Party foul
Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization
Shanto Iyengar & Sean Westwood
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
When defined in terms of social identity and affect toward co-partisans and opposing partisans, the polarization of the American electorate has dramatically increased. We document the scope and consequences of affective polarization of partisans using implicit, explicit and behavioral indicators. Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters' minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race. We further show that party cues exert powerful effects on non-political judgments and behaviors. Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, and do so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race. We note that the willingness of partisans to display open animus for opposing partisans can be attributed to the absence of norms governing the expression of negative sentiment and that increased partisan affect provides an incentive for elites to engage in confrontation rather than cooperation.
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Does Politics Influence Hiring? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment
Karen Gift & Thomas Gift
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do resumes with political “signals” make job applicants more or less likely to get hired? To test our theory that employers are more likely to hire like-minded partisans (and less likely to hire those of opposing partisan bents), we conduct a randomized experiment, sending out 1,200 politically branded resumes in response to help-wanted ads in two U.S. counties — one highly conservative and the other, highly liberal. In our pooled sample, we find that job seekers with minority partisan affiliations are statistically less likely to obtain a callback than candidates without any partisan affiliation. Meanwhile, applicants sharing the majority partisan affiliation are not significantly more likely to receive a callback than non-partisan candidates. These results suggest that individuals may sometimes place themselves at a disadvantage by including partisan cues on their resumes.
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Motive attribution asymmetry for love vs. hate drives intractable conflict
Adam Waytz, Liane Young & Jeremy Ginges
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Five studies across cultures involving 661 American Democrats and Republicans, 995 Israelis, and 1,266 Palestinians provide previously unidentified evidence of a fundamental bias, what we term the “motive attribution asymmetry,” driving seemingly intractable human conflict. These studies show that in political and ethnoreligious intergroup conflict, adversaries tend to attribute their own group’s aggression to ingroup love more than outgroup hate and to attribute their outgroup’s aggression to outgroup hate more than ingroup love. Study 1 demonstrates that American Democrats and Republicans attribute their own party’s involvement in conflict to ingroup love more than outgroup hate but attribute the opposing party’s involvement to outgroup hate more than ingroup love. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrate this biased attributional pattern for Israelis and Palestinians evaluating their own group and the opposing group’s involvement in the current regional conflict. Study 4 demonstrates in an Israeli population that this bias increases beliefs and intentions associated with conflict intractability toward Palestinians. Finally, study 5 demonstrates, in the context of American political conflict, that offering Democrats and Republicans financial incentives for accuracy in evaluating the opposing party can mitigate this bias and its consequences. Although people find it difficult to explain their adversaries’ actions in terms of love and affiliation, we suggest that recognizing this attributional bias and how to reduce it can contribute to reducing human conflict on a global scale.
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Meytal Nasie et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, November 2014, Pages 1543-1556
Abstract:
One significant socio-psychological barrier for peaceful resolution of conflicts is each party’s adherence to its own collective narrative. We hypothesized that raising awareness to the psychological bias of naïve realism and its identification in oneself would provide a path to overcoming this barrier, thus increasing openness to the adversary’s narrative. We conducted three experimental studies in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Studies 1 and 2, conducted among Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis, respectively, revealed that participants with hawkish political ideology reported greater openness to the adversary’s narrative when they were made aware of naïve realism bias. Study 3 revealed that hawkish participants at the baseline adhered to the ingroup narrative and resisted the adversary’s narrative more than dovish participants. They were also more able to identify the bias in themselves upon learning about it. This identification may explain why the manipulation led to bias correction only among hawkish participants.
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The tea party and the 2012 presidential election
Leigh Bradberry & Gary Jacobson
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using both the 2012 American National Election Study and the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we examine the Tea Party movement’s role in crystallizing attitudes and shaping voting behavior in the 2012 elections. The data show that, compared to other Republicans, Tea Party sympathizers were notably more hostile to Obama, more receptive to bogus notions about his origins and religion, and more conservative across a broad range of issues and issue dimensions — including those related to racial and ethnic minorities. Voters’ opinions of the Tea Party were linked to their presidential vote choice directly as well as through their association with the core values, opinions, and attitudes that underlie opinions of the Tea Party. Tea Party sympathizers form the Republican coalition’s largest, most loyal, and most active component, so their opinions and beliefs help to explain why national politics in the United States is currently stalemated on so many major issues.
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Andrew Hall
Harvard Working Paper, August 2014
Abstract:
The power of voters to select representatives is limited by the pool of candidates who run for office. In recent times, many observers of American politics have worried that those who run for office hold extreme views, at the same time as primary voters have exhibited a marked preference for more extreme candidates. Despite these trends, we have little understanding of the factors that determine the ideological composition of the candidate pool, or of the broader consequences stemming from primary voters’ choice to nominate more extreme candidates. In this paper, I link these two phenomena together. Using data on the ideological positioning of U.S. House primary and general-election candidates, 1980–2010, I show that the decision of primary voters to nominate an extremist candidate in one election causes the pool of candidates that party fields in future elections to become more extreme. I show that this effect is the result of at least two notable mechanisms: first, extremist nominations are “self-perpetuating”; and second, incumbents “scare off” moderate challengers. The results show how the decisions of primary and general-election voters constrain the future pool of candidates who run for office and are relevant for understanding the advantage of incumbents as well as the high levels of polarization in U.S. legislatures.
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Juraj Medzihorsky, Levente Littvay & Erin Jenne
PS: Political Science & Politics, October 2014, Pages 806-812
Abstract:
Much ink has been spilled to describe the emergence and likely influence of the Tea Party on the American political landscape. Pundits and journalists declared that the emergence of the Tea Party movement pushed the Republican Party to a more extreme ideological position, which is generally anti-Washington. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the ideological positions taken by candidates in the 2008 and 2012 pre-Iowa caucus Republican presidential-primary debates. To establish the positions, we used the debate transcripts and a text-analytic technique that placed the candidates on a single dimension. Findings show that, overall, the 2012 candidates moved closer to an anti-Washington ideology — associated with the Tea Party movement — and away from the more traditional social conservative Republican ideology, which was more salient in the 2008 debates. Both Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, the two candidates who ran in both elections, shifted significantly in the ideological direction associated with the Tea Party.
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Solution aversion: On the relation between ideology and motivated disbelief
Troy Campbell & Aaron Kay
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, November 2014, Pages 809-824
Abstract:
There is often a curious distinction between what the scientific community and the general population believe to be true of dire scientific issues, and this skepticism tends to vary markedly across groups. For instance, in the case of climate change, Republicans (conservatives) are especially skeptical of the relevant science, particularly when they are compared with Democrats (liberals). What causes such radical group differences? We suggest, as have previous accounts, that this phenomenon is often motivated. However, the source of this motivation is not necessarily an aversion to the problem, per se, but an aversion to the solutions associated with the problem. This difference in underlying process holds important implications for understanding, predicting, and influencing motivated skepticism. In 4 studies, we tested this solution aversion explanation for why people are often so divided over evidence and why this divide often occurs so saliently across political party lines. Studies 1, 2, and 3 — using correlational and experimental methodologies — demonstrated that Republicans’ increased skepticism toward environmental sciences may be partly attributable to a conflict between specific ideological values and the most popularly discussed environmental solutions. Study 4 found that, in a different domain (crime), those holding a more liberal ideology (support for gun control) also show skepticism motivated by solution aversion.
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Inequality, Participation, and Polarization
Razvan Vlaicu
Northwestern University Working Paper, October 2014
Abstract:
The strong co-movement of economic inequality and partisan polarization in the U.S. is typically explained as the result of increased citizen polarization into economic classes or through the presence of a wealth bias in the political process. This paper formalizes an alternative, class-less, theory of political polarization under income inequality where citizen ideology is fixed and orthogonal to income. Instead income affects political competition through changing patterns of political participation, i.e., voting vs. giving. Income inequality depresses turnout and bolsters giving, reducing the electoral penalty for radicalization and causing candidates' electoral priorities to shift from seeking votes to seeking partisan policy goals. Party competition for candidates to form a majority policy coalition can exacerbate candidate polarization by increasing intra-party ideological homogeneity and the prevalence of safe seats. The model captures polarization data features beyond between-party mean differences.
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How The Public Funding Of Elections Increases Candidate Polarization
Andrew Hall
Harvard Working Paper, August 2014
Abstract:
I show that the public funding of elections produces a large decrease in the financial and electoral advantage of incumbents. Despite these effects on electoral competition, I demonstrate that public funding produces more polarization and candidate divergence -- not less. Finally, I establish that this effect is at least in part due to the fact that public funding disproportionately affects the contribution behavior of access-oriented interest groups, groups who, I show, systematically support moderate incumbents. Access-oriented interest groups therefore help generate the incumbency advantage and mitigate polarization by supporting moderate legislators.
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Information and Extremism in Elections
Raphael Boleslavsky & Christopher Cotton
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We model an election in which parties nominate candidates with observable policy preferences prior to a campaign that produces information about candidate quality, a characteristic independent of policy. Informative campaigns lead to greater differentiation in expected candidate quality, which undermines policy competition. In equilibrium, as campaigns become more informative, candidates become more extreme. We identify conditions under which the costs associated with extremism dominate the benefits of campaign information. Informative political campaigns increase political extremism and can decrease voter welfare. Our results have implications for media coverage, the number of debates, and campaign finance reform.
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On Cooperation in Open Communities
Özgür Gürerk, Bernd Irlenbusch & Bettina Rockenbach
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Economic interactions often take place in open communities, where agents are free to leave in order to join a more preferred community. Tiebout (1956) conjectured that “voting with feet” might generate considerable efficiency gains, since individuals with different preferences sort themselves into those communities that suit them most. We provide new empirical insights into Tiebout’s intuition by showing that self-selection in open heterogeneous communities can significantly foster communities’ success. Voting with feet improves cooperation by facilitating the right initial match between individuals and institutions and by establishing a cooperative environment that is attractive for others to join.
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Elias Dinas
British Journal of Political Science, October 2014, Pages 827-852
Abstract:
Children are more likely to adopt their family's political views when politics is important to their parents, and the children of politically engaged parents tend to become politically engaged adults. When these transmission dynamics are considered together, an important hypothesis follows: the children who are most likely to initially acquire the political views of their parents are also most likely to later abandon them as a result of their own engagement with the political world. Data from the Political Socialisation Panel Study provide support for this hypothesis, illuminate its observational implications and shed light on the mechanisms, pointing to the role of new social contexts, political issues and salient political events. Replications using different data from the US and the UK confirm that this dynamic is generalizable to different cohorts and political periods.
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The interactive effects of mortality salience and political orientation on moral judgments
Jonathan Bassett et al.
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two studies, the authors examined how threat induced by reminders of mortality would moderate the effect of political orientation on moral judgments. In Study 1, university students (n = 113) categorized their political orientation, were randomly assigned to complete a fear of death or public speaking scale, and then completed a moral foundations questionnaire. In Study 2, university students (n = 123) rated their political orientations, were randomly assigned to write about their own death or dental pain, and then completed a moral foundations questionnaire. In both studies, mortality salience intensified the moral differences between liberals and conservatives. These findings were primarily the result of the reactions of liberals, who responded to mortality salience with increased ratings of the fairness/cheating virtue in Study 1 and the care/harm virtue in Study 2.
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Shifting Liberal and Conservative Attitudes Using Moral Foundations Theory
Martin Day et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
People’s social and political opinions are grounded in their moral concerns about right and wrong. We examine whether five moral foundations — harm, fairness, ingroup, authority, and purity — can influence political attitudes of liberals and conservatives across a variety of issues. Framing issues using moral foundations may change political attitudes in at least two possible ways: (a) Entrenching: Relevant moral foundations will strengthen existing political attitudes when framing pro-attitudinal issues (e.g., conservatives exposed to a free-market economic stance) and (b) Persuasion: Mere presence of relevant moral foundations may also alter political attitudes in counter-attitudinal directions (e.g., conservatives exposed to an economic regulation stance). Studies 1 and 2 support the entrenching hypothesis. Relevant moral foundation-based frames bolstered political attitudes for conservatives (Study 1) and liberals (Study 2). Only Study 2 partially supports the persuasion hypothesis. Conservative-relevant moral frames of liberal issues increased conservatives’ liberal attitudes.
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Modeling the electoral dynamics of party polarization in two-party legislatures
Samuel Merrill, Bernard Grofman & Thomas Brunell
Journal of Theoretical Politics, October 2014, Pages 548-572
Abstract:
While there are many formal models that generate predictions about polarization, only a handful address the question of how, with no change in electoral rules, levels of polarization can dramatically vary over time, as they have in the US House during 150 years of two-party competition. We propose a model that emphasizes national party constraints on district candidates’ ability to locate at positions far from the national party stance. The model predicts a close relation between tight tethers maintained by the national parties and congressional polarization, suggests implications for political competition, and generates the empirically accurate prediction that partisan polarization and within-party differentiation are negatively correlated. When the tethers of the two parties are not equally strong, the model suggests modifications to the conditional party governance approach and helps explain ideological shift/drift affecting both parties, with the party with the tighter tether moving the other party toward its ideological wake.
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Mariano Torcal & Gerardo Maldonado
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Citizens’ deliberation and interest in politics are crucial to democracy and have always been understood as positively related. We argue here that political discussion, one of the most common mechanisms of deliberation, might lead to citizens’ political disengagement or lack of interest. Using the Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP), an innovative data set of postelection national surveys, we attempt to ascertain and shed light on these apparently contradictory effects on citizen engagement. The results indicate that political discussions, specifically those involving disagreements, can produce a lower level of interest when citizens are less informed, are strongly partisan, or hold strong social ties with those they disagree with.
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The Fate of Obamacare: Racial Resentment, Ethnocentrism and Attitudes about Healthcare Reform
Angie Maxwell & Todd Shields
Race and Social Problems, December 2014, Pages 293-304
Abstract:
Health care has been a contentious issue in American politics for decades, and scholars are beginning to understand the reasons behind public support for, and opposition to, healthcare reform. Using national survey data, we measure the impact of various racial attitudes, including Racial Resentment and Ethnocentrism, on white support for healthcare reform. We measure participants’ attitudes across a range of important dimensions of healthcare reform and examine a randomized experiment with a control group that frames legislation as “recent” healthcare reform and a treatment condition that frames legislation as “President Obama’s” healthcare reform. The findings demonstrate that racial attitudes and Ethnocentrism continue to play a role in both support and opposition to healthcare reform.
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Elizabeth Suhay et al.
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Putnam warned over a decade ago that the urge to associate with similar others online may lead to “cyberbalkanization,” fostering bonding capital at the expense of bridging capital. This study examines balkanization with respect to political blogs, investigating to what extent opinions in posts and comment sections on blogs associated with the left and right are ideologically polarized. We also investigate whether extreme opinions tend to co-occur with uncivil discourse aimed at political opponents. Finally, this study compares political blogs with a newer information source that bridges the gap between old and new media — newspaper blogs — asking whether polarization and incivility are reduced on that platform. A content analysis was conducted of blog discussions about a salient political event—Occupy Wall Street. In both posts and comments, political blogs were highly polarized and opinion extremity and incivility were correlated. However, content on newspaper blogs was largely unpolarized and civil.