Refereed PublicationsJenke, L. and Sullivan, N. (Forthcoming.) Attention and Political Choice: A Foundation for Eye Tracking in Political Science. Political Analysis.
Bansak, K. and Jenke, L. (Forthcoming.) Odd Profiles in Conjoint Experimental Design: Effects on Survey-Taking Attention and Behavior. Political Analysis.
Jenke, L. (Forthcoming.) An Eye-Tracking Study of Gender Biased Information Acquisition in Candidate Evaluation. Political Psychology.
Jenke, L. ( Conditionally accepted.) Third Time's the Charm?: Repeated Treatments of Affective Polarization and Changes in Democratic Norm Support. Journal of Experimental Political Science.
view summaryAlthough theory and observational studies suggest that affective polarization should impact citizens' support for democratic norms, the experimental literature testing this causal claim has found no relationship between the two concepts. Researchers have assumed that any potential relationship would be immediate in response to treatments and have relied on one-shot experimental designs. But democratic norms are, by definition, sticky; one-shot manipulations of affective polarization are unlikely to be strong enough to change them. This research design tests whether three manipulations of affective polarization carried out over weeks impacts respondents' democratic norm support. It may offer a reason that observational and experimental results have been at odds with one another.Jenke, L., Johnston, C., and Madson, G. (2025.) An Assessment of Citizens' Capacity for Prospective Issue Voting using Incentivized Forecasting. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 20(1): 1-31.
Jenke, L. (2024.) Affective Polarization and Misinformation Belief. Political Behavior, 46, 825–884.
view paper Jenke, L. & Munger, M. (2022.) Attention Distribution as a Measure of Issue Salience. Public Choice, 191(3), 405-416.
view paper Jenke, L. (2021.) Introduction to the Special Issue: Innovations and Current Challenges in Experimental Methods. Political Analysis, 30(S1), S3-S7.
view paper 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.
view paper Jenke, L. and Huettel, S. (2020.) Voter Preferences Reflect a Competition Between Policy and Identity. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 2739.
view paper 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.
view paper 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 summaryThe “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 ReviewPrediction and Cumulative Knowledge in the Social Sciences (with Pablo Beramendi, Scott De Marchi, Max Gallop, and Scott Page) Under contract at Cambridge University Press
Affective Polarization Lowers Support for Democratic Norms of Restraint (with Diana Mutz)
view summaryWe propose an original theory predicting that affective polarization will negatively influence democratic norms of forbearance among the mass public, that is, norms that require citizens to exercise restraint rather than to take action. Using multi-wave panel data, we examine whether increases in individual levels of affective polarization predict declines over time in support for two types of democratic norms involving restraint. Consistent with our theory, we find that individuals who increase over time in affective polarization simultaneously decrease in political tolerance. In addition, rising affective polarization facilitates more severe declines in the perceived legitimacy of the US political system among partisans whose party has lost an election. Importantly, increasing affective polarization lowers the perceived legitimacy of the political system to a greater extent among co-partisans of the losing presidential candidate than affective polarization raises legitimacy among co-partisans of the election winner. This asymmetry offers a partial explanation for long-term declines in system legitimacy. Our findings suggest that democratic norms of restraint are at especially high risk as affective polarization increases.Excludability is a Matter of Research Design: How to Conduct Credible Indirect Manipulations (with Donald Green)
view summaryWhen putative causes cannot be directly manipulated (e.g., psychological states), experimental researchers must resort to encouragements (i.e., manipulations that increase the likelihood that subjects respond in the intended manner). When analyzing the effect of an encouraged variable, scholars must assume that this variable is the sole pathway through which the encouragement affects the outcome (the exclusion restriction). Few papers address the possibility that another intermediary variable may transmit the encouragement's influence to the dependent variable. We propose a three-step approach for making the exclusion restriction more defensible. This approach uses theoretical arguments to design encouragements that are then tested iteratively using (1) manipulation checks and (2) estimation of "first-stage" effects of the encouragements on posited intermediary variables. Although no method can ensure that exclusion restrictions are satisfied, ours leverages researchers' theoretical intuitions about causal pathways and multiple encouragements to make core assumptions as credible as possible.The Impact of Vice-Presidential Candidates' Race and Gender on Election Outcomes (with Jon Krosnick)
view summaryDid 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)
view summaryAcross 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)
view summaryAnti-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.Working PapersPredicting Measurement Error Bias in Conjoint Survey Experiments (with Gary King)
Interactive Effects in Conjoint Experiments (with Kirk Bansak) |
