<p> What causes variation in the turnout of an individual from election to election? Most individual level predictors of turnout can account for the propensity of an individual to vote but fail to account for changes in turnout behavior. Broad aggregate factors can account for variation in turnout trends from election to election but fail to account for changes in turnout at the individual level. In this dissertation I argue that civic duty can capture the variation that typical predictors of voter turnout cannot. Civic duty can account for variation in the turnout of high and low propensity voters, as well as distinguish why some groups turnout in one election and other groups turnout in another. The capacity of civic duty to capture such variation comes from the sensitivity of civic duty to the saliency of identities and the competing group concerns they generate. Civic duty motivates an individual to vote due to a sense of obligation that is generated by multiple group identities, with these identities either complementing each other and enhancing a sense of civic duty or conflicting with each other and diminishing such a sense. I apply and test such theory using the case of the 2017 British general election. With this case I find that civic duty can uniquely capture a sense of European identity, as well as the variation in salience of such identity that can account for the highly unexpected turnout of Millennials in 2017.</p><p>

<p> Discrepant findings in past research have led to two competing hypotheses regarding threat&rsquo;s effect on political ideology: the worldview defense and the conservative-shift hypotheses. According to the former, supported by terror management theory (TMT), threat will cause liberals to become more liberal and conservatives to become more conservative (political polarization). According to the latter, supported by system justification theory (SJT) and the theory of political conservatism as motivated social cognition, threat will cause liberals to become more conservative, and conservatives either to become more conservative or to remain at their current level of conservatism. To pit these two hypotheses against one another in a single experiment, it was tested whether making participants&rsquo; political views salient might influence the way that threat affects political views. It was predicted that when liberals wrote about their liberal views and when conservatives wrote about their conservative views, to make their political views more salient, threat would lead to greater political polarization. This was predicted because past TMT research has shown that threat will lead to a more fervent adherence to salient values, not to all aspects of a worldview. Thus, the salience of people&rsquo;s political views should make them more likely to adhere to them following threat. On the other hand, it was predicted that in the control condition, all participants would become more conservative. This appears likely because of abundant past evidence that threat leads to greater conservatism and because threat tends to activate brain areas that are also associated with conservatism. It was, furthermore, predicted that threat might make liberal participants, but not conservative participants, less likely to participate in politics, because past research has shown that liberals will withdraw from participation in politics when they are more authoritarian, and threat tends to make people behave more like authoritarians. The former hypothesis was not supported; in fact, the only effect found was that conservatives became more liberal under threat, a finding that has no precedent in the literature. However, there was partial support for the latter hypothesis: both liberals and conservatives showed less of an intent to participate in politics following threat.</p><p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Syracuse University, 2008. / "Publication number: AAT 3323088."