Extremism in the defense
Does Choice Bring Loyalty? Electoral Participation and the Development of Party Identification
Elias Dinas
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Party identification is known to influence almost all aspects of political life. How this attachment develops across the adult life cycle, however, remains unknown. I argue that people reinforce their partisan predispositions by voting for their preferred party. Voting entails a choice over a set of alternatives. This choice is likely to induce rationalization. In so doing, it provides signals of group identity, which in turn strengthens people's partisan ties. Testing this hypothesis is made difficult because it implies a reciprocal relationship between partisanship and vote choice. I address this problem by using vote eligibility as an instrument of vote in a sample of almost equally aged respondents. The results indicate that elections fortify prior partisan orientations. Moreover, they do so not by increasing political information. Rather, it is the act of voting for a party that, itself, bolsters partisan attachment. This act leaves a long-lasting imprint on people's partisan outlooks.
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Selective Exposure, Tolerance, and Satirical News
Natalie Stroud & Ashley Muddiman
International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Autumn 2013, Pages 271-290
Abstract:
Partisan selective exposure, the tendency for citizens to select political information agreeing with their predispositions, has been widely demonstrated. This study draws from research on how citizens process information to evaluate whether satirical versus serious news influences selective exposure. The analysis also examines whether exposure to satirical news affects partisan tolerance compared with serious news or no news at all. An experiment was conducted where participants were randomly assigned to view a comedic and satirical political Web site, a serious Web site, or no Web site. Respondents’ article selections were unobtrusively tracked. Results document that satirical news may lead people away from articles opposing their views and that it reduces tolerance for partisan views unlike one’s own.
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The Myth of the Elite Cue: Influence of Voters’ Preferences on the U.S. Congress
Manabu Saeki
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
While various scholars of public opinion in the United States explain that the ideology of partisan legislators influences the preferences of partisan voters, the literature within the paradigm of represen tational politics maintains the reverse — that partisan voters’ ideology affects legislators’ voting preferences. By employing Vector Autoregression analysis, this article examines whether changes in the preferences of US Congress members lead to changes in the ideology of partisan voters, or vice versa. The findings indicate that the legislators’ ideology in the House or Senate has no impact on the preferences of partisan voters as measured by the ANES seven-point ideology scale. Rather, Democratic voters’ ideological shift influences the change in Democratic members’ preferences in both the Senate and the House. However, Republican voters do not exert equivalent influence on GOP legislators.
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Framing the Right Suspects: Measuring Media Bias
Wayne Dunham
Journal of Media Economics, Summer 2013, Pages 122-147
Abstract:
This article examines ideological bias in six large daily newspapers and The Associated Press. The media examined are three to six times more likely to associate ideological labels (or frames) with organizations (think tanks) with a conservative orientation than think tanks having a liberal orientation. This tends to frame the analyses done by conservative think tanks as less objective than the analysis done by liberal think tanks. Regression results suggest that approximately three-fourths of the explained differential in framing rates is due to media bias. The rest is primarily explained by the differential in the “quality” of think tanks.
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Ideological Donors, Contribution Limits, and the Polarization of State Legislatures
Michael Barber
Princeton Working Paper, September 2013
Abstract:
Can campaign contribution limits affect political polarization? In this paper I show that legislators respond to the ideological preferences of those who fund their campaigns -- individual contributors who are ideologically motivated when contributing, and political action committees, who tend to be less ideological in their giving. Furthermore, I show that limits on campaign contributions dramatically affect the way in which candidates fund their campaigns, yielding the prediction that limits on contributions may also affect legislator's ideology and voting behavior. To test this prediction, I use an original dataset of campaign contribution limits in the states over the last 16 years to estimate a fixed-effects model and find that higher individual contributions lead to more extreme legislators, while higher limits on contributions from PACs yield more ideologically moderate legislators. These results suggest that the connection between donors and recipients plays a role in the story of the polarization of American legislatures.
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Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government
Dan Kahan et al.
Yale Working Paper, September 2013
Abstract:
Why does public conflict over societal risks persist in the face of compelling and widely accessible scientific evidence? We conducted an experiment to probe two alternative answers: the “Science Comprehension Thesis” (SCT), which identifies defects in the public’s knowledge and reasoning capacities as the source of such controversies; and the “Identity-protective Cognition Thesis” (ICT) which treats cultural conflict as disabling the faculties that members of the public use to make sense of decision-relevant science. In our experiment, we presented subjects with a difficult problem that turned on their ability to draw valid causal inferences from empirical data. As expected, subjects highest in Numeracy — a measure of the ability and disposition to make use of quantitative information — did substantially better than less numerate ones when the data were presented as results from a study of a new skin-rash treatment. Also as expected, subjects’ responses became politically polarized — and even less accurate — when the same data were presented as results from the study of a gun-control ban. But contrary to the prediction of SCT, such polarization did not abate among subjects highest in Numeracy; instead, it increased. This outcome supported ICT, which predicted that more Numerate subjects would use their quantitative-reasoning capacity selectively to conform their interpretation of the data to the result most consistent with their political outlooks. We discuss the theoretical and practical significance of these findings.
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Is Newspaper Coverage of Economic Events Politically Biased?
John Lott & Kevin Hassett
American Enterprise Institute Working Paper, September 2013
Abstract:
This paper develops an econometric technique to test for political bias in news reports that controls for the underlying character of the news reported. Because of the changing availability of the number of newspapers in Nexis/Lexis, two sets of time are examined from January 1991 to May 2004 and from January 1985 to May 2004. Our results suggest that American newspapers tend to give more positive news coverage to the same economic news when Democrats are in the White House than when Republicans are, and a similar though smaller effect is found for Democratic control of Congress. Our results reject the claim that “reader diversity is a powerful force toward accuracy.” When all types of news are pooled into a single analysis, our results are highly significant. However, the results vary greatly depending upon which types of economic data are being reported. When newspapers are examined individually the only support that Republicans appear to obtain is from the president’s home state newspapers during his term. This is true for the Houston Chronicle under both Bushes and the Los Angeles Times during the Reagan administration. Contrary to rational expectations, media coverage affects people’s perceptions of the economy.
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Personality Dispositions and Political Preferences across Hard and Easy Issues
Christopher Johnston & Julie Wronski
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
A wealth of theoretical and empirical work suggests that conservative orientations in the mass public are meaningfully associated with personality dispositions related to needs for certainty and security. Recent empirical research, however, suggests that (1) associations between these needs and economic conservatism are substantially weaker than associations with conservative identifications and social conservatism, and (2) political sophistication plays an important role in moderating the translation of needs into political preferences within the economic domain. The present article extends this work by offering a theoretical model of the heterogeneous translation of personality dispositions into political preferences across issues and issue domains. We argue that these needs structure preferences directly for highly symbolic issues like those in the social domain, but they structure preferences indirectly through partisanship for difficult issues like those in the economic domain. We test this theory utilizing a national survey experiment in the United States and explore its broader implications for both the literature on the psychological determinants of political ideology and for debates over the “culture war” in the United States.
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Every Heart Beats True, for the Red, White, and Blue: National Identity Predicts Voter Support
Debbie Ma & Thierry Devos
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two studies conducted during the 2012 U.S. presidential election, we sought to determine whether the relative ascription of the American identity to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney was distinct from attitudinal responses and from associations about racial categories. We also tested the degree to which these associations accounted for voter support. In both studies, participants completed a series of Implicit Association Tests and reported their intention to vote for and their willingness to support these candidates. In contrast to implicit associations about racial categories (Black vs. White), Obama was implicitly seen as more American and elicited a more favorable implicit evaluation than Romney (Study 1). At the same time, these effects were reduced when candidates were categorized based on their racial (rather than personal) identity (Study 2). Implicit associations about the candidates (but not racial categories) accounted for intention to vote for them and relative willingness to support them over and above the effect of political orientation (Studies 1 & 2). These findings suggest that the implicit ascription of a national identity is an important facet of presidential elections.
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Media proliferation and partisan selective exposure
Jimmy Chan & Daniel Stone
Public Choice, September 2013, Pages 467-490
Abstract:
The number of Internet news media outlets has skyrocketed in recent years. We analyze the effects of media proliferation on electoral outcomes assuming voters may choose news that is too partisan, from an informational perspective, i.e., engage in partisan selective exposure. We find that if voters who prefer highly partisan news — either because they are truly ideologically extreme, or due to a tendency towards excessive selective exposure — are politically “important,” then proliferation is socially beneficial, as it makes these voters more likely to obtain informative news. Otherwise, proliferation still protects against very poor electoral outcomes that can occur when the number of outlets is small and the only media options are highly partisan. Our model’s overall implication is thus that, surprisingly, proliferation is socially beneficial regardless of the degree of selective exposure.
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The Younger, More Independent Republican Leaner
Zachary Cook
The Forum, August 2013, Pages 259–275
Abstract:
Are independent leaners best compared to weak partisans, strong partisans, or to pure independents? Two recent surveys of leaners’ policy attitudes differ over whether they are more like weak partisans or strong partisans. Meanwhile, a separate survey of leaners’ interest in elections suggests that they are trending closer to pure independents. To resolve such differences, I argue for an issue-driven model of leaners that can encompass all of this variation. While some leaners are indistinguishable from strong partisans, other leaners are cross-pressured by their underlying policy preferences to look more independent from the party they say they are closer to. As one example of the latter, younger Republican leaners are more cross-pressured in terms of their economic ideology, and thus are more independent than are younger Democratic leaners.
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Predicting Political Biases Against the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party Movements
Jarret Crawford & Eneda Xhambazi
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Accusations of hypocrisy have flown against both supporters and opponents of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Tea Party movements. Integrating the ideologically objectionable premise model (IOPM), a newly devised model of political judgment, with political tolerance research, we find that how the political activities of OWS and Tea Party demonstrators are described determines whether or not biases against these groups emerge among people low and high in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). Specifically, people low in RWA were more biased against the Tea Party than OWS regardless of whether the groups engaged in normatively threatening or reassuring political behavior, whereas people high in RWA were more biased against OWS than the Tea Party when the groups engaged in normatively threatening (and therefore objectionable), but not normatively reassuring (and therefore acceptable) behavior. These findings further support the IOPM's contention that premise objectionableness, not right-wing orientation, determines biases in political judgment.
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Side by Side, Worlds Apart: Desired Policy Change as a Function of Preferences AND Perceptions
Dona-Gene Mitchell et al.
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The degree to which people desire policy change is a function of two factors: preferences for future policies and perceptions of current policies. Political scientists, pollsters, and pundits know a good deal about people’s policy preferences but surprisingly little about the distance of those preferences from policy perceptions. In this article, we assess the distance between policy perceptions and policy preferences to calculate the amount of policy change desired. The data come from an original survey tapping respondents’ preferred and perceived policies and from those few National Election Surveys where parallel items on policy preferences and perceptions were posed. By incorporating policy perceptions alongside of preferences, our findings provide a better indication of the gulf between the policy change desired by liberals and the policy change desired by conservatives. The findings help explain polarization in the United States where differences in policy preferences alone often do not indicate extreme diversity.
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Cheryl Boudreau & Scott MacKenzie
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Citizens in representative democracies receive party endorsements and policy information when choosing candidates or making policy decisions via the initiative process. What effects do these sources of information have on public opinion? We address this important question by conducting survey experiments where citizens express opinions about initiatives in a real-world electoral context. We manipulate whether they receive party cues, policy information, both, or neither type of information. We find that citizens do not simply ignore policy information when they are also exposed to party cues. Rather, citizens respond by shifting their opinions away from their party's positions when policy information provides a compelling reason for doing so. These results challenge the prominent claim in public opinion research that citizens blindly follow their party when also exposed to policy information. They also suggest that efforts to inform the electorate can influence opinions, provided that citizens actually receive the information being disseminated.
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Partisan Selective Exposure in the Digital Age: Evidence from Field Experiments
Timothy Ryan & Ted Brader
University of Michigan Working Paper, August 2013
Abstract:
The possibility that citizens expose themselves to information in biased ways — so-called selective exposure — is increasingly important in a high-choice media environment, but support for the idea that citizens prefer congenial information is notably mixed. Methodological challenges likely contribute to the inconclusive nature of findings, as researchers face trade-offs between the artificiality of lab environments and the difficult-to-disentangle confounds of observational analysis. We try to improve understanding of selective exposure in two ways. First, we consider how message content may affect the preference for congenial political information in the context of a U.S. presidential election. Economic news is minimally enticing to partisans, irrespective of whether the news is good or bad for their candidate. In contrast, citizens find news regarding the personal foibles or gaffes of candidates much more attractive, particularly when it is embarrassing for the opposing party. Second, we arrive at these conclusions by way of a field experiment that provides a passive and naturalistic measure of selective exposure to electoral news content while retaining the benefits of random assignment. This allows us to reach more confident conclusions about the genuine manifestation of partisan selection exposure under certain conditions. Overall, our results help to illuminate underpinnings of the oft-lamented tendency for campaign media to focus on personalities and candidate miscues rather than substantive policy differences.
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Compensatory Control and Its Implications for Ideological Extremism
Aaron Kay & Richard Eibach
Journal of Social Issues, September 2013, Pages 564–585
Abstract:
This article outlines and reviews evidence for a model of compensatory control designed to account for the motivated belief in personal and external sources of control. In doing so, we attempt to shed light on the content and strength of ideologies, including extreme libertarian, nationalist, socialist, and religious fundamentalist ideologies. We suggest that although these ideologies differ in their content they commonly function to provide people with a sense of control over otherwise random events. We propose that extreme ideologies of personal control (e.g., libertarianism) and external control (e.g., socialism, religious fundamentalism) are equifinal means of meeting a universal need to believe that things, in general, are under control — that is, that events do not unfold randomly or haphazardly. We use this model to explain how the adoption and strength of ideologies of personal and external control may vary across temporal and sociocultural contexts.
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Danny Osborne & Chris Sibley
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research demonstrates that the Big-Five's Openness to Experience is inversely associated with political conservatism. This literature, however, implicitly assumes that the strength of this relationship is invariant across the electorate. We challenge this assumption by arguing that education — an institution designed to increase civic competence — affects the degree to which personality predicts various political attitudes. Specifically, we posit that education facilitates people's ability to identify issue positions that (theoretically) resonate with their personality. Using a national probability sample of New Zealand voters (n = 6,518), we show that education consistently moderates the relationship between personality and a host of political attitudes. Whereas Openness to Experience is inversely associated with politically conservative issue positions among the highly educated, it is often uncorrelated with the same attitudes among those with low levels of educational attainment. These results identify an important — though often neglected — moderator of the relationship between personality and political attitudes.
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Jon Bond
The Forum, August 2013, Pages 243–258
Abstract:
In the heated rhetoric of the 2010 elections, there were some accusations that the Tea Party movement was racist, and charges of Tea Party racism persisted through 2011 as President Obama attempted to deal with an intransigent Republican majority. This paper seeks to refute the charge of Tea Party racism. In particular, I treat the charge of racism as a research hypothesis (HR): If racial animosity is a systematic motivation, then Republican freshmen elected to the House in 2010 with Tea Party endorsements should be significantly less supportive of the nation’s first Black president than are other conservative Republicans. The null hypothesis (H0) is of course that Tea Party freshmen support for Obama is not different from that of other conservative Republicans. Controlling for the most obvious competing hypotheses (party, ideology, district partisanship) while comparing the results to analogous control groups, the analysis is able to reject the null hypothesis: ceteris paribus, Tea Party freshman support is significantly lower than should be expected, and this behavior is different from that of control groups. Although these results fail to provide evidence to refute charges of racism, it does not prove that President Obama’s race is the cause of lower Tea Party support. In the end, it suggests that more research is needed to look for causes other than race to explain Tea Party behavior.
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The ironic impact of activists: Negative stereotypes reduce social change influence
Nadia Bashir et al.
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite recognizing the need for social change in areas such as social equality and environmental protection, individuals often avoid supporting such change. Researchers have previously attempted to understand this resistance to social change by examining individuals' perceptions of social issues and social change. We instead examined the possibility that individuals resist social change because they have negative stereotypes of activists, the agents of social change. Participants had negative stereotypes of activists (feminists and environmentalists), regardless of the domain of activism, viewing them as eccentric and militant. Furthermore, these stereotypes reduced participants' willingness to affiliate with ‘typical’ activists and, ultimately, to adopt the behaviours that these activists promoted. These results indicate that stereotypes and person perception processes more generally play a key role in creating resistance to social change.
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Overconfidence in Political Behavior
Pietro Ortoleva & Erik Snowberg
NBER Working Paper, July 2013
Abstract:
This paper studies, theoretically and empirically, the role of overconfidence in political behavior. Our model of overconfidence in beliefs predicts that overconfidence leads to ideological extremeness, increased voter turnout, and increased strength of partisan identification. Moreover, the model makes many nuanced predictions about the patterns of ideology in society, and over a person's lifetime. These predictions are tested using unique data that measure the overconfidence, and standard political characteristics, of a nationwide sample of over 3,000 adults. Our predictions, eight in total, find strong support in this data. In particular, we document that overconfidence is a substantively and statistically important predictor of ideological extremeness and voter turnout.
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Partisan Bias and Information Discounting in Economic Judgments
Mark Ramirez & Nathan Erickson
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research shows that partisanship biases people's views about the economy. Yet, there is little understanding of the factors, if any, that might mitigate the influence of partisanship on these judgments or the effect of partisanship on metacognitive judgments. This study uses an experimental design to show that partisanship continues to bias economic judgments even when subjects receive direct and neutral information about specific aspects of the economy. Moreover, it extends our understanding of partisan bias by showing it has a direct effect on people's metacognitive assessments of their own attitudes — particularly the degree of uncertainty people have in their own economic judgments. However, it appears that people are aware of the conflict between their partisan-based judgment and economic information since we observe increases in economic uncertainty when information is counter to a subject's partisan predisposition. The results provide new insight into the extent of partisan bias and the difficulty of countering partisan-based judgments.
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Jennifer Wolak & Andrea McAtee
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, September 2013, Pages 398-421
Abstract:
To what degree do people distinguish the partisan divisions of national politics from the partisan battles within their state? We explore why people hold favorable views of the political parties in their state, investigating the degree to which such evaluations are simply an artifact of national considerations, or responsive to the political performance and ideological leanings of the state political parties. Using a national survey from 2007, we consider why people like or dislike the Democratic and Republican Parties in their states. While ratings of the state political parties carry the imprint of national political considerations, they are also responsive to the character of state parties. As the liberalism of state parties increases, liberals offer increasingly favorable evaluations of the Democratic Party, while conservatives offer increasingly negative party evaluations. Under Republican state legislatures, better economic performance translates into greater support for the party. Popular support for state political parties rests in part on the policy positions these parties take and the party’s performance in office.
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Amy Becker
International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Autumn 2013, Pages 344-356
Abstract:
The current study uses experimental data (N = 265) to assess the impact of exposure to interviews from political comedy and cable news programs on information recall and anticipated political expression. The results highlight higher recall rates for political comedy as opposed to cable news exposure. The study then considers the differential impact of exposure to two different types of comedy interviews, comparing how viewers evaluate the more straightforward satire of The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart with the parody-driven presentation of The Colbert Report’s Stephen Colbert. The study then considers the relationship between interview exposure and anticipated political expression. The results suggest that viewing political comedy interviews from The Daily Show is positively related to anticipated political expression.