Dear Hot Politics Lab followers,
This Friday (9th February) from 15:00-16:00 there will be another Hot Politics Lab meeting. During this session, Patrick Fournier (University of Montreal) will give a talk titled
“Do Emotions Drive the Link Between Winning and Satisfaction with Democracy? Leveraging the Lion King, the Super Bowl, and the World Cup”.
Abstract
It is well known that people who vote for electoral winners have higher levels of satisfaction with democracy than those who do not. The literature on this link posits a policy mechanism (people become satisfied or dissatisfied
because their party will or will not enter government and form policy) and an emotional mechanism (people become satisfied or dissatisfied because winning and losing affects feelings and emotions that then impact satisfaction), but it has not been able to
disentangle the two convincingly. To address this, we employ three pre-registered studies. One study is a survey experiment where participants are randomly assigned to a view a positive/negative excerpt of the animated movie The Lion King before expressing
their satisfaction with democracy. Two other two studies exploit the outcome of the 2022 Super Bowl and the final game of the 2022 World Cup. In each case, we interview several thousand people in the two geographic regions home to the two football teams, who
are exogenously separated into winning and losing groups based on the outcome of the game. Our interviews are held just before and just after the game’s outcome is known. This short-term interrupted panel design allows us to estimate the causal effect of experiencing
victory on satisfaction with democracy. Further, as the outcome of the games has no bearing on governmental policy, any difference in satisfaction with democracy across groups is attributable to emotions—especially if effects are bigger for respondents with
a strong attachment to one of the competing teams. A null effect would suggest that prior findings of a winner’s boost in satisfaction with democracy are attributable to policy considerations.
The talks will be followed by a Q&A, and everybody is welcome to join via Zoom:
https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/82942755100 or join the live session in the Common Room (REC-B9.22) at 3pm (CET).
You can check out the full program of this semester on our
website. You can also watch any of the previous online hot politics lab meetings via the labs
archive.
Interesting Summer Schools
We would like to draw your attention to two summer schools. You, or your students, might find these interesting at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research and at Sciences Po:
- ECPR Summer School of Political Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research
What: We look forward to welcoming 20
#NextGenPolCom
students to the beautiful city of Amsterdam!
When: 4-8 July
Speakers: Claes de Vreese (UvA), Sophie Lecheler (U of Vienna), Anna Ines Langer (U of Glasgow), Jakob Ohme (Free University Berlin), Aleksandra Urman (U of Zurich), Peter van Aelst (U of Antwer) and Bert Bakker (U of
Amsterdam)
Deadline to apply: March 27 More info:
https://ecpr.eu/Events/221
- Summer School on “Electoral Democracy in Danger?” at Sciences Po (see attachment).
Science Po is inviting applications from doctoral students for a doctoral summer school on the topic “Electoral Democracy in Danger?”
(see attachment for the details). The summer school will take the form of a five-day program, and consists of lectures by experts in the field as well as time for the presentation of students’ papers. The summer school will cover a broad range of topics, including
lectures that assess the question whether electoral democracy is indeed in crisis, as well as lectures that focus on solutions such as democratic innovation.
Program
Monday 3 July: Affective polarization –
Markus Wagner
(University of Vienna)
Tuesday 4 July: Electoral integrity –
Sarah Birch
(King’s College London)
Wednesday 5 July: Democratic backsliding –
Natasha Wunsch
(Sciences Po Paris)
Thursday 6 July: Democratic innovation –
Hannah Werner
(University of Zurich)
Friday 7 July: The role of emotions and personality traits –
Bert Bakker
(University of Amsterdam)
Best,
Maaike
Maaike Homan
PhD Candidate at the Political Science Department
Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research
University of Amsterdam
Room B10.01
