refereeD publications

​An Eye-Tracking Study of Gender Biased Information Acquisition in Candidate Evaluation Forthcoming at Political Psychology
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 ​Third Time's the Charm?: Repeated Treatments of Affective Polarization and Changes in Democratic Norm Support Conditional acceptance at the Journal of Experimental Political Science
Jenke, L., Johnston, C., and Madson, G. (2023.) An Assessment of Citizens' Capacity for Prospective Issue Voting using Incentivized Forecasting. Quarterly Journal of Political Science.
view summary The ability of voters to predict the future policy-related behavior of candidates is essential to a well-functioning representative democracy. But existing studies have difficulty distinguishing between detailed knowledge of individual candidates and the use of coarse partisan cues when making prospective judgments. This article uses incentivized forecasting of candidates' future interest group ratings, which allows for finer distinctions than yea or nay votes on bills. We examine the extent to which citizens can not only identify the typical issue positions of Democrats and Republicans but also distinguish between co-partisan legislators. First, we find a strong relationship between citizen's prospective beliefs and candidates' actual positions once elected to office. Further, we find that many of these relationships persist even when comparing candidates of the same party. This suggests that a meaningful portion of citizens go beyond party cues to distinguish the ideological extremity of individual candidates for office. Comparing accuracy across citizens, we find a strong correlation between respondents' political interest and the accuracy of their prospective beliefs, and a negative relationship between respondents' strength of political identification and accuracy.
Jenke, L. (2022.) Affective Polarization and Misinformation Belief. Political Behavior.
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Jenke, L. (2021.) Introduction to the Special Issue: Innovations and Current Challenges in Experimental Methods. Political Analysis​.
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Jenke, L., Bansak, K., Hainmueller, J., and Hangartner, D. (2021.) Using Eye-Tracking to Understand Decision-Making in Conjoint Experiments.  Political Analysis, 29, ​75-101.
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Jenke, L. and Huettel, S. (2020.) Voter Preferences Reflect a Competition Between Policy and Identity. ​Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 2739. 
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Jenke, L.  & Munger, M. (2019.) Attention Distribution as a Measure of Issue Salience. Public Choice, 1-12.
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Jenke, L., & Gelpi, C. (2017.) Theme and Variations: Historical Contingencies in the Causal Model of Interstate Conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 61(10), 2262-2284.
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Aldrich, J. H., & Jenke, L. M. (2017.) Recent Advances and Prospects for Integration with Theories of Campaigns and Elections. The Routledge Handbook of Elections, Voting Behavior and Public Opinion.
view summary The “calculus of voting” is the rational-choice based theory of turnout and vote choice that has been at the base of the choice-theoretic studies of campaigns and elections since its first formal statement by Downs (1957) and especially by Riker and Ordeshook (1968). Perhaps because of its initial formal results about turnout that are ordinarily understood to be both pessimistic and empirically wrong, a number of years passed with relatively little theoretical advancement, while theories of voting, political parties, and campaigns and elections developed, often with little to no attention to the voters’ calculus. In this chapter, after a review of the basics of the calculus of voting with respect to turnout, we consider two relatively new theoretical advances: the development of a fully articulated theory of expressive voting; and specification of the (spatial) utility function, to consider a theoretically coherent account of “abstention due to alienation,” and its relationship to the (spatial) account of moral convictions.
Jenke, L., & Huettel, S. A. (2016.) Issues or identity? Cognitive foundations of voter choice. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(11), 794-804.
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UNDER REVIEW

Odd Profiles in Conjoint Experimental Design: Effects on Survey-Taking Attention and Behavior (with Kirk Bansak) R&R at Political Analysis​
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Attention and Political Choice: A Foundation for Eye Tracking in Political Science (with Nicolette Sullivan) R&R at Political Analysis
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view summary All political science studies are, at root, about how people make decisions -- how voters choose whether and for whom to vote, how prejudice influences political choices, and the effects of emotions and morals on political choice. However, what people are thinking during these decisions remains obscure; currently utilized methods leave us with a "black box" of decision making. Eye tracking offers a deeper insight into these processes by capturing respondents' attention, understanding, salience, and emotion. But how applicable is this method to political science questions, and how does one go about using it? Here, we explain what eye tracking allows researchers to measure, how these measures are relevant to political science questions, and how political scientists without expertise in the method can nonetheless use it effectively. In particular, we clarify how researchers can understand the choices made in preset software in order to arrive at correct inferences from their data and discuss new developments in eye tracking methodology, including webcam eye tracking. We additionally provide templates for preregistering eye tracking studies in political science, as well as starter code for processing and analyzing eye tracking data.
Prediction and Cumulative Knowledge in the Social Sciences (with Pablo Beramendi, Scott De Marchi, Max Gallop, and Scott Page) Under contract at Cambridge University Press
The Impact of Vice-Presidential Candidates' Race and Gender on Election Outcomes (with Jon Krosnick) 
view summary Did the fact that Kamala Harris is a Black woman influence evaluations of Joe Biden, turnout, and candidate choice in the 2020 U.S. presidential election? This paper reports two empirical investigations. First, data from the 2020 American National Election Study show that attitudes toward Ms. Harris predicted turnout and candidate choice, controlling for an array of other plausible causes. Second, a novel, ecologically valid experiment embedded in a national non-probability sample survey ($N$ = 3,234) tested whether varying the race and gender of the vice-presidential nominee (using actual potential candidates) influenced turnout and candidate choice. Ms. Harris’ race and gender did not influence turnout or candidate choice directly (even among people high in racism, people high in sexism, Black people, and female respondents) but did so indirectly by shaping attitudes toward Mr. Biden. This is the first demonstration that these demographic characteristics of vice-presidential nominees influence evaluations of presidential nominees.
Leadership Sexism: A New Sexism Measure to Predict Candidate Choice (with Jon Krosnick, Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, and Emily West) ​
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view summary Across the social sciences, several different measures have been developed to assess sexism, including the modern sexism, ambivalent sexism, and social role sexism scales, as well as implicit attitude measures. We introduce another measure---leadership sexism---that is especially predictive of an important outcome in the study of political behavior: candidate choices. This measure focuses on whether an individual holds gender stereotypes with respect to personality traits viewed as important to voters when considering political leaders. Leveraging two national surveys, we demonstrate that leadership sexism is a useful addition to scholars' toolbox for understanding the role of gender attitudes in shaping voting behavior. Leadership sexism taps a type of sexism distinct from commonly used sexism measures. Moreover, leadership sexism predicts vote choice in U.S. presidential elections, even if the election does not feature a female candidate, suggesting that prejudicial attitudes against women widely influence contemporary American politics.
Predicting Anti-Institutionalism in Member of Congress' Tweets (with Scott De Marchi, Michael Ensley, Max Gallop, and Shahryar Minhas)
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view summary Anti-institutional rhetoric has been increasing on both sides of the political spectrum in the United States. We offer a new measure of anti-institutionalism that uses a natural language processing approach based on large language models (LLMs) to code House members' tweets as anti-institutional or not and test a number of factors that may influence members' likelihood of engaging in anti-institutional rhetoric. Our results indicate that constituents' characteristics such as partisan and ideological extremity do not play much of a role in determining House members' anti-institutional rhetoric. But members' own partisanship correlates strongly with their number of anti-institutional tweets. Collectively, our results imply that the rise in anti-institutional rhetoric among elites is rooted mostly in a change in the behavior of elected officials rather than in the growing clamor of a discontented populace.
Rising Affective Polarization Lowers Support for Democratic Norms of Restraint (with Diana Mutz)

working papers

Predicting Measurement Error Bias in Conjoint Survey Experiments (with Gary King)

Experimental Manipulations of Affective Polarization: A Design-Based Evaluation of Key Assumptions (with Donald Green)
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Interactive Effects in Conjoint Experiments (with Kirk Bansak)