Scholars@Duke
Christopher Johnston

Christopher Johnston

Professor of Political Science
Political Science
christopher.johnston@duke.edu
Box 90204, Durham, NC 27708
294J Gross Hall, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

An Ideology by Any Other Name

Journal Article Political Behavior · January 1, 2024 The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are prominent features of political discourse in the United States, and many citizens choose to identify with one of these ideological labels. Yet, many citizens do not fit comfortably in either of these categories, a ... Full text Cite

Mixed evidence for a relationship of cognitive fatigue to political engagement

Journal Article Electoral Studies · June 1, 2023 Daily cognitive fatigue is widespread, yet we are still learning about its influence on political behavior. Existing research suggests fatigue will reduce consumption of politics at the margin. Moreover, when fatigued individuals do engage with political m ... Full text Cite

The nature and impact of emotional content in congressional candidate emails to supporters

Journal Article Electoral Studies · October 1, 2022 Previous research suggests that appeals to anger and enthusiasm increase voter participation but decrease deliberation and openness to persuasion, while appeals to anxiety increase information-seeking and deliberation but not participation. Thus, campaigns ... Full text Cite

Negativity bias, personality and political ideology.

Journal Article Nature human behaviour · May 2022 Research suggests that right-wing ideology is associated with negativity bias: a tendency to pay more attention and give more weight to negative versus positive stimuli. This work typically relies on either self-reported traits related to negativity bias i ... Full text Cite

Ideological Asymmetries and the Determinants of Politically Motivated Reasoning

Journal Article American Journal of Political Science · April 1, 2022 A large literature demonstrates that conservatives have greater needs for certainty than liberals. This suggests an asymmetry hypothesis: Conservatives are less open to new information that conflicts with their political identity and, in turn, political ac ... Full text Cite

The Conditional Relationship of Psychological Needs to Ideology

Journal Article Public Opinion Quarterly · January 1, 2022 We offer novel tests of hypotheses regarding the conditional relationship of psychological needs to political ideology. Using five personality measures and a large national sample, our findings affirm that political engagement plays an important moderating ... Full text Cite

Curbing the court: Why the public constrains judicial independence

Book · August 20, 2020 What motivates political actors with diverging interests to respect the Supreme Court's authority? A popular answer is that the public serves as the guardian of judicial independence by punishing elected officials who undermine the justices. Curbing the Co ... Full text Cite

How different are cultural and economic ideology?

Journal Article Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences · August 1, 2020 While a single left-right dimension is often used for elites, many scholars have found it useful to distinguish mass political ideology along two dimensions: an ‘economic’ dimension concerning issues of redistribution, regulation, and social insurance, and ... Full text Cite

Erratum: Ethnic change, personality, and polarization over immigration in the American public (Public Opinion Quarterly (2020) DOI: 10.1093/poq/nfv022)

Journal Article Public Opinion Quarterly · March 1, 2020 In Johnston, Newman and Velez (2015), we examine how personality traits related to uncertainty aversion moderate the effect of local ethnic change on perceived cultural threat from immigrants and on immigration-related policy preferences. In two studies-on ... Full text Cite

Authoritarianism, Affective Polarization, and Economic Ideology

Journal Article Political Psychology · February 1, 2018 I consider two theories of affective polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the United States: (1) ideological divergence on size-of-government issues (Webster & Abramowitz,) and (2) authoritarianism-based partisan sorting (Hetherington & Weiler ... Full text Cite

Open versus Closed: Personality, identity, and the politics of redistribution

Book · February 17, 2017 Debates over redistribution, social insurance, and market regulation are central to American politics. Why do some citizens prefer a large role for government in the economic life of the nation while others wish to limit its reach? In Open versus Closed, t ... Full text Cite

Erratum

Journal Article American Journal of Political Science · July 2016 Full text Cite

On the Measurement of Judicial Ideology

Journal Article Justice System Journal · April 2, 2016 Researchers cannot assess the importance of ideology to judicial behavior without good measures of ideology, and great effort has been spent developing measures that are valid and precise. A few of these have become commonly used in studies of judicial beh ... Full text Cite

Economists and public opinion: Expert consensus and economic policy judgments

Journal Article Journal of Politics · April 1, 2016 How do citizens view economists, and how do they respond to consensus in the profession? We examine the responsiveness of the American public to information regarding the distribution of opinion among economists on five economic policy issues. We also exam ... Full text Cite

Economic Inequality and U.S. Public Policy Mood Across Space and Time

Journal Article American Politics Research · January 1, 2016 While classic theories suggest that growing inequality will generate mass support for redistribution, recent research suggests the opposite: increases in inequality in the United States are associated with decreases in support for redistribution among both ... Full text Cite

Emotion and Political Judgment: Expectancy Violation and Affective Intelligence

Journal Article Political Research Quarterly · September 13, 2015 What factors prompt citizens to switch from a partisan judgment strategy, one in which they reflexively side with the in-group in policy and electoral contests, to a more thoughtful one, in which they pause to consider additional information? Previous work ... Full text Cite

Lawyers' Perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court: Is the Court a "Political" Institution?

Journal Article Law and Society Review · September 1, 2015 Do legal elites-lawyers admitted to federal appellate bars-perceive the Supreme Court as a "political" institution? Legal elites differentiate themselves from the mass public in the amount and sources of information about the Court. They also hold near-uni ... Full text Cite

Context, engagement, and the (multiple) functions of negativity bias.

Journal Article The Behavioral and brain sciences · June 2014 Hibbing and colleagues argue that political attitudes may be rooted in individual differences in negativity bias. Here, we highlight the complex, conditional nature of the relationship between negativity bias and ideology by arguing that the political impa ... Full text Cite

Understanding the determinants of political ideology: Implications of structural complexity

Journal Article Political Psychology · January 1, 2014 There has been a substantial increase in research on the determinants and consequences of political ideology among political scientists and social psychologists. In psychology, researchers have examined the effects of personality and motivational factors o ... Full text Cite

Dispositional sources of economic protectionism

Journal Article Public Opinion Quarterly · June 1, 2013 Despite the increasing salience of issues related to free trade, research on citizen preferences over trade is sparse, and largely limited to economic explanations related to objective exposure. The present paper extends this literature by examining the ps ... Full text Cite

The Ambivalent Partisan: How Critical Loyalty Promotes Democracy

Book · January 24, 2013 Over the past half-century, two overarching topics have dominated the study of mass political behaviour: How do ordinary citizens form their political judgments, and how good are they from a normative perspective? This book provides a novel goal-based appr ... Full text Cite

Personality Dispositions and Political Preferences across Hard and Easy Issues

Journal Article Political Psychology · 2013 A wealth of theoretical and empirical work suggests that conservative orientations in the mass public are meaningfully associated with personality dispositions related to needs for certainty and security. Recent empirical research, however, suggests that ( ... Full text Cite

On the Ideological Foundations of Supreme Court Legitimacy in the American Public

Journal Article American Journal of Political Science · January 1, 2013 Conventional wisdom says that individuals' ideological preferences do not influence Supreme Court legitimacy orientations. Most work is based on the assumption that the contemporary Court is objectively conservative in its policymaking, meaning that ideolo ... Full text Cite

The Unexpected Impact of Coded Appeals

Other New York Times Campaign Stops · September 10, 2012 Link to item Cite

Perceptions of Supreme Court Legitimacy

Other YouGov Model Politics · July 15, 2012 Link to item Cite

Immigration Crackdown in the American Workplace: Explaining Variation in E-Verify Policy Adoption Across the U.S. States

Journal Article State Politics and Policy Quarterly · June 1, 2012 Immigration remains a powerful and recurrent feature of American politics. Of the issues related to immigration, controversy over government policy for controlling illegal immigration occupies a central position in the debate. One increasingly important an ... Full text Cite

Political justice? Perceptions of politicization and public preferences toward the supreme court appointment process

Journal Article Public Opinion Quarterly · March 1, 2012 To what extent should Supreme Court justices be appointed on the basis of ideology and politics as opposed to qualifications and experience only? We examine how Americans' preferences regarding this question are influenced by their perceptions of the Court ... Full text Cite