Anger has become increasingly pervasive in U.S. politics. Recently, we have witnessed a sharp rise in displays of anger across several contexts: campaigns and elections, large protests and riots, social media, and the news. In American Rage, Steven W. Webster walks us through the current political climate dominated by outrage at the opposing party, its leaders, and its supporters. It offers us a much-needed explanation of how we got here and where we are likely to be heading.The book is divided into two parts. The first discusses anger as a consequence of partisan sorting with racial, ethnic, cultural, and ideological identities, as well as of the drastic changes to the media landscape, which has become characterized by polarized news echo chambers and the internet. The second part is the main focus of American Rage. Webster employs several survey and experimental studies to demonstrate that rage has serious and deleterious consequences not only for attitudes toward opposing partisans, but also for American democracy. As both a personality trait and an emotion, anger leads to lower trust in government-a greater belief that the national government is unresponsive to the public. Moreover, angry citizens display a weaker commitment to democratic norms and values: they are more likely to believe that out-party supporters represent a threat to the country's well-being and are less intelligent than they are.Webster makes the compelling case that American politicians and media figures deliberately encourage their supporters to be angry. They indeed have a strategic interest in doing so, because anger at the opposing party's candidates produces partisan loyalty in presidential, House, and Senate elections. Perhaps the most concerning aspect of anger's impact on loyalty is that it is most pronounced among voters who view their own party's candidate negatively or neutrally. In other words, by stoking anger, elites expand their electoral reach and garner votes from copartisans who are the least enthu-
Racial disparities have persisted in COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and death rates in the United States. Differences in vaccination hesitancy have also emerged by race: communities of color and, particularly, African Americans have been more reluctant to get a vaccine to prevent COVID-19. Can racial descriptive norms provide a tool to increase confidence and reduce hesitancy within the US public? We conducted a survey experiment at the end of January 2021 on a sample of non-Hispanic white and Black American adults. The experiment varied whether information about uptake intent by race was provided, and what racial group was reported to be more likely to get a vaccine if one were available to them today. Our results show that the tendency to conform to one’s racial ingroup can play a key role in improving vaccination attitudes across race. Indeed, whites become significantly more willing to get vaccinated now or in the near future after they learn that a majority of whites intend to do so. Furthermore, both Blacks with high science trust and whites with low science trust are more likely to accept multiple vaccine doses and yearly boosters if their racial ingroup plans on getting vaccinated. Finally, the desire for ingroup conformity leads Blacks with low science trust to be more willing to receive a vaccine when they are provided a choice among vaccine brands.
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