Broadly, my research seeks to answer why voters hold the attitudes they hold and, more importantly, why they vote the way they vote. Voter rationality is a tenet of democratic theory. I seek to understand to what extent we can rely on it and what the public’s attitudes and behavior say about the state of democracy.
My dissertation and book project offers an important, new understanding of ideology – one of the core elements of American politics. In my dissertation, I demonstrate that ideology is much more stable and powerful than current views suggest. Almost all of the literature on political ideology in American politics sees it as a largely ephemeral, inconsequential factor. Traditionally, the public is viewed as ideologically naïve with unstable and largely incoherent issue positions. I show that, in fact, the opposite is true.
Other lines of research include public opinion and its effects on elections and policy, LGBT+ politics, inequality, and political communication. My work is forthcoming in the Journal of Politics.
Publications
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De Abreu Maia, Lucas, Chiu, Albert, and Desposato, Scott. “No Evidence of Backlash: LGBT Rights in Latin America.” Forthcoming at The Journal of Politics.
- Abstract: Since the civil rights movement, scholars have warned that prominority policies can create a backlash effect in the majority. Some observers fear these dynamics may be at work in Latin America, where after dramatic advances in LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) rights, voters have elected antigay leaders. To investigate, we created the Latin American Rainbow Index—a measure of LGBT rights in the continent by country—and combined it with individual survey responses to test whether granting new rights had any discernible impact on attitudes. We find no evidence of backlash and little evidence of polarization. We also provide a new index of LGBT rights in the continent, which may be used by other scholars to further examine the LGBT movement in Latin America.
Working Papers
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De Abreu Maia, Lucas. “The Substantive Basis of Ideological Identification and its Behavioral Consequences in the United States.” Job market paper.
- Abstract: Scholars of political representation debate whether ideology is issue based–i.e., founded on substantive attitudes–or a social identity–i.e., derived from a sense of group-belonging. I argue that there is no contradiction between identity and issue-based ideology and that the degree of disconnect between attitudes and ideological self-placement has been exaggerated. I examine 10 panel surveys, spanning 45 years and 295,405 interviews, to show that ideological identification is about as stable over time as that greatest of political identities: partisanship. Additionally, data from the American National Election Studies indicate that ideological self-placement today is as affectively loaded as party identification. I also show that the labels “liberal,” “moderate,” and “conservative” are strongly predictive of attitudes, once we control for measurement error. Therefore, ideology has both an identity-based and an attitudinal dimension to it. Scholars also debate whether or not ideology matters in American politics. Some argue that it is predictive of behavior, while others claim its role is negligible. I employ a variety of estimators to isolate the independent relationship between ideological identification and presidential, Congressional and gubernatorial vote choice. I find significant and substantively large effects of ideology on presidential and Congressional elections. These results suggest a more optimistic view of democracy than has been the norm among most students of American politics–one in which voters are comfortable with ideological language and vote accordingly.
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De Abreu Maia, Lucas. “A Matter of Morality: Evidence That Ideological Labels Generate More Polarized Judgments Than Other Social Identities.”
- Growing political polarization in the United States has called into question the traditional view that ideological self-identification is a weak social attachment. To test this argument, I propose a new measurement of identity strength: the use of moral language. Results across two samples — a dataset of over 40,000 tweets and an experiment — show that ideology is more strongly associated with morality than five other social identities: partisanship, race, religion, sexual orientation, and sports affiliation. Moreover, ideological extremity is predictive of moral judgment. These findings contradict previous theories of political identification by showing that ideological labels are a polarized, relatively strong social identity.