In this dissertation, I examine the processes that lead individuals to feel disaffected from various aspects of American government, and furthermore, to understand how those feelings of disaffection shape engagement within the political sphere. This dissertation consists of three essays, each of which will focus on a specific instance of the development or expression of disaffection in American politics. In "Grinding to a Halt: Micro- and Macro-Evidence of the Negative Effects of Gridlock on Citizens' Evaluations of Political Parties," I explore how the parties inability to reach legislative compromises, thus producing gridlock, shapes the public's attitudes towards them. Micro-level analyses reveal that some members of the mass public express concern over gridlock, and that this concern is related to lower evaluations of both one's own party, as well as the opposition, but macro-level analyses reveal that actual increases in gridlock are related only to decreases in favorability toward the out-party. In "Public Opinion and The Politicization of Federal Agencies," I employ a content analysis and survey experiment to explore how the association of federal agencies with "politics as usual" may harm perceptions of the agencies' legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. I find that agencies of the federal government are routinely covered in media as politically or strategically motivated actors, however, these depictions only appear to damage agency reputations among Democrats. Finally, in "Alie(n)ation: Political Outsiders in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election," I combine ANES open-ended responses with recently developed text analysis tools to investigate how two dimensions of political alienation--including input-based and output-based alienation--shape attitudes towards candidates that present themselves as a challenge to the political system (i.e., political outsiders). I find that those alienated on either dimension are more likely to prefer outsider candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders because of their anti-establishment orientations, but only input-based alienation is related to vote choice.
