Ambivalence, Political Engagement and Context

Abstract

Scholars of American politics have generally found a negative relationship between ambivalence and political engagement. This study explores such conclusions and argues that the effect of ambivalence on engagement varies according to electoral context. Using a multi‐level modeling strategy, I find that ambivalence has a significant overall effect on political engagement for citizens in the United States but a lesser overall impact for citizens in Great Britain. Yet by allowing the slope and the intercept of ambivalence to vary across parliamentary districts, I find that ambivalence has asymmetrical effects on political engagement within Britain. I conclude by arguing that ambivalence essentially operates in a differential manner across electoral contexts and provide preliminary evidence as to why this is.

Does party ambivalence decrease voter turnout? A global analysis

“…3 The formula can be applied to different types of measures. It has been applied to information on (1) the number of positive and negative evaluations of parties (Bassinger and Lavine, 2005; Lavine, 2001; Lavine et al, 2012; Yoo, 2010), on (2) data from Likert scale responses of two parties (Rudolph, 2011) or on (3) feeling thermometer scores of two different parties (Johnson, 2014; Leiter, 2019; Mutz, 2002). I follow the latter approach and make use of citizens’ evaluations of parties to capture ambivalence.…”

Ethnic Diversity and Political Participation: The Role of Individual Income

“…The substantial similarity of the results obtained with the two alternative measures of ethnic diversity suggests that the effect is driven by the neighborhood concentration of immigrants from Asian and African countries, that is by ethnicities who are culturally and somatically more distant from Europeans and therefore more likely to be perceived as ethnic others by eligible voters. 15 Table 2 reports the partial effects of the percentage of African and Asian residents over the income distribution, using the estimation results of the model with the largest set of observable controls (last column of Table 1). Our main finding is the strongly heterogeneous effect of ethnic diversity on individual turnout for different levels of individual income.…”

“…3 Ambivalence has been found to have negative effects on political participation (see, for example, Mutz, 2002, andJohnson, 2014).…”

Understanding ‘Don't know’ answers to survey questions - an International comparative analysis using interview paradata

“…Research has identified different types of ambivalence, including distinguishing between what has been described as objective ambivalence (measured by comparing people's answers to questions) and subjective or metapsychological ambivalence (explicitly asking people to state how ambivalent they are) (Craig et al, 2002;Holbrook and Krosnick, 2005;Lavine, 2001;Martinez et al, 2012). Ambivalence has been shown to be associated with more unstable attitudes and lower levels of political engagement (Alvarez and Brehm, 2002;Johnson, 2014). Rudolph and Popp (2007) argue that ambivalence is a function of the cognitive effort involved in forming political judgments.…”