Mobilizing Aggression in Mass Politics.

Abstract

This is an investigation of human aggression and the surprising ways it colors modern politics. Although aggression has always existed in human behavior, the emergence of a peculiar new species – the democratic citizen – introduces aggression into the newfound habitat of representative governance. This dissertation reveals the striking breadth of aggression’s influence on mass political behavior, which ranges from intuitive but unstudied links with violent attitudes to its unexpected impact on voting behavior. Aggression’s dynamic effects stem from interactions between stable individual predispositions for aggression in everyday life and the violent metaphors that appear regularly in the language of political leaders, journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens. Each element and outcome is grounded in the literatures of political science, psychology, cognitive linguistics, and communication, bridging research on aggression, metaphorical thinking, and political behavior. For these tests, I utilize complementary methods including: 1) two nationally-representative survey experiments and a third study to make strong, generalizable causal inferences about communication effects, 2) content analysis of presidential nomination acceptance speeches since 1932 to show the prevalence and variation of violent campaign metaphors, and 3) survey analysis with fifty years of American National Election Studies data that, when merged with the content analysis, replicate the experimental results in real-world election campaigns. In the first empirical section, trait aggression strongly predicts support for state violence and violence by citizens against political authority. Exposure to mild violent metaphors substantially amplifies support for violence against political authority among trait-aggressive citizens, but the same pattern does not appear for state violence attitudes. In the second empirical section, I find that exposure to violent campaign metaphors has polarizing effects on voter turnout and vote choice that hinge jointly on individual levels of trait aggression and perceptions of government’s responsiveness to citizens. These diverging effects are consistent with media violence research, and the electoral consequences match the signature of emotion’s influence in politics. Ultimately, this work provides substantial evidence supporting a new aggression framework for interpreting political behavior, it attests to the fundamental dependence between communication and personality effects in politics, and it uncovers new instantiations of timeless human behaviors.