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AbstractHow does parties' use of moral rhetoric affect voter behavior? Prior comparative party research has studied party positions without much attention to how parties explain and justify their positions. Drawing insights from political and moral psychology, I argue that moral rhetoric mobilizes copartisan voters by activating positive emotions about their partisan preference. I expect this to hold among copartisans who are exposed to party rhetoric. To test my argument, I measure moral rhetoric by text‐analyzing party manifestos from six English‐speaking democracies and measure mobilization using copartisan turnout in survey data. The results support my argument. Furthermore, I find evidence in support of the theoretical mechanism using survey experiments and panel survey data from Britain. The article shows that moral rhetoric is a party campaign frame that has important consequences for voter behavior.

"Insights from social psychology and the gender and politics literature, as well as discussions and campaigns in the policymaking world, suggest that exposure to counter-stereotypes about gender roles might improve people's attitudes toward gender equality and LGBTQ rights. The authors test this expectation using survey experiments"--

Political scientists have long viewed values as a source of constraint in political belief systems. More recently, scholars have argued that values—particularly moral values—contribute to polarization. Yet, there is little direct and systematic research on which values are perceived as moral values. We examine 21 values, including Schwartz's values, political values, and moral foundations. Drawing on a broad literature on cooperation, we first develop theoretical expectations for the extent of value moralization both between and within value systems. We next argue that this moralization matters because it intensifies the effects of value disagreement on social polarization. Using a probability-based survey of the US and an embedded conjoint experiment, we find substantial variation in moralization across values, and that highly moralized values are more polarizing. Our research brings together competing literatures on values and shows how moral values differentially shape polarization.

AbstractFinancial regulation is often adopted in the wake of scandals and crises. Yet political science has little to say about the political effects of corporate scandals. We break that silence, asking whether exposure to news coverage of bank scandals changes the preferences of voters for financial regulation. Drawing from the literatures on media influence and public opinion, we argue that news coverage of bank scandals should increase voters' appetite for regulation. We test our hypothesis with data from six countries, using original nationally representative panel surveys with embedded experiments (total N = 27,673). Our pooled and country‐specific analyses largely support our expectation that exposure to news coverage of scandals increases regulatory preferences. We reproduce this finding in a separate survey wave, using different scandals than in our original analysis. These results contribute to studies on media influence on public opinion, the political significance of scandals, and the political economy of regulation.

Do narratives about the causes of inequality influence support for redistribution? Scholarship suggests that information about levels of inequality does not easily shift redistributive attitudes. We embed information about inequality within a commentary article depicting the economy as being rigged to advantage elites, a common populist narrative of both the left and right. Drawing on the media effects and political economy literature, we expect articles employing narratives that portray inequality as the consequence of systemic unfairness to increase demands for redistribution. We test this proposition via an online survey experiment with 7426 respondents in Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our narrative treatment significantly increases attitudes favoring redistribution in five of the countries. In the US the treatment has no effect. We consider several reasons for the non-result in the US – highlighting beliefs about government inefficiency – and conclude by discussing general implications of our findings.