Research

Following the Ticker: The Political Origins and Consequences of Americans’ Stock Market Perceptions (SUNY Press, March 2023)

“Every day, we’re surrounded by news about the stock market. In this important book, Ian Anson examines what the growing importance of the stock market as an economic indicator, and the media’s sustained focus on it, means for American politics… Anson paints an important picture of how Americans perceive ‘the economy’ and how partisan motivated reasoning impacts these perceptions.” — Dominik Stecula, coauthor of We Need to Talk: How Cross-Party Dialogue Reduces Affective Polarization

Following the Ticker traces the growing influence of the stock market on Americans’ beliefs about politics. Drawing on a wide variety of empirical methodologies, including large-scale survey analysis, survey experiments, and content analyses, the book explores the complex relationship between stock market performance and political judgments through distinctive patterns of coverage in American news media. Building an eclectic theory that explores the interplay between media agenda-setting and partisan motivated reasoning, the book helps to explain why the stock market increasingly occupies the minds of Americans when they evaluate the performance of incumbent Presidents. In doing so, it contributes to a growing literature exploring the links between public opinion and economic inequality in American society. Because “the stock market is not the economy,” the increasing salience of the stock market as a source of political judgments reflects a worrying development for classic models of democratic accountability.

My work on political and economic perceptions seeks to integrate insights from the fields of political communication and political psychology to arrive at a more robust understanding of the ways in which Americans understand (and misunderstand) reality. In this research, I examine the contingent circumstances under which Americans (especially political partisans) develop and justify perceptions which do not square with empirical reality.

A related research agenda contends with the circumstances and contours of Americans’ political knowledgeability and perceptions. For instance, I am engaged in ongoing research on political overconfidence, or an unwarranted belief in one’s own knowledgeability about politics. In recent papers, I contend with this question in the realms of partisan motivations and political misperceptions. In work in progress, I seek to identify the limits and context dependence of this phenomenon, especially as it concerns partisanship.

My interests also encompass the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL). Using observational and experimental methods, I have recently examined ways to help undergraduate political science students become more deeply engaged in course content, improve as writers, and develop as researchers. These studies critically examine how we teach writing in political science as a point of departure for the achievement of these goals.

Part of my research agenda is methodological in nature. In one strand of this work, I focus on online survey experimental methods. Another strand seeks to innovate text-as-data approaches in the fields of SoTL research and writing analytics. In several ongoing research projects with Chris M. Anson, Kendra Andrews, Cary Moskovitz, and others, I investigate how text analytics can help us to better understand how students engage with peers to develop their writing skills, how plagiarism and text recycling are practiced across disciplines of study, and how experts think about the student writing experience.

I am also engaged in a variety of ongoing projects in the realm of public opinion, partisan and group identities, political psychology, experimental politics, and other topics.