Lies and half-truths are commonplace in US politics. While there is a growing literature examining questionable statements, relatively little attention has been given to the consequences that befall the sources. We address this gap by looking at how a candidate’s sex shapes citizens’ reactions to a factually dubious statement. We argue and show that subjects from the opposing party display a greater desire and tendency to punish a female candidate. Subjects from the candidate’s same party, however, appear to be more forgiving when the candidate is portrayed as a woman versus a man. In total, our findings suggest that gender and partisan biases may operate in tandem to both help and harm female political candidates who “misspeak.”

Previous literature suggests that economic performance affects government approval asymmetrically, either because voters are quicker to blame incompetence than to credit ability (grievance asymmetry) or because they understand that the degree to which policy-makers can affect the economy varies depending on economic openness (clarity of responsibility asymmetry). We seek to understand whether these asymmetries coexist, arguing that these theories conjointly imply that globalization may have the capacity to mitigate blame for bad outcomes but should neither promote nor reduce credit to policy-makers for good economic outcomes. We look for evidence of these asymmetries in three survey experiments carried out in the USA and Canada in 2014 and 2015. We find ample experimental evidence in support of the grievance asymmetry, but our results are mixed on the impact of economic openness on blame mitigation, with some evidence of this phenomenon in the USA, but not in Canada.

How does single-party dominance influence interpersonal trust? We draw on evidence from trust games played by more than 2,000 subjects in South Africa, where, since Apartheid, race-based social enmity has persisted under democratic competition characterized by single-party dominance. We find that partisan-based trust discrimination is most pronounced for those who identify with the main opposition party and is driven by strong distrust of rival partisans. These findings underscore how electoral competition, in general, shapes trust across party lines and suggests one-sided competition, in particular, has asymmetrical effects between parties in dominant party systems. Moreover, this study provides additional evidence regarding the relative weights of trustworthiness stereotypes tied to partisanship and race.

Perceived discrimination (PD) is reliably and strongly associated with partisan identity (PID) among US immigrant minorities such as Latinos and Asian Americans. Yet whether PD causes PID remains unclear, since it is possible that partisanship influences perceptions of discrimination or that other factors drive the observed association. Here, we assess the causal influence of group-level PD on PID using five experiments with Latino and Asian American adults. These experiments varied in important ways: they took place inside and outside the lab, occurred prior to and during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and tested different manifestations of PD and partisan attitudes (total n = 2,528). These efforts point to a simple but unexpected conclusion: our experiments and operationalizations do not support the claim that group-targeted PD directly causes PID. These results have important implications for understanding partisanship among immigrants and their co-ethnics and the political incorporation of Latinos and Asian Americans.

We use a novel survey experiment with a broadly representative sample to reveal an important phenomenon in voter integration of campaign communications: preference-mediated partisan motivation. When evaluating the credibility of candidate position changes on minimum wage policy (a readily quantifiable and salient issue domain), partisans do not take a new stance at face value, apply universal skepticism, or simply afford more credibility to co-partisans. Instead, they process a candidate’s stance through an interaction between the voter’s partisan allegiance and their own policy preference. Partisans update more when a co-partisan moves closer to them than when the candidate shifts away from them. The opposite pattern emerges with the other party’s candidates: partisans tend to be more receptive if the candidate moves away from them. This feature of campaign message acceptance has profound implications for political communication and our understanding of partisan cognition.