Abstract
Findings in political science suggest that negative emotions play a significant role in our understanding of 1) which factors affect our political attitudes (e.g. Brader 2006) and 2) which factors motivate our political behavior (e.g. Lamprianou and Ellinas 2019; Miller 2011). Further, anger has been established as a negative emotion that significantly affects both political attitudes (e.g. Brader 2006) and political behavior (e.g. Lamprianou and Ellinas 2019; Miller 2011). However, there is evidence to suggest that we are motivated differently by three established types of anger (i.e. personal, empathic, and deontic) (Batson et al. 2007), and so each type of anger should be examined independently of the others. Thus, the intention of this dissertation, and the main contribution to the literature on political attitudes and political behavior, is the introduction of deontic anger, which is a measure of moral outrage that is derived from psychology’s established deonance theory (e.g. Bucciarelli and Johnson-Laird 2005). Data for this dissertation is collected from survey experiments administered through the third-party platforms Mechanical Turk and Lucid. Chapter One gives a brief introduction of deontic anger. The first empirical chapter, Chapter 2, offers a theoretical and empirical justification for the inclusion of deontic anger in political science. The chapter’s analyses first examine the relationship between perceptions of behavior of abuse and deontic anger and then examine the moderating effect of partisanship on that relationship. The second empirical chapter, Chapter 3, first examines the relationship between deontic anger and individual attitudes toward immigration and redistributive policies and then examines the moderating effect of partisanship on that relationship. The final empirical chapter, Chapter 4, first examines the relationship between deontic anger and charitable giving and then examines the moderating effect of partisanship on that relationship. The final chapter of this dissertation addresses potential limitations and explores avenues for addressing those limitations in future research.