Food and health regulations are increasingly being pushed onto the political agenda, with rising concerns about genetically modified foods, obesity rates, and vaccination. Public beliefs and attitudes on these issues often conflict with the scientific evidence, yet we know relatively little about what influences opinion on these issues. The public lacks clear partisan cues, and many food and health attitudes cut across the ideological spectrum. We argue that these issues represent new 'purity' attitudes that are driven by the emotion of disgust. Across three studies, both by measuring individuals' trait disgust sensitivity and experimentally inducing an emotional state of disgust, we demonstrate the impact of disgust on food and health policy attitudes. Our results show that greater sensitivity to disgust is associated with support for organic foods, opposition to genetically modified foods, and anti-vaccination beliefs. However, we find only limited evidence that experimentally manipulated disgust affects attitudes toward genetically modified and organic foods. Overall, our results demonstrate that disgust plays an important role in attitudes regarding public health and broadens our understanding of purity attitudes.

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Objectives This analysis of referenda voting on same‐sex marriage (SSM) from 1998 until Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) focuses on the impact of turnout, which has been neglected in previous research on gay marriage referenda. Methods We employ OLS regression analysis with clustered standard errors by state to analyze voting on SSM referenda with eight county‐level variables and seven state‐level variables. Our novel data set includes 2,610 counties across 34 different states. Results Higher referendum turnout consistently produced less support for banning SSM. Additionally, we find that the gap between the polling numbers and referendum results was caused by low turnout levels. A higher turnout would reduce that gap, so that polling would have more closely approximated public opinion. Conclusions These findings suggest that impact of voter turnout on public policy is understudied, and including turnout measures may help future researchers better understand the electoral behavior of morality policy referenda.

Immigration has become a focal debate in politics across the world. Recent research suggests that anti-immigration attitudes may have deep psychological roots in implicit disease avoidance motivations. A key implication of this theory is that individual differences in disease avoidance should be related to opposition to immigration across a wide variety of cultural and political contexts. However, existing evidence on the topic has come almost entirely from the United States and Canada. In this article, we test the disease avoidance hypothesis using nationally representative samples from Norway, Sweden, Turkey, and Mexico, as well as two diverse samples from the United States. We find consistent and robust evidence that disgust sensitivity is associated with anti-immigration attitudes and that the relationship is similar in magnitude to education. Overall, our findings support the disease avoidance hypothesis and provide new insights into the nature of anti-immigration attitudes.