Stressful politics: Voters’ cortisol responses to the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2009.10.018Get rights and content

Summary

Social subordination can be biologically stressful; when mammals lose dominance contests they have acute increases in the stress hormone cortisol. However, human studies of the effect of dominance contest outcomes on cortisol changes have had inconsistent results. Moreover, human studies have been limited to face-to-face competitions and have heretofore never examined cortisol responses to shifts in political dominance hierarchies. The present study investigated voters’ cortisol responses to the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election. 183 participants at two research sites (Michigan and North Carolina) provided saliva samples at several time points before and after the announcement of the winner on Election Night. Radioimmunoassay was used to measure levels of cortisol in the saliva samples. In North Carolina, John McCain voters (losers) had increases in post-outcome cortisol levels, whereas Barack Obama voters (winners) had stable post-outcome cortisol levels. The present research provides novel evidence that societal shifts in political dominance can impact biological stress responses in voters whose political party becomes socio-politically subordinate.

Section snippets

Subjects

Data were collected from 80 participants (27 men) in Durham, NC and from 103 participants (34 men) in Ann Arbor, MI. Eleven Durham participants’ data and nine Ann Arbor participants’ data were omitted from the analyses, because they did not vote in the election or failed to complete all aspects of the experiment. The final Durham sample (N = 69) consisted of 24 men and 45 women (21.07 ± 0.46 years old). The final Ann Arbor sample (N = 94) consisted of 33 men and 61 women (21.12 ± 0.49 years old). Three

Results

Salivary cortisol values were right-skewed, thus all subsequent analyses used log-transformed cortisol values. To examine how supporting the winning or losing candidate affected cortisol levels after the outcome of the election, we ran a repeated-measures ANCOVA with post-outcome cortisol at T2, T3, and T4 as a within-subjects factor, and candidate choice as a between-subjects factor. Covariates included cortisol level at T1 and saliva collection time at T2. We included saliva collection time

Discussion

The present study provides novel evidence demonstrating that shifts in political dominance hierarchies are biologically stressful for voters who supported the losing candidate in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Our hypothesis that voters who supported the losing candidate would have increases in cortisol after the outcome of the election was affirmed at the Durham, North Carolina study site. The context of the U.S. presidential election is a salient stimulus to voters—as political

Role of funding source

This research was supported by departmental funds from the University of Michigan (to JCB) and Duke University (to KSL), and the McClelland Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Hay Group (to SJS). Our funding sources had no further role in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Conflicts of interest

All authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgements

We thank Matt Fecteau, Eila Roberts, and Sonali Mohanty for assistance in scheduling and testing participants.

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