunctive‐norm interventions. These interventions advance that by making injunctive norms, the norms representing collective values, salient to a targeted group of individuals, individuals will likely conform to the promoted norm. However, studies testing the effectiveness of injunctive‐norm interventions have produced mixed results. We hypothesize that individuals with few plans to vote are those who will be most influenced by these interventions. Individuals with few plans should be more receptive to normative influence because they do not have preconceived commitments about how to engage with voting. Study 1 (N = 141) shows that injunctive‐norm interventions influence the voting behavior of those with few plans about voting. Studies 2 (N = 152) and 3 (N = 195) bring forth evidence that this influence is also present when the salient injunctive norms are from close meaningful groups, such as family and friends.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has put substantial pressure on individuals to adapt and change their behaviours. As the hope of a vaccine remains at least a year away, everyone is urged to take action to slow the spread of the virus. Thus, "flattening the curve" has become vital in preventing medical systems from being overrun, and it relies on massive collective action by citizens to follow specific public health measures such as physical distancing, hand washing, and physical isolation for vulnerable individuals. Despite the recommendations, the public has often been confronted with the reality that some individuals are not respecting them, including elected officials (Aguilar, 2020).

AbstractIn multiparty systems, maintaining a distinct and positive partisan identity may be more difficult for those who identify with minor parties, because such parties lack the rich history of success that could reinforce a positive social standing in the political realm. Yet, we know little about the unique nature of minor partisan identities because partisanship tends to be most prominent in single-member plurality systems that tend toward two dominant parties, such as the United States. Canada provides a fascinating case of a single-member plurality electoral system that has consistently led to a multiparty system, ideal for studying minor party identity. We use large datasets of public opinion data, collected in 2019 and 2021 in Canada, to test a Lasso regression, a machine learning technique, to identify the factors that are the most important to predict whether partisans of minor political parties will seekin-group distinctiveness, meaning that they seek a different and positive political identity from the major political parties they are in competition with, or take part inout-group favouritism, meaning that they seek to become closer major political parties. We find that party rating is the most important predictor. The more partisans of the minor party rate their own party favourably, the more they take part in distinctiveness. We also find that the more minor party partisans perceive the major party as favourable, the more favouritism they will show towards the major party.