Findings

How Divided

Kevin Lewis

January 06, 2023

Partisan Stability During Turbulent Times: Evidence from Three American Panel Surveys
Donald Green & Paul Platzman
Political Behavior, forthcoming 

Abstract:

The past decade has witnessed profound changes in the tenor of American party politics. These changes, in tandem with growing affective polarization and residential segregation by party, raise the question of whether party identification is itself changing. Using three multi-wave panel surveys that stretch from the first Obama Administration through the Trump Administration, this paper takes a fresh look at the stability of party identification, using several different statistical approaches to differentiate true partisan change from response error. Perhaps surprisingly, the pace of partisan change observed between 2011 and 2020 is quite similar to the apparent rates of change in panel surveys dating back to the 1950s. Few respondents experience appreciable change in party identification in the short run, but the pace at which partisanship changes implies that substantial changes are relatively common over a voter’s lifespan.


Incivility Diminishes Interest in What Politicians Have to Say
Matthew Feinberg & Jeremy Frimer
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming 

Abstract:

Incivility is prevalent in society suggesting a potential benefit. Within politics, theorists and strategists often claim incivility grabs attention and stokes interest in what a politician has to say. In contrast, we propose incivility diminishes overall interest in what a politician has to say because people find the incivility morally distasteful. Studies 1a and 1b examined the relationship between uncivil language and followership in the Twitter feeds of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, finding incivility reduced their following on the platform. In Studies 2–3, we manipulated how uncivil a number of politicians were and found that incivility consistently depressed interest in what they had to say. These effects of incivility are generalized to both political allies and opponents. Observers’ moral disapproval of the incivility mediated the diminished interest, suppressing the attention-grabbing nature of incivility. Altogether, our findings indicate that the public reacts more negatively to political incivility than previously thought.


Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides
Sahil Chinoy et al.
Harvard Working Paper, January 2023 

Abstract

We examine the causes and consequences of an important cultural and psychological trait: the extent to which one views the world in zero-sum terms -- i.e., that benefits to one person or group tend to come at the cost of others. We implement a survey among approximately 15,000 individuals living in the United States that measures zero-sum thinking, political and policy views, and a rich set of characteristics about their ancestry. We find that a more zero-sum view is strongly correlated with several policy views about the importance of government, the value of redistributive policies, the impact of immigration, and one’s political orientation. We find that zero-sum thinking can be explained by experiences of an individual’s ancestors (parents and grandparents), including the amount of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, the degree of economic hardship they suffered, whether they immigrated to the United States or were exposed to more immigrants, and whether they had experiences with enslavement. These findings underscore the importance of psychological traits, and how they are transmitted inter-generationally, in explaining current political divides in the United States.


Basking in Their Glory? Expressive Partisanship among People of Color Before and After the 2020 US Election
Rahsaan Maxwell, Efrén Pérez & Stephanie Zonszein
Journal of Experimental Political Science, forthcoming

Abstract:

As the number of people of color (PoC) grows in the United States, a key question is how partisanship will develop among this important electoral group. Yet many open questions remain about PoC partisanship, due to limited availability of panel data, a lack of sensitive instrumentation, and small samples of PoC in most public opinion surveys. This brief report leverages a unique panel of African American (N = 650) and Latino (N = 650) eligible voters, before and after the 2020 Presidential Election between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump. Using measures that tap expressive partisan, racial, and national identity attachments, we find that Biden’s electoral victory significantly intensified partisan identity among his Democratic PoC supporters, relative to PoC who were not Democrats and supported Trump. We do not find significant changes in racial or national identities. Our results advance research on PoC’s partisanship.


Individuals prefer to harm their own group rather than help an opposing group
Rachel Gershon & Ariel Fridman
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 6 December 2022 

Abstract:

Group-based conflict enacts a severe toll on society, yet the psychological factors governing behavior in group conflicts remain unclear. Past work finds that group members seek to maximize relative differences between their in-group and out-group (“in-group favoritism”) and are driven by a desire to benefit in-groups rather than harm out-groups (the “in-group love” hypothesis). This prior research studies how decision-makers approach trade-offs between two net-positive outcomes for their in-group. However, in the real world, group members often face trade-offs between net-negative options, entailing either losses to their group or gains for the opposition. Anecdotally, under such conditions, individuals may avoid supporting their opponents even if this harms their own group, seemingly inconsistent with “in-group love” or a harm minimizing strategy. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, these circumstances have not been investigated. In six pre-registered studies, we find consistent evidence that individuals prefer to harm their own group rather than provide even minimal support to an opposing group across polarized issues (abortion access, political party, gun rights). Strikingly, in an incentive-compatible experiment, individuals preferred to subtract more than three times as much from their own group rather than support an opposing group, despite believing that their in-group is more effective with funds. We find that identity concerns drive preferences in group decision-making, and individuals believe that supporting an opposing group is less value-compatible than harming their own group. Our results hold valuable insights for the psychology of decision-making in intergroup conflict as well as potential interventions for conflict resolution.


Riot in the party? Voter registrations in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 capitol insurrection
Sara Loving & Daniel Smith
Party Politics, forthcoming 

Abstract:

Following the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, news outlets reported that registered Republicans were leaving the party in droves. Drawing on millions of individual-level voter registration records in Florida, we place post-riot party-switching in broader context. We investigate whether Republicans were more likely to experience greater out-migration after the riot, detail to which parties’ individuals switched their allegiances, use a difference-in-difference strategy to determine if the 2021 exodus was greater than 4 years earlier, and examine whether those who decamped from the GOP returned to the fold a year later. We find that registered voters who switched parties after the January 6th uprising were more likely to be white, middle-aged, high-propensity voters, and that Republicans were nearly four times more likely than Democrats to defect following the insurrection. We also find that the GOP defection rate after January 6th was nine times higher than during the same time period in 2017. However, we find that Republican registrants who switched parties post-riot did not migrate to the Democratic Party, but rather became independents, and that a year later, almost no Republicans (only 4.6%) who had defected returned to their GOP roots.


The effect of party identification and party cues on populist attitudes
Diogo Ferrari
Research & Politics, November 2022 

Abstract:

In recent years, a wave of populist leaders has emerged in many democratic countries, including the United States. Previous studies have argued that populist rhetoric matters for leaders’ electoral support because the public has populist attitudes, which are activated in contexts of failure of democratic governance or economic crises. This paper investigates the opposite causal direction and argues that people’s support for populist ideas can be an effect rather than a cause of leaders’ electoral support. People who support a candidate due to the candidate’s party affiliation or policy position tend to support or oppose populist or anti-populist messages if they learn that the candidate of the party they identify with supports that message. The paper investigates the argument with an experiment that randomly assigns (anti-)populist messages and a cue about the candidate that supports the message. The experiment shows that voters’ party identification largely affects support for both populist and anti-populist messages.


Do Political Differences Inhibit Market Transactions? An Investigation in the Context of Online Lending
Hongchang Wang & Eric Overby
Management Science, forthcoming

Abstract:

Do political differences, which are becoming increasingly acute among Americans, inhibit market transactions? We study this by examining whether the perceived political distance between investors and borrowers in an online lending market affects whom investors choose to fund. Using two complementary empirical approaches (a gravity model and a difference-in-differences analysis), we find a nuanced effect: Investors from comparatively conservative states consider political distance when making lending decisions, whereas investors from comparatively liberal states do not. Lending activity drops by as much as 11.6% when the investor’s state is more conservative than the borrower’s state. We also find that political distance between investors and borrowers reduces the likelihood that a borrower’s listing will be funded, thereby limiting the ability of the market to fulfill its function. However, political distance does not predict loan performance, which is consistent with another finding: The relationship of political distance to lending activity is not significant for experienced investors. It may be that investors stop considering political distance after they learn from experience that it does not predict loan performance. We find evidence for two mechanisms underlying our results: (1) a preference-based mechanism, in which investors from conservative states have a general preference for borrowers from conservative states, and (2) a rationality-based mechanism in which investors from conservative states use political ideology as a signal of creditworthiness (rightly or wrongly). Our results contribute to the literatures on online frictions and political (in)tolerance and have implications for the design of online lending (and other) markets.


Assessing the Potential of Partisan Group Cues in Promoting Accurate Beliefs
Dustin Carnahan et al.
Mass Communication and Society, forthcoming 

Abstract:

Recent work on misinformation has indicated a role for social and group-based factors in shaping people’s beliefs on factual matters, suggesting that communicators might be able to leverage social cues in messages aimed at promoting more accurate beliefs. To test this possibility, we conducted an online experiment (N = 605) to assess whether partisan in-group cues across several factual claims are effective in either promoting more accurate beliefs independently or in reinforcing the effect of fact-checking messages. Results reveal that while factual messages consistently promote accurate beliefs, partisan in-group cues have neither a direct effect in promoting greater belief accuracy nor moderate the influence of factual messages. We discuss the implications of the results for theory and offer some practical implications.


Polarized America: From Political Polarization to Preference Polarization
Verena Schoenmueller, Oded Netzer & Florian Stahl
Marketing Science, forthcoming

Abstract:

In light of the widely discussed political divide and increasing societal polarization, we investigate in this paper whether the polarization of political ideology extends to consumers’ preferences, intentions, and purchases. Using three different data sets—the publicly available social media data of over three million brand followerships of Twitter users, a YouGov brand-preference survey data set, and Nielsen scanner panel data—we assess the evolution of brand-preference polarization. We find that the apparent polarization in political ideologies after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 stretches further to the daily lives of consumers. We observe increased polarization in preferences, behavioral intentions, and actual purchase decisions for consumer brands. Consistent with compensatory consumption theory, we find that the increase in polarization following the election of Donald Trump was stronger for liberals relative to conservatives, and that this asymmetric polarization is driven by consumers’ demand for “Democratic brands” rather than the supply of such brands. From a brand perspective, there is evidence that brands that took a political stance observed a shift in their customer base in terms of their customers’ political affiliation. We provide publicly available (http://www.social-listening.org) access to the unique Twitter-based brand political affiliation scores.


A test of the “hybridity hypothesis:” Support for celebrity political expression, political ideology, and need for cognitive closure 
Dannagal Young et al.
International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Autumn 2022

Abstract:

Are conservatives more likely than liberals to oppose celebrity political expression? And if so, is this attributable to the overwhelmingly liberal ideology of the actors, musicians, and athletes who speak out on political matters? The hybridity hypothesis suggests that opposition to celebrity political expression might also be grounded in individuals’ psychological predispositions and resulting aesthetic preferences. Using 2018 national CCES data (N = 1000), we test the relationships between political beliefs, psychological traits, and support for celebrity political expression. Results indicate that need for cognitive closure is significantly negatively associated with support for celebrity expression, and that this relationship functions independently of the political leanings of the audience and of the political nature of the expression being made. The notion that a psychological need for closure is associated with less approval of certain forms of political discourse has important democratic implications, especially given the documented link between need for cognitive closure and political conservatism.


The effect of social approval on perceptions following social media message sharing applied to fake news
Joseph Walther et al.
Journal of Communication, December 2022, Pages 661–674 

Abstract:

A field experiment examined social approval in the form of Twitter “Likes” on individuals’ perceptions after retweeting a fictitious news story about a politician. The study incorporated research about feedback effects on self-perception online, partisan bias, and negativity principles. Participants read or retweeted a (verifiably false) news story via social media, and researchers appended systematic increments of Likes to the retweets. A baseline hypothesis test found no effect on perceptions due to retweeting versus simply reading a news story. Results supported a predicted three-way interaction effect between positive versus negative news story, political congruence with participants’ political party identification, and the reception of 0–22 Likes on perceptions of the politician. More Likes magnified negative perceptions of politicians, from fictitious news, when news stories were negative and focused on politicians from one’s opposite political party.


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