About

Marc Hetherington is the Raymond Dawson Distinguished Bicentennial Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He specializes in American politics and is involved in the Department of Political Science within the College of Arts and Sciences. As a faculty member, he contributes to the academic community through his research and teaching in the field of political science, with a focus on American political processes and behavior.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Law
• Computer Science
• Communication
• Sociology
• Biology
• Internet privacy
• Medicine
• Chemistry
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Hypercompetitiveness and Loser’s Consent

  Public Opinion Quarterly · 2025-11-15

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Electoral democracy rests on the conferral of Loser’s Consent. The Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021—and the widespread sympathy for it that endures among Republican citizens and elected officials—can be understood as an unprecedented denial of that Consent. We hypothesize that insurrectionist sympathies among 2020 election losers are structured in part by hypercompetitiveness—a psychological need to win at all costs. Using original survey data collected in the spring of 2022, we find strong suggestive support for our hypothesis. Many of the Americans who fail to condemn the Capitol riot may not be simply knee-jerk partisans, well-intentioned victims of propaganda, or sycophants in thrall to a would-be authoritarian leader. Substantiating the anxieties of many observers, those people may instead be unwilling to abide by democratic rules if it means they have to lose.

  PublisherDOI

• Affective polarization in the USA

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-07-08 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Masks and racial stereotypes in a pandemic: the case for surgical masks

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-24

  articleOpen access

  To contain the spread of COVID-19, experts emphasize the importance of wearing masks. Unfortunately, this practice may put black people at elevated risk for being seen as potential threats by some Americans. In this study, we evaluate whether and how different types of masks affect perceptions of black and white male models. We find that non-black respondents perceive a black male model as more threatening and less trustworthy when he is wearing a bandana or a cloth mask than when he is not wearing his face covering—especially those respondents who score above average in racial resentment, a common measure of racial bias. When he is wearing a surgical mask, however, they do not perceive him as more threatening or less trustworthy. Further, it is not that non-black respondents find bandana and cloth masks problematic in general. In fact, the white model in our study is perceived more positively when he is wearing all types of face coverings. Although mandated mask wearing is an ostensibly race-neutral policy, our findings demonstrate the potential implications are not.

  PublisherDOI

• Public Service Announcements and Promoting Face Masks During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  UNC Libraries · 2025-06-11

  articleOpen access

  Wearing face masks to combat the spread of COVID-19 became a politicized and contested practice in the United States, largely due to misinformation and partisan cues from masking opponents. This article examines whether Public Service Announcements (PSAs) can encourage the use of face masks. We designed two PSAs: one describes the benefits of using face masks; the other uses a novel messenger (i.e., a retired US general) to advocate for them. We conducted two studies. First, we aired our PSAs on television and surveyed residents of the media market to determine if they saw the PSA and how they felt about wearing face masks. Second, we conducted a randomized experiment on a diverse national sample. Both studies suggest that exposure to our PSAs increased support for face masks and induced greater compliance with public health advice. These findings have implications for how governments might fight pandemics.

  PublisherDOI

• The Presidential Election:

  University of Virginia Press eBooks · 2025-05-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The detection of health problems in Australian Youth Olympic divers using the OSTRC-H2 questionnaire as a surveillance tool

  Journal of science and medicine in sport · 2024-10-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Partisanship and the Pandemic: How and Why Americans Followed Party Cues on COVID-19

  Journal of Health Politics Policy and Law · 2023-11-21 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The United States underperformed its potential in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors use original survey data from April 2020 to March 2022 to show that political partisanship may have contributed to this inconsistent response by distinguishing elites and citizens who took the crisis seriously from those who did not. This division was not inevitable; when the crisis began, Democrats and Republicans differed little in their viewpoints and actions relative to COVID-19. However, partisans increasingly diverged when their preferred political leaders provided them with opposing cues. The authors outline developments in party politics over the last half century that contributed to partisan division on COVID-19, most centrally an anti-expertise bias among Republicans. Accordingly, Republicans' support for mitigation measures, perception of severity of COVID-19, and support for vaccines gradually decreased after the initial outbreak. Partisan differences also showed up at the state level; Trump's vote share in 2016 was negatively associated with mask use and positively associated with COVID-19 infections. Diverging elite cues provided fertile ground for the partisan pandemic, underscoring the importance of political accountability even in an era of polarization.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: Where Motivated Reasoning Withers and Looms Large: Fear and Partisan Reactions to the COVID-19 Pandemic

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-01-23

  datasetOpen access

  Contemporary American politics has been largely characterized by hyper-partisanship and polarization, with partisan motivated reasoning a thematic concern. Theories of emotions in politics suggest that anxiety might interrupt partisan heuristics and encourage citizens to reason more evenhandedly—but in what domains and to what extent? We use original panel data to assess how anxiety about becoming seriously ill from Covid-19 interacted with partisan attachments to shape political judgment during the Covid-19 pandemic. The structure of our data allows us to assess large-scale implications of politically relevant emotions in ways that so far have not been possible. We find large effects on policy attitudes: Republicans who were afraid of getting sick rejected signals from co-partisan leaders by supporting mask mandates and the like. Effects on vote choice for Republicans were muted in comparison, but fear’s large effect on independents may have been pivotal.

  PublisherDOI

• Partisanship and the Pandemic: How and Why Americans Followed Party Cues on COVID-19

  UNC Libraries · 2023-12-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The United States underperformed its potential in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using original survey data from April 2020 to March 2022, we show that political partisanship may have contributed to this inconsistent response by distinguishing elites and citizens who took the crisis seriously from those who did not. This division was not inevitable; when the crisis began, Democrats and Republicans differed little in their viewpoints and actions. However, partisans increasingly diverged when their preferred political leaders provided them with opposing cues. We outline developments in party politics over the last half-century that contributed to partisan division on COVID-19, most centrally an anti-expertise bias among Republicans. Accordingly, Republicans' support for mitigation measures, perception of severity of COVID-19, and support for vaccines gradually decreased after the initial outbreak. Partisan differences also showed up at the state level; Trump's vote share in 2016 was negatively associated with mask use and positively associated with COVID-19 infections. Diverging elite cues provided fertile ground for the partisan pandemic, underscoring the importance of political accountability, even in an era of polarization.

  PublisherDOI

• Counter-stereotypical messaging and partisan cues: Moving the needle on vaccines in a polarized United States

  Science Advances · 2023 · 25 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Communication
  • Computer Science

  value of 0.097). Based on this average treatment effect and totaling across our 1014 treated counties, the total estimated effect was 104,036 vaccines.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jonathan D. Weiler

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (United States)

  18 shared

• Thomas Rudolph

  10 shared

• Timothy J. Ryan

  Australian Synchrotron

  7 shared

• Steven Greene

  Marymount University

  7 shared

• Isaac D. Mehlhaff

  6 shared

• Rahsaan Maxwell

  4 shared

• Meri T. Long

  University of Pittsburgh

  4 shared

• James A. Thurber

  4 shared