Date of Award
2024
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Psychology, PhD
Program
School of Social Science, Politics, and Evaluation
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Oluf Gøtzsche-Astrup
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Michael Hogg
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
William Crano
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Jason T. Siegel
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2024 Kaiyuan Chen
Keywords
Economic uncertainty, Self-uncertainty, Elections, Public trust, Political liberals
Subject Categories
Psychology
Abstract
Elections play a central role in building public trust. Yet, ironically, distrust in elections is also pervasive, posing a threat to many political systems. It is therefore important to understand factors that affect public’s confidence in elections. Drawing from work in social psychology, this research proposes that economic uncertainty should undermine confidence in elections, because it could elicit self-uncertainty. Two studies were designed to test this hypothesis. Study 1 ( N = 87,822) was a secondary data analysis of a large-scale multi-nation dataset. The main finding was that economic uncertainty predicted reduced confidence in elections especially among political liberals (vs. conservatives) and in nations where election integrity (i.e., freedom and fairness) was high. Study 2 ( N = 342) zoomed in on the causal effect of economic uncertainty in one specific context (i.e., the contemporary United States). Participants received either an economic uncertainty prime, a neutral/control prime, or a direct self-uncertainty prime, and then rated themselves on measures of self-uncertainty and confidence in various social institutions (including elections). The experimental conditions did not differ from one another, providing no support for the hypothesis. Follow-up analyses were conducted using self-report uncertainty as the predictor. The analyses revealed that uncertainty predicted less confidence in social institutions generally (as opposed to elections specifically) among political liberals (but not among conservatives). Implications are discussed with regards to confidence in social institutions and the different ways conservatives and liberals respond to economic uncertainty.
ISBN
9798382742380
Recommended Citation
Chen, Kaiyuan. (2024). Economic Uncertainty as a Source of Self-Uncertainty and a Threat to Confidence in Elections. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 772. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/772.
