It was a powerful statement, if notably hyperbolic. (Voldemort was a literal mass-murderer; Trump is not. Voldemort was a powerful dark wizard; Trump is just a Muggle.) But a forthcoming study from the journal P S: Political Science and Politics makes a better case for how lessons learned from fiction can influence people’s political preferences. The researcher Diana Mutz, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, found that Harry Potter book readers are actually more inclined to dislike Trump. This was the case even after Mutz controlled for variables such as age, education, gender, party identification, evangelical identification, and ideology. 
 
 Given that these typical predictors didn’t change the outcome, Mutz floats the likelihood that the lessons of the novels—embracing tolerance and inclusivity, rejecting physical and psychological violence—might explain the correlation between reading Harry Potter and disliking Trump. Basically: People familiar with the series’ narrative of good-vs-evil might recognize aspects of the books’ portrayals of “evil” in Trump. Mutz discusses how, in Rowling’s novels, the protagonists are constantly defending the outsiders of the wizarding world. “The ongoing battle between good, as personified by Harry and his friends, and evil, as personified by Lord Voldemort, is at root about the importance of group purity,” she writes, drawing connections to Trump’s statements about banning Muslims from entering the U.S., building a Mexican border wall, and other racially inflammatory comments. 
 
 The study featured 1,142 respondents. An initial 2014 survey measured their exposure to the Harry Potter films and books, and a second survey conducted in 2016 asked subjects to rate their feelings about Trump on a “thermometer” with a scale of 0 degrees (unfavorable) to 100 degrees (favorable). While watching the films didn’t significantly predict people’s feelings about Trump, reading the novels did (possibly because the mediums lend themselves differently to exploring the relevant themes of tolerance.) Additionally, Mutz notes that the delay between people’s consumption of the Harry Potter stories and their exposure to Trump bodes well for the study results, since people had plenty of time to absorb the underlying messages of the series before forming attitudes about the candidate. 
 
 
 
 It’s worth noting that the study occasionally contains editorialized language. (From the conclusion: “Perhaps most importantly, these findings raise the hope that Harry Potter can stop the Deathly Donald and make America great again in the eyes of the world, just as Harry did by ridding the wizard world of Voldemort.”) But it also, as Mutz writes, offers “some of the first evidence outside of a laboratory that a fictional story may have implications for general election preferences.” There will always be limits to the usefulness of comparing real people to fictional characters. And so far, there has been only one other empirical study exploring the political impact of reading Harry Potter (unlike Mutz, the researchers didn’t control for important factors such as political ideology.) 
 
 But it seems less specious to argue that the bestselling book series of all time could instill values that affected how its readers—especially its younger fans—now think about the world. From 1997’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to 2007’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the series consistently explored the dangers of cults of personality and authoritarianism through individuals such as Voldemort, but also Dolores Umbridge, Gilderoy Lockhart, and Rita Skeeter. It reinforced the virtues of acceptance and diversity, championing marginalized characters such as the house elf Dobby, the half-giant Hagrid, and other “non-pure” groups. Readers learned that it was was right to defend victims of discrimination, even if it meant being ostracized. While observational data can’t confirm causality, Mutz’s study nonetheless suggests that Rowling’s simple but meaningful messages have helped shape the political sentiments of her readers. ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| Can Harry Potter defeat Donald Trump? 
 
 Harry may not be a full-on patronus against the Republican presidential nominee’s appeal, but reading Potter stories does appear to be a shield charm against Trump’s message. 
 
 A new study to be published in a special 2016 election issue of PS: Political Science and Politics finds that reading Harry Potter books leads Americans to take a lower opinion of Donald Trump. In fact, the more books the participants read, the greater the effect. 
 
 Even when controlling for party identification, gender, education level, age, evangelical self-identification, and social dominance orientation — all factors known to predict Americans’ attitudes toward Donald Trump — the Harry Potter effect remained. 
 
 The study, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Donald?,” was written by Professor Diana Mutz, the Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. 
 
 Diana Mutz, Ph.D. 
 
 In the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was widely credited with shifting public opinion against slavery, but to date, there has been sparse evidence that fictional stories, even very popular ones, can influence political opinion. Evidence has largely come from laboratory experiments — for example, forcing people to read one of two stories — rather than observing real-world consumption of fictional stories. 
 
 Harry Potter’s popularity, with more than 450 million copies sold worldwide, made such a study possible in the public as a whole. 
 
 “Because Trump’s political views are widely viewed as opposed to the values espoused in the Harry Potter series,” Mutz writes in the study, “exposure to the Potter series may play an influential role in influencing how Americans respond to Donald Trump.” 
 
 To test that explanation for the Harry Potter effect, Mutz focused on three core themes from Harry Potter: The value of tolerance and respect for difference; opposition to violence and punitiveness; and opposition to authoritarianism. 
 
 In each case, Mutz points out, Donald Trump’s messages are opposed to the lessons conveyed in Harry Potter and closer to that of his enemy, Lord Voldemort. Examples abound throughout the series: 
 
 Harry and his friends advocate for oppressed house-elves and oppose Lord Voldemort’s quest for blood purity among wizards. Harry himself is of mixed wizard/muggle (non-wizard) ancestry. Trump, by contrast, has called for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration and made offensive comments about outgroups of all kinds, including women, Mexicans, Asians, and those with disabilities. 
 
 
 
 The Harry Potter series promotes non-violent means of conflict resolution; while Voldemort is willing to kill many times, the books’ protagonists consistently avoid unnecessary curses for killing, torture, or controlling others. Harry even saves the life of his Voldemort-aligned nemesis, Draco Malfoy. Trump, by contrast, has spoken widely about his fondness for waterboarding, and advocates the killing of terrorists’ families as a means of deterrence. He has praised his followers’ acts of violence against protesters at his rallies. 
 
 
 
 The Harry Potter protagonists work against authoritarian characters in the books. “As does Voldemort,” Mutz writes, “Trump portrays himself as a strongman who can bend others to his will, be they the Chinese government or terrorists.” 
 
 Mutz polled a nationally representative sample of 1,142 Americans in 2014, and again in 2016, asking about their Harry Potter consumption, their attitudes on issues such as waterboarding, the death penalty, the treatment of Muslims and gays, and (in 2016 only) their feelings about Donald Trump on a 0-100 scale. 
 
 Party affiliation did not affect the likelihood that a person had read the Harry Potter books, the study found; Democrats, Republicans, and Independents have all read Rowling’s books in roughly equal numbers. 
 
 The study found that each Harry Potter book read lowered respondents’ evaluations of Donald Trump by roughly 2-3 points on a 100 point scale. 
 
 “This may seem small,” Mutz acknowledges, “but for someone who has read all seven books, the total impact could lower their estimation of Trump by 18 points out of 100. The size of this effect is on par with the impact of party identification on attitudes toward gays and Muslims.” 
 
 Mutz’s data also shows that each Harry Potter book read also raised a person’s evaluations of Muslims and homosexuals, two groups chosen to gauge the respondent’s tolerance and respect for difference. Harry Potter also appeared to encourage opposition to punitive policies — gauged by responses to questions about the use of torture, killing terrorists, and support for the death penalty — though the effect size was small. 
 
 But reading Harry Potter also engendered opposition to Trump in ways that surpassed the effect of these two themes. 
 
 “It may simply be too difficult for Harry Potter readers to ignore the similarities between Trump and the power-hungry Voldemort,” she writes. 
 
 Mutz also collected data on viewership of Harry Potter movies, but found that these did not predict Trump opposition. This may be because of pre-existing partisan patterns in movie viewing whereby Republicans were less likely to see the movies than Democrats. Moreover, reading inherently requires much higher levels of attention and allows for greater nuance in characters, many of whom are neither wholly good nor wholly bad. Due to length, movies must leave out material from the full books, and they are more likely to emphasize action over the characters’ internal dilemmas and introspection. 
 
 So can Harry Potter defeat Donald Trump? 
 
 “Throughout the series, love and kindness consistently triumph over aggression and prejudice,” says Mutz. “It’s a powerful positive theme, and thus not surprising that readers understand the underlying message of this storyline, and are moved by it. These pro-unity views come through loud and clear in the storyline and have also been publicly voiced by the author of the series, J.K. Rowling, who has publicly espoused anti-Brexit and anti-Trump political views. Harry Potter’s popularity worldwide stands to make a difference not just in the U.S. election, but in elections across Europe that involve aggressive and domineering candidates worldwide.” 
 
 About Diana Mutz 
 
 Diana C. Mutz, Ph.D., studies public opinion, political psychology and mass political behavior, with a particular emphasis on political communication. At Penn she holds the Samuel A. Stouffer Chair in Political Science and Communication, and also serves as Director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. 
 
 Mutz was a recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship to study attitudes towards globalization. In 2011, she received the Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award from the American Political Science Association. She was inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. 
 
 Mutz has published several awarding-winning books including Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participative Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and most recently published In-Your-Face Politics: The Consequences of Uncivil Media (Princeton University Press, 2015), the recipient of the 2016 David O. Sears Book Award for the best book in political psychology from the International Society for Political Psychology. 
 
 Media Contact: Julie Sloane, jsloane@asc.upenn.edu, 215-746-1798
– The novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was believed to help turn the tide of public opinion away from condoning slavery after it was published in 1852, but even the most popular fictional works today aren't shown to impact political leanings on a mass scale. Now researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say their new study, to be published in the journal PS: Political Science and Politics, may be the very first done outside of a lab to show that the lessons learned in a work of fiction seem to shape a reader's political ideologies—namely, that those who've read the Harry Potter series are less inclined to like Donald Trump. The effect is magnified among those who've read more of the series' books, with each book read corresponding with a 2- to 3-point drop in Trump's favorability on a scale going to 100. The study looked at the survey responses of 1,142 people in 2014 and 2016 and found, among other things, that watching the films didn't produce the same effect as reading did. The Atlantic warns that "observational data can't confirm causality," but it surmises that because the books "reinforce the virtues of diversity and acceptance" and consistently reveal the "dangers of cults of personalities and authoritarianism," it's not a stretch to suggest that these messages have helped to shape readers' outlook. JK Rowling, for her part, made her leanings known last year when she tweeted that it's "horrible" to compare Trump to the evil Lord Voldemort because "Voldemort was nowhere near as bad." (Are more Harry Potter books on the way?)