Changing Parties
Does informing partisans about partisan bias reduce partisan bias?
Diogo Ferrari
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Party cues, which are signals of political parties’ stances on policy issues, have been found to bias partisans’ policy opinions toward the positions taken by the party they like. This registered report examines a metacognition bias-regulation hypothesis, investigating if making partisans aware of the potential bias their party attachment introduces into their policy judgments mitigates partisan bias. It employs an experimental design in which subjects are informed that party cues induce people who identify with a party to take policy positions because the party does and that relying on party cues instead of reflecting on the policy content can lead partisans to support policies that they otherwise wouldn’t under more careful consideration of the policy. Results show that awareness attenuated the party cue effects in some cases and reduced partisans’ confidence that they can infer policy content from party cues.
Do we really think our politicians should be intellectually humble?
Jonah Koetke & Karina Schumann
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2025
Abstract:
In recent years, researchers have investigated how intellectual humility (IH) might help reduce political polarization among everyday U.S. Americans. In the current work, we examine whether people think politicians should exhibit IH and how this might depend on context. In preregistered Study 1 (N = 477), participants read about and reported their ideal level of IH for a fictional ingroup or outgroup politician in contexts that were either cooperative or competitive. Across both contexts, participants thought outgroup politicians should have higher IH than ingroup politicians. They also thought ingroup (and to a lesser extent outgroup) politicians should have higher IH in cooperative than competitive contexts. In preregistered Study 2 (N = 843), we randomly assigned participants to read about a fictional ingroup or outgroup politician who expressed high or low IH in different contexts. We found that perceptions of IH played a significant role in perceptions of competence, warmth, and intention to vote for the politician. However, the impact of IH was larger for outgroup politicians than ingroup politicians, with the exception of voting intentions. We also asked participants to report their ideal and perceived level of IH for then-presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump. We found an intergroup bias in that participants perceived the ingroup candidate as having higher IH than the outgroup candidate. Importantly, perceptions of IH significantly predicted voting intentions for these politicians. Overall, this work points to the importance and nuanced role of IH in political person perception.
Ideological Concordance Between Students and Professors
Adam Bonica et al.
University of Chicago Working Paper, December 2024
Abstract:
The largely liberal composition of American university faculties is frequently lamented in academic discourse and public debate, largely out of concern that professors "brainwash" younger generations with left-leaning principles. However, these complaints often fail to acknowledge that university students are also overwhelmingly liberal. It is thus possible that university professors are more liberal than the American public but more conservative than their students. In this article, we develop a measure of student-professor ideological concordance based on the share of faculty members who are more liberal than the students at a given school. We then use data on the ideology of students and professors in American law schools over more than a twenty-year period to estimate the degree of ideological concordance in the legal academy. We find that although professors have become more liberal over time, they have also become more conservative than their students.
Who’s Persuasive? Understanding Citizen-to-citizen Efforts to Change Minds
Martin Naunov, Carlos Rueda-Cañòn & Timothy Ryan
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Political behavior researchers tend to view persuasion as a top-down enterprise: politicians, journalists, and other “elites” do the persuasion, and citizens listen. Consequently, much research focuses on what makes citizens persuadable. This study shifts our focus to what makes citizens persuasive. We developed an innovative survey design, incentivizing over 400 participants to write messages that would change the opinion of people they disagree with politically. We then presented these messages to survey participants with opposing views, and measured their persuasive impact. Our findings reveal that persuading the other side is possible, with a success rate of almost 30% and only 11% backfire. The most reliable predictors of persuasion success, we find, involve the ability to bridge identity divides through perspective-taking and personal narratives. Finally, we show that citizens are largely unaware of their persuasive potential: unsuccessful senders perceive themselves to be as persuasive as successful ones.
Ideological Moderation and Success in U.S. Elections, 2020-2022
Michael Bailey & Benjamin Reese
Georgetown University Working Paper, January 2025
Abstract:
Understanding how candidate ideology affects elections is crucial to understanding representation. We assess the influence of ideological positioning on election outcomes for virtually all general election candidates in the 2020 and 2022 U.S. House, Senate and gubernatorial elections. Our approach has three novel features. First, we use original ideology estimates based on the language candidates use on social media and their campaign websites. Second, we leverage the fact that multiple elections occur simultaneously, allowing us to compare the performance of ideologically distinctive candidates within a district. If a moderate candidate in one race runs ahead of an extreme candidate in another race among the same electorate, we have evidence that moderation helps. Third, we compare patterns across federal, state, legislative and executive positions. Across multiple specifications and multiple comparisons, we find that ideological moderation was associated with higher vote shares, especially in competitive and gubernatorial races.
The Electoral Consequences of Ideological Persuasion: Evidence from a Within-Precinct Analysis of U.S. Elections
Adam Bonica, Kasey Rhee & Nicolas Studen
Stanford Working Paper, January 2025
Abstract:
Most research on the electoral penalty of candidate ideology relies on between-district or longitudinal comparisons, which are confounded by turnout and ballot composition effects. We employ a within-precinct design using granular precinct-level election data from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab (2016-2022) alongside comprehensive data on candidate ideology. By analyzing within-precinct variation in two-party vote shares for contests simultaneously appearing on the same ballot, we isolate the effect of ideology on vote choice among a fixed electorate. We estimate how voters respond to candidate ideology in terms of vote choice across diverse electoral contexts, holding turnout fixed. A standard deviation change in the midpoint between candidates results in an average vote share penalty of 0.6 percentage points. The effect varies with office type, information availability, incumbency status, and partisan geography. Overall, we find that gains associated with ideological moderation are relatively modest and likely secondary to turnout effects.
Political correctness and elite prestige
Esther Hauk & Javier Ortega
Journal of Theoretical Politics, April 2025, Pages 122-155
Abstract:
Consider a society where the prestige of orthodox views is linked to the prestige of the elite. Heterodox individuals are less likely to express their views if other peers refrain from doing so and if the elite is prestigious. In turn, corruption by the elite is less easily detected if orthodox views dominate. We characterize equilibrium self-denial and corruption and show that an exogenous increase in the range of orthodox views may result in a decrease in the total number of individuals truthfully expressing their views. Some features of the model are shown to be compatible with US data.
The epicenter of conspiracy belief: The economically left-leaning and culturally regressive spot in the political landscape
Florian Buchmayr & André Krouwel
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
While the psychological dispositions that underlie conspiracy thinking are well researched, there has been remarkably little research on the political preferences of conspiracy believers that go beyond self-reported ideology or single political issue dimensions. Using data from the European Voter Election Study (EVES), the relationship between conspiracy thinking and attitudes on three deeper-lying and salient political dimensions (redistribution, authoritarianism, migration) is examined. The results show a clear picture: Individuals with economically left-wing and culturally conservative attitudes tend to score highest on conspiracy thinking. People at this ideological location seem to long for both economic and cultural protection and bemoan a “lost paradise” where equalities had not yet been destroyed by “perfidious” processes of cultural modernization and economic neoliberalism. This pattern is found across all countries and holds regardless of socioeconomic characteristics such as education and income. While previous research has found that belief in conspiracies tends to cluster at the extremes of the political spectrum, our analysis opens up a more complex picture, showing that conspiracy thinking is not merely related to extremist orientations, but to specific combinations of political attitudes.