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   Faculty
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Professor Brader’s research and teaching interests include public opinion, media effects, political psychology, campaigns and elections, and political parties. Although most of the work is in American politics, his general concern with questions of political behavior invites research in comparative politics as well. Professor Brader is currently writing a book on the impact of emotion in campaign advertising: Based on neuropsychological theories of emotion and controlled field experiments, the research confirms, ironically, that “feel good” ads polarize the electorate by reinforcing prior beliefs and energizing involvement, while fear ads unsettle political habits to stimulate greater thinking, learning, and opinion change. He is also developing a new series of studies to explore more fully how citizens’ emotional responses to political messages, persons, and events, motivate political action and facilitate persuasion. In addition to the research just described, Professor Brader’s current projects cover a range of topics and methodologies: (a) collaborative research on how and why Americans separate public and private judgments of the president, including the effect of media discourse, especially during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal; (b) a project that overcomes previous methodological difficulties in linking constituency service to incumbency advantage in congressional elections by using an exogenous measure of opportunities for constituency service; (c) collaborative research into how voters develop partisan orientations in new democracies, currently focusing on partisanship in Russia; and (d) a project, a little more distant, on the development of party and media campaigns through U.S. history with an eye on the relationship between specific campaign tactics or strategies to the “construction” of electoral coalitions.
Selected Publications
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