Three Essays on the Political Consequences of Loneliness

Abstract

The Political Consequences of Loneliness investigates how loneliness, both chronic and situational, shapes political attitudes and behaviors, including political participation and belief in partisan falsehoods. The dissertation develops a theoretical approach that integrates perspectives from political psychology and public health to examine how subjective feelings of social disconnection influence political life. These questions are increasingly relevant given the rising issue salience of loneliness during recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the erosion of interpersonal networks. Governments have begun to recognize loneliness as a serious public issue, with the U.S. Surgeon General releasing a National Strategy to Advance Social Connection (2023) and countries like the U.K. (2018) and Japan (2021) appointing Ministers of Loneliness. Within political science, however, loneliness has received limited attention, with most research focused on objective social network measures. This dissertation argues that subjective relationship qualities like loneliness add a unique dimension to understanding political behavior and political attitudes.The first essay examines the relationship between loneliness and political participation in the U.S. context, offering the first systematic study of its kind. Using multiple large-scale surveys, I find that loneliness is negatively associated with electoral participation, such as voting and registering to vote, but positively associated with non-institutionalized forms of engagement, including protesting, petitioning, and boycotting. While existing work has emphasized social motives as the primary link between loneliness and civic behavior, this study builds on grievance theory to propose an integrated framework that includes both political discontent and symbolic social motivation. These findings highlight loneliness as a meaningful predictor of both institutional and contentious forms of political action.The second essay focuses on the relationship between loneliness and voter turnout using longitudinal panel data based in the U.K. It shows that chronic, trait-like loneliness is significantly and negatively associated with voting. Individuals who report being persistently lonely are approximately three percentage points less likely to vote. To explain this pattern, I examine two potential pathways, political discontent and civic duty, and find that loneliness is associated with lower external political efficacy, greater dissatisfaction with democracy, and weaker civic duty. Notably, loneliness does not predict internal efficacy, suggesting that it undermines political engagement not by reducing personal confidence but by deepening feelings of exclusion from civic life.The final essay explores the connection between loneliness and belief in misinformation, addressing a previously untested link. I develop a theory based on the tendency of loneliness to increase hypervigilance to social information and its effects on socially motivated partisan reasoning. This framework predicts that loneliness should increase belief in in-party falsehoods and reduce belief in out-party falsehoods, especially among strong partisans. However, experimental evidence from a novel survey design, including one of the first large-scale manipulations of loneliness, shows that loneliness actually reduces belief in both in-party and out-party misinformation, particularly among weak partisans. Furthermore, loneliness has no effect on the persuasiveness of misinformation corrections. These results suggest that when social ties are weak, loneliness may activate accuracy-based rather than identity-based processing.Together, these studies demonstrate that loneliness, often considered a private emotion, has consequences for democratic life. By introducing loneliness as a key subjective dimension of social connection, this dissertation expands existing theories of political participation, misinformation, and political discontent, offering new insights into how emotional and relational experiences shape political behavior in an era of growing social fragmentation.