Essays on the Moderating Role of Political Engagement in Political Preference Formation

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore how Americans’ attentiveness to, interest in, and knowledge about politics—i.e., their level of political engagement—shapes the way their psychological traits manifest into political preferences. Some Americans are highly engaged with politics, following political news closely and being attentive to current affairs. Other Americans pay little attention to politics and exhibit very little knowledge about current affairs. These varying levels of political engagement are consequential in shaping how psychological traits are translated by citizens into political preferences in many issue areas. Examining decades of national US survey data from an array of sources (2008-2020), I identify political engagement as a key moderating variable in the relationships between (1) dispositional authoritarianism and responses to the COVID pandemic; (2) dispositional needs for certainty and security (NSC) and preferences for collective security; and (3) rural place-based consciousness and partisan-ideological identity and economic attitudes. In some cases, I find political engagement compounds the relationships of psychological traits to political preferences; for example, political engagement strengthens the associations of needs for security and certainty with hawkish foreign policy attitudes and tough-on-crime preferences. But in other cases, political engagement attenuates and reverses altogether the relationships of traits to political preferences; for example, the relationship between authoritarianism and preferences for COVID restrictions flips from positive at low political engagement to negative at high political engagement. Examining a diverse set of psychological traits and political attitudes, my findings consistently show the importance of political engagement as a moderator of political preference formation in the United States.