For this week’s assignment, read Hassell & Settle (2017) The Differential Effects of Stress on Voter Turnout.pdf Hassell & Settle (2017) The Differential Effects of Stress on Voter Turnout.pdf – Alternative Formats and listen to Shana Gadarian and Bethany Albertson’s 45-minute audio interview on “How anxiety and crises change our political behavior.”
For this week’s discussion, please respond to the following questions. As much as possible, use your own words to respond to these questions. Do not merely cut and paste snippets from the article. You need to demonstrate how you personally are interacting with and understanding this article:
1. Are stress and anxiety (as Gadarian and Albertson have studied it) the same thing or different things? (Are the article and the podcast about the same phenomena or different phenomena? Or are the two sets of researchers asking the same question or a different question?) Do you see any overlaps?
2. What are the independent (IV) and dependent variables (DV) for the research presented in the (a) podcast and (b) article?
3. What is some common wisdom about how stress affects political behavior? (This is referred to as the “customary explanation” and is found on p. 533 of the article.)
4. What are the major debates among analysts regarding the relationship between stress and turnout? List some competing findings about the relationship between stress-inducing life events and political participation (p. 534)
5. In the article, what are some sub-populations that might respond differently to the IV, leading to a different outcome for the DV? And who says this?
6. In the podcast, why do the authors think health anxiety is good? What does it cause people to do? Do they think that everyone reacts the same way to anxiety?
7. What are the authors’ contributions (both the article and podcast) to this debate? How do they refine the existing argument?
Attach is PDF of the article however I don’t have a copy of the 45 minute video but you can find it online. Use the following textbooks as a reference (I don’t have a copy of the textbooks either)
Powner, C. L. (2015). Empirical Research and Writing: A Political Science Student’s Practical Guide.
Sage. ISBN: 978-1-4833-6963-1.
Howard, C. (2017). Thinking Like a Political Scientist. University of Chicago Press. ISBN:
978022632754-9.
