Coming apart
Donors, Primary Elections, and Polarization in the United States
Jordan Kujala
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
I examine the influence of partisan donors on the district‐level ideological polarization of congressional candidates in the United States. I use data from 2002–10 U.S. House elections, which provide for the placement of major party primary winners on the same ideological dimension as their primary, general election, and partisan donor constituencies. Using this unique data set, I find strong evidence that the influence of donors in nominating contests is a source of polarization in the United States. House nominees are more responsive to their donor constituencies than either their primary or general electorates. I also find some evidence that the lack of general election competition affects nominee extremity. In safer districts, Democratic incumbents appear more responsive to donors. However, Republican donors seem to demand proximity regardless of district competitiveness. Overall, the polarizing effects of donor constituencies dominate any moderating effects, resulting in ideologically extreme nominees and, ultimately, members of Congress.
Does money have a conservative bias? Estimating the causal impact of Citizens United on state legislative preferences
Anna Harvey & Taylor Mattia
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent work has suggested that the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United (2010), eliminating restrictions on independent campaign expenditures, increased the election probabilities of Republican state legislative candidates (Klumpp et al. in J Law Econ 59(1):1–43, 2016). Left unexplored has been whether the Court’s ruling in Citizens United increased not only the number of Republican state legislators, but also the conservatism of their estimated policy preferences, net of any effects on election probabilities. We attempt to distinguish between the possible electoral and preference effects of Citizens United. Our estimates consistently suggest that Citizens United led not only to greater likelihoods of election for Republican state legislative candidates, but also to larger within-district increases in their conservatism. The estimates, which are robust to a series of matching and placebo exercises, may provide support for the claim that more money in elections has contributed to greater conservatism among state-level Republican officeholders.
Trump, Twitter, and Public Dissuasion: A Natural Experiment in Presidential Rhetoric
Matthew Miles & Donald Haider‐Markel
Presidential Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research suggests that the ability of the president to influence public attention to issues and shape public opinion is limited. Recently, presidential efforts at persuasion have expanded to social media, but presidential persuasion has yet to be explored in this medium. We address two relevant questions. First, what effects does a presidential tweet have on public interest in the issue discussed in the tweet? Second, what effect does a presidential tweet have on public attitudes about that issue? To answer these questions, we utilize a natural experiment that occurred while we were fielding a nationally representative survey of American adults. Our analysis provides considerable evidence that presidential tweets can have the unintended consequence of driving the public away from the president’s position on an issue.
Do People Really Become More Conservative as They Age?
Johnathan Peterson, Kevin Smith & John Hibbing
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Folk wisdom has long held that people become more politically conservative as they grow older, though several empirical studies suggest political attitudes are stable across time. Utilizing data from the Michigan Youth-Parent Socialization Panel study, we analyze attitudinal change over a major portion of the adult lifespan. We document changes in party identification, self-reported ideology, and selected issue positions over this time period and place these changes in context by comparing them with contemporaneous national averages. Consistent with previous research but contrary to folk wisdom, our results indicate that political attitudes are remarkably stable over the long-term. In contrast to previous research, however, we also find support for folk wisdom: On those occasions when political attitudes do shift across the lifespan, liberals are more likely to become conservatives than conservatives are to become liberals, suggesting that folk wisdom has some empirical basis even as it overstates the degree of change.
Enemy or Ally? Elites, Base Relations, and Partisanship in America
John Kane
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
A wealth of research demonstrates that partisans dismiss information that challenges their attitudes toward political elites, especially when citizens are aware of these elites’ party membership. Relatively little is known, however, about the conditions under which partisans will adjust their support for such elites. Drawing upon research on the group-foundations of partisanship, I hypothesize that, issues and policy stances aside, partisans’ support for, and willingness to compromise with, a given elite is contingent upon how well the elite relates to the groups associated with his or her party (i.e., the party’s “base”). In short, partisans should be inclined to exhibit greater political support for, and greater willingness to compromise with, the enemy of their socio-political enemies, but less support for the enemy of their socio-political allies. Findings from survey experiments and observational analyses involving real-world executives offer strong empirical support for these contentions. Thus, while acknowledging the powerful effects of cues involving elites’ party labels, this study reveals that “base relations” cues can potentially counteract the motivated reasoning processes that arise from partisans’ attentiveness to party cues alone. Such effects should be observed, I argue, precisely because base relations cue an elite’s fidelity to the very groups that endow the party label with its symbolic meaning. Therefore, more broadly, this study advances our understanding of polarization by demonstrating an important way in which politically aligned social groups underpin American partisanship and public opinion.
How Ambient Cues Facilitate Political Segregation
Matt Motyl, J.P. Prims & Ravi Iyer
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
People increasingly self-segregate into politically homogeneous communities. How they do this remains unclear. We propose that people use ambient cues correlated with political values to infer whether they would like to live in those communities. We test this hypothesis in five studies. In Studies 1 (n = 3,543) and 2 (n = 5,609), participants rated community cues; liberals and conservatives’ preferences differed. In Studies 3a (n = 1,643) and 3b (n = 1,840), participants read about communities with liberal or conservative cues. Even without explicit information about the communities’ politics, participants preferred communities with politically congenial cues. In Study 4 (n = 282), participants preferred politically congenial communities and wanted to leave politically uncongenial communities. In Study 5 (n = 370), people selectively navigated their communities in a politically congenial way. These studies suggest that peoples’ perceptions of communities can be shaped by subtle, not necessarily political, cues that may facilitate growing political segregation.
Does private money increase party extremism?
Andrey Tomashevskiy
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, I explore whether private money affects party extremism. This is one of the most important questions in the study of party politics, but it has not been systematically studied in the comparative context due to lack of data. I have assembled a novel and most comprehensive cross-national data about private donations that are currently available. Using these data that cover 45 parties in 9 countries from 1996 to 2013, I show that the more private money parties receive, the more likely are they to take extreme positions. I further show that this effect is especially strong in the case of the more ideological, principled issues, and absent in the case of the less ideological, pragmatic ones. These findings contribute to our understanding of party position taking and the role of money in politics.
Are there Still Limits on Partisan Prejudice?
Sean Westwood, Erik Peterson & Yphtach Lelkes
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Partisan affective polarization is believed, by some, to stem from vitriolic elite political discourse. We explore this account by replicating several 2014 studies that examine partisan prejudice. Despite claims of elevated partisan affective polarization from pundits, this extensive replication offers no evidence of an increase in the public’s partisan prejudice between 2014 and 2017. Divides in feeling thermometer ratings of the two political parties remained stable, and there was no overall increase in measures of partisan prejudice between periods. This is consistent with results from the 2012 and 2016 ANES. Moreover, the most affectively polarized members of the public became no more likely to hold prejudicial attitudes toward the other party. Despite an intervening campaign with elevated elite hostility and rampant postelection discord, the limits on partisan prejudice identified in prior research remain in place. This stability is important for understanding the nature and malleability of partisan affect.
Honeymoon or hangover? How election outcomes produce emotional shifts to winning candidate smiles
Patrick Stewart, Carl Senior & Erik Bucy
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Presidential elections are emotion-laden affairs felt psychologically by both competitors and followers. The emotional fallout of losing competitive contests has been documented in the literature but little research has considered the change in affect among political followers in the aftermath of an unsuccessful election. This study examines changes in self-reported happiness, anger, and distress to different smile types expressed by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, measured immediately prior to and again following the 2012 presidential election. A panel of online respondents (N = 214) were shown four video clips featuring different smile types from each candidate before and after the election. Obama's clips featured an amusement and controlled-amusement smile, while Romney's featured a posed and contempt smiles. Findings revealed significant differences in self-reported emotional response to Obama. Followers of Obama reported an increase in happiness when shown examples of the president's smile after the election but no change in response to Romney's smiles. However, Romney's followers reported a significant increase in anger and distress towards Obama's smiles post-election, but minimal change to their own candidate. Election outcomes not only determine office holders; they also produce emotional shifts in the electorate that are most responsive to the electoral victor.
Is Disgust a “Conservative” Emotion?
Julia Elad-Strenger, Jutta Proch & Thomas Kessler
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Extant political–psychological research has identified stable, context-independent differences between conservatives and liberals in a wide range of preferences and psychological processes. One consistent finding is that conservatives show higher disgust sensitivity than liberals. This finding, however, is predominantly based on assessments of disgust to specific elicitors, which confound individuals’ sensitivity and propensity to the experience of disgust with the extent to which they find specific elicitors disgusting. Across five studies, we vary specific elicitors of disgust, showing that the relations between political orientation and disgust sensitivity depend on the specific set of elicitors used. We also show that disgust sensitivity is not associated with political orientation when measured with an elicitor-unspecific scale. Taken together, our findings suggest that the differences between conservatives and liberals in disgust sensitivity are context dependent rather than a stable personality difference. Broader theoretical implications are discussed.
Party Animals? Extreme Partisan Polarization and Dehumanization
James Martherus et al.
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
The affective, identity based, and often negative nature of partisan polarization in the United States has been a subject of much scholarly attention. Applying insights from recent work in social psychology, we employ three novel large-N, broadly representative online surveys, fielded over the course of 4 years, across two presidential administrations, to examine the extent to which this brand of polarization features a willingness to apply dehumanizing metaphors to out-partisans. We begin by looking at two different measures of dehumanization (one subtle and one more direct). This uncovers striking, consistent observational evidence that many partisans dehumanize members of the opposing party. We examine the relationship between dehumanization and other key partisan intensity measures, finding that it is most closely related to extreme affective polarization. We also show that dehumanization “predicts” partisan motivated reasoning and is correlated with respondent worldview. Finally, we present a survey experiment offering causal leverage to examine openness to dehumanization in the processing of new information about misdeeds by in- and out-partisans. Participants were exposed to identical information about a melee at a gathering, with the partisanship of those involved randomly assigned. We find pronounced willingness by both Democrats and Republicans to dehumanize members of the out-party. These findings shed considerable light on the nature and depth of modern partisan polarization.
The Incidental Pundit: Who Talks Politics with Whom, and Why?
William Minozzi et al.
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Informal discussion plays a crucial role in democracy, yet much of its value depends on diversity. We describe two models of political discussion. The purposive model holds that people typically select discussants who are knowledgeable and politically similar to them. The incidental model suggests that people talk politics for mostly idiosyncratic reasons, as by‐products of nonpolitical social processes. To adjudicate between these accounts, we draw on a unique, multisite, panel data set of whole networks, with information about many social relationships, attitudes, and demographics. This evidence permits a stronger foundation for inferences than more common egocentric methods. We find that incidental processes shape discussion networks much more powerfully than purposive ones. Respondents tended to report discussants with whom they share other relationships and characteristics, rather than based on expertise or political similarity, suggesting that stimulating discussion outside of echo chambers may be easier than previously thought.
Partisanship vs. Principle: Understanding Public Opinion on Same-Day Registration
Devin McCarthy
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Voter access has become a deeply polarized issue in American politics. It is well known that policymakers’ positions on election laws are often dictated by whether they think the laws will help their electoral interests and those of their party. But we know little about whether public opinion on election laws is similarly driven by partisan interest or is instead constrained by concerns of procedural legitimacy. To answer this question, I conduct a survey experiment that frames the issue of same-day registration (SDR) in terms of which major party it is expected to help electorally. The results provide clear evidence that both Democrats and Republicans are less likely to support SDR after being told the policy will primarily increase turnout among voters of the opposing party, but little evidence that being told SDR will benefit their own party affects opinion. These findings suggest an asymmetry in citizens’ willingness to choose partisan interest over democratic principles based on whether they perceive a rule change as benefiting the in-party or out-party.
Communicating policy information in a partisan environment: The importance of causal policy narratives in political persuasion
Philip Gordon Chen & Matthew Luttig
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, forthcoming
Abstract:
Public opinion is frequently formed in an environment of both partisan signals and other types of policy information. How do people form opinions in such an environment? Much of the literature suggests that most people simply align their opinions with those of their party. We examine a condition under which people may rely instead on a more normatively defensible criterion: policy information. We argue that what people want in terms of policy instruments are effective tools for achieving their desired end-state. When information clearly communicates that a policy will lead to a desirable outcome, we hypothesize that it will be persuasive even in a context where party leaders provide countervailing signals. In two experimental studies, we find support for this hypothesis, and we find some evidence that such information also reduces reliance on partisan cues. We show that causal narratives are central to the opinion formation process and that communicating this information can improve the quality of public opinion.
Fusion with political leaders predicts willingness to persecute immigrants and political opponents
Jonas Kunst, John Dovidio & Lotte Thomsen
Nature Human Behaviour, forthcoming
Abstract:
From the 2016 US presidential election and into 2019, we demonstrate that a visceral feeling of oneness (that is, psychological fusion) with a political leader can fuel partisans’ willingness to actively participate in political violence. In studies 1 and 2, fusion with Donald Trump predicted Republicans’ willingness to violently persecute Muslims (over and above other established predictors). In study 3, relative deprivation increased fusion with Trump and, subsequently, willingness to violently challenge election results. In study 4, fusion with Trump increased after his election and predicted immigrant persecution over time. Further revealing its independent effects, this fusion with Trump predicted a willingness to persecute Iranians (independent of identification with him, study 5); a willingness to persecute immigrants (study 6); and a willingness to personally protect the US border from an immigrant caravan (study 7), even over and above fusion with the group of Trump’s followers. These findings echo past political movements and suggest critical future research.
Just a Big Misunderstanding? Bias and Bayesian Affective Polarization
Daniel Stone
International Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
I present a model of affective polarization — growth in hostility over time between two parties — via quasi‐Bayesian inference. In the model, two agents repeatedly choose actions. Each choice is based on a balance of concerns for private interests and the social good. More weight is put on private interests when an agent's character is intrinsically more self‐serving and when the other agent is believed to be more self‐serving. Each agent Bayesian updates about the other's character, and dislikes the other more when she is perceived as more self‐serving. I characterize the effects on growth in dislike of three biases: a prior bias against the other agent's character, the false consensus bias, and limited strategic thinking. Prior bias against the other's character remains constant or declines over time, and actions do not diverge. The other two biases cause actions to become more extreme over time and repeatedly be “worse” than expected, causing mutual growth in dislike, i.e., affective polarization. The magnitude of dislike can become arbitrarily large — even when both players are arbitrarily “good” (unselfish). The results imply that seemingly irrelevant cognitive biases can be an important cause of the devolution of relationships, in politics and beyond, and that subtlety and unawareness of bias can be key factors driving the degree of polarization.