Left to Right
How Markets Shape Values and Political Preferences: A Field Experiment
Yotam Margalit & Moses Shayo
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does engagement with markets affect socioeconomic values and political preferences? A long line of thinkers has debated the nature and direction of such effects, but claims are difficult to assess empirically because market engagement is endogenous. We designed a large field experiment to evaluate the impact of financial markets, which have grown dramatically in recent decades. Participants from a national sample in England received substantial sums they could invest over a 6‐week period. We assigned them into several treatments designed to distinguish between different theoretical channels of influence. Results show that investment in stocks led to a more right‐leaning outlook on issues such as merit and deservingness, personal responsibility, and equality. Subjects also shifted to the right on policy questions. These results appear to be driven by growing familiarity with, and decreasing distrust of markets. The spread of financial markets thus has important and underappreciated political ramifications.
A voter-centric explanation of the success of ideological candidates for the U.S. house
Stephen Utych
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
In recent years, ideological candidates for the U.S. House have become increasingly successful, to the point where their chances of being elected are indistinguishable from moderates. However, scholars have still not uncovered exactly why this is happening. Using survey data from the American National Election Studies, I find that voter-centric explanations of vote choice - a voter's partisanship, ideology, and presidential approval rating - have increasingly predicted their vote choice in U.S. House elections from 1980 to 2016. Using data on candidate ideology, I find that candidate ideology is an increasingly poor predictor of individual vote choice over time. Original experimental data supports these claims, finding only a small electoral advantage for moderates, compared to ideologues of their own party, and evidence suggesting that, at least among Democrats, ideological candidates are rated more favorably than moderates. Taken together, these results suggest that the increased electoral success of ideological candidates can be attributed to changes in voters' decision calculus, rather than structural or candidate-centric explanations.
Who Do You Loathe? Feelings toward Politicians vs. Ordinary People in the Opposing Party
Jon Kingzette
Journal of Experimental Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars, the media, and ordinary people alike express alarm at the apparent loathing between Democrats and Republicans in the mass public. However, the evidence of such loathing typically comes from survey items that measure attitudes toward the Democratic and Republican Parties, rather than attitudes toward ordinary partisans. Using a nationally representative survey, I find that Democrats and Republicans have substantially more positive feelings toward ordinary people belonging to the opposing party than they do toward politicians in the opposing party and the opposing party itself. These results indicate that research relying on measures of feelings toward the opposing “Party” vastly overstates levels of partisan animosity in the American public and demonstrate the need to distinguish between attitudes toward party elites and ordinary partisans in future research.
Why Party Leaders Tend to Be Extremists
Richard Zeckhauser, David King & Benjamin Schneer
Harvard Working Paper, June 2020
Abstract:
This paper proposes that strategic concerns about negotiations strongly influence whom parties select to be legislative leaders. Leaders tilt more extreme than the typical party member. Hence, they can credibly threaten to let negotiations break down if they find proposed legislation personally unacceptable. Such threats move negotiations towards the ideal point of the median party member. We present a simple framework for analyzing the roles of extreme leaders in legislative negotiations. We then confirm the tendency towards extreme leaders empirically in congressional data ranging from 1900 to the present. We also evaluate and reject several alternative explanations for extremeness. Extreme leadership cannot be explained by a tendency for more senior members of Congress to come from safer, more extreme congressional districts. Nor is it merely a product of recent polarization. Instead, as our theory predicts and our empirical results confirm, rank-and-file members balance their own ideologies with knowledge of the opposing party’s ideological orientation. In response, they select leaders extreme enough to aid in negotiations but not so extreme as to lead to total breakdowns in negotiation. Hence, as the evidence reveals, the degree of extremeness for a leader is greater for majority than minority parties, and for the majority party when its majority is greater. The filibuster threat inhibits the Senate Majority Leader from being as extreme as the Speaker of the House.
The Growing Divide: The Case of (Mis)Information and Polarization
Trent McNamara & Roberto Mosquera
Texas A&M University Working Paper, May 2020
Abstract:
The divergence of political attitudes towards their ideological extremes has become an identifying feature of the political landscape in the United States. Very little is known about the source of this divergence, how large it is, whether information can attenuate these differences, and what its impact is on political support and civic engagement. We run a field experiment to recover a distribution of polarization for American constituents and find it is driven by beliefs rather than preferences. We randomly introduce factual information and show that it corrects these misaligned beliefs. Using this variation, we further estimate polarization's impact on a suite of outcomes, including government support, views about government efficiency, and the willingness to compromise. We document that increasing polarization results in an individual being 0.35 s.d. less supportive towards the government, believe the government is less efficient by 0.42 s.d., and are less willing to compromise and trust by 0.43 s.d. We do not find any significant changes when reducing polarization. This asymmetric response is consistent with the literature showing that negative information has a greater impact on attitudes and beliefs than does positive information.
Pluralistic Collapse: The “Oil Spill” Model of Mass Opinion Polarization
Daniel DellaPosta
American Sociological Review, June 2020, Pages 507-536
Abstract:
Despite widespread feeling that public opinion in the United States has become dramatically polarized along political lines, empirical support for such a pattern is surprisingly elusive. Reporting little evidence of mass polarization, previous studies assume polarization is evidenced via the amplification of existing political alignments. This article considers a different pathway: polarization occurring via social, cultural, and political alignments coming to encompass an increasingly diverse array of opinions and attitudes. The study uses 44 years of data from the General Social Survey representing opinions and attitudes across a wide array of domains as elements in an evolving belief network. Analyses of this network produce evidence that mass polarization has increased via a process of belief consolidation, entailing the collapse of previously cross-cutting alignments, thus creating increasingly broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs. Further, the increasing salience of political ideology and partisanship only partly explains this trend. The structure of U.S. opinion has shifted in ways suggesting troubling implications for proponents of political and social pluralism.
Sharp as a Fox: Are foxnews.com Visitors Less Politically Knowledgeable?
Peter Licari
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 2012, a survey research was publicized suggesting that Fox News viewers were not only less informed than consumers of other news media but also less informed than people abstaining from news media entirely. Many have taken this to be unequivocally true and the study remains popular among political discussants to this day. However, virtually all of the investigations used to advance the argument focus on current events type knowledge and neglect important controls that could influence both political knowledge and Fox News consumption. Furthermore, no research to date has investigated any effects stemming from consuming the network’s online content (i.e., from foxnews.com). This article aims to contribute these gaps. Using the 2016 American National Election Survey (ANES), I investigate whether consuming content from foxnews.com is associated with decreased political knowledge. I find no differences in knowledge concerning how the U.S. political system works (what I call process-related knowledge) but do find a significant, negative relationship between visiting foxnews.com and facts about society writ large (what I call society-oriented knowledge). These effects persist even when controlling for party, ideology, and conservative-group affinity and in the preponderance of matching procedures employed to reduce concerns of self-selection. Implications and avenues of future research are also discussed.
Neither influence nor selection: Examining co-evolution of political orientation and social networks in the NetSense and NetHealth studies
Cheng Wang, Omar Lizardo & David Hachen
PLoS ONE, May 2020
Abstract:
Political orientation is one of the most important and consequential individual attributes studied by social scientists. Yet, we know relatively little about the temporal evolution of political orientation, especially at periods in the life course during which individuals are forming new social relationships and transitioning to new relational contexts. Here we use Stochastic Actor-Oriented models (SAOMs) to examine the co-evolution of political orientation and social networks using two feature-rich, temporal network datasets from samples of students making the transition to college at the University of Notre Dame (i.e. the NetSense and NetHealth studies). Overall, we find a great deal of stability in political orientation, with a slight tendency for the 2011 NetSense study participants to become more conservative during their first four semesters in college, but not the 2015 NetHealth study participants. Partisanship is the best predictor of changes in political orientation, with students who identify or vote as Republicans becoming more conservative over time. Neither network influence nor selection processes seem to be driving observed changes. During this formative period, relatively stable identities such as party affiliation predict changes in political orientation independently of local network dynamics, selection processes, socio-demographic traits, and dispositional factors.
Media, Pulpit, and Populist Persuasion: Evidence from Father Coughlin
Tianyi Wang
University of Pittsburgh Working Paper, April 2020
Abstract:
New technologies make it easier for charismatic individuals to influence others. This paper studies the political impact of the first populist radio personality in American history. Father Charles Coughlin blended populist demagoguery, anti-Semitism, and fascist sympathies to create a hugely popular radio program that attracted tens of millions of listeners throughout the 1930s. I evaluate the short- and long-term impacts of exposure to Father Coughlin's radio program. Exploiting variation in the radio signal strength as a result of topographic factors, I find that a one standard deviation increase in exposure to Coughlin's anti-FDR broadcast reduced FDR's vote share by about two percentage points in the 1936 presidential election. Effects were larger in counties with more Catholics and persisted after Father Coughlin left the air. An alternative difference-in-differences strategy exploiting Coughlin's switch in attitude towards FDR during 1932-1936 confirms the results. Moreover, I find that places more exposed to Coughlin’s broadcast in the late 1930s were more likely to form a local branch of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, sell fewer war bonds during WWII, and harbor more negative feelings towards Jews in the long run.
Do Search Algorithms Endanger Democracy? An Experimental Investigation of Algorithm Effects on Political Polarization
Jaeho Cho et al.
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines algorithm effects on user opinion, utilizing a real-world recommender algorithm of a highly popular video-sharing platform, YouTube. We experimentally manipulate user search/watch history by our custom programming. A controlled laboratory experiment is then conducted to examine whether exposure to algorithmically recommended content reinforces and polarizes political opinions. Results suggest that political self-reinforcement, as indicated by the political emotion-ideology alignment, and affective polarization are heightened by political videos - selected by the YouTube recommender algorithm - based on participants’ own search preferences. Suggestions for how to reduce algorithm-induced political polarization and implications of algorithmic personalization for democracy are discussed.
The (Null) Effects of Clickbait Headlines on Polarization, Trust, and Learning
Kevin Munger et al.
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
“Clickbait” headlines designed to entice people to click are frequently used by both legitimate and less-than-legitimate news sources. Contemporary clickbait headlines tend to use emotional partisan appeals, raising concerns about their impact on consumers of online news. This article reports the results of a pair of experiments with different sets of subject pools: one conducted using Facebook ads that explicitly target people with a high preference for clickbait, the other using a sample recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We estimate subjects’ individual-level preference for clickbait, and randomly assign sets of subjects to read either clickbait or traditional headlines. Findings show that older people and non-Democrats have a higher “preference for clickbait,” but reading clickbait headlines does not drive affective polarization, information retention, or trust in media.
Exploring Genetic Contributions to News Use Motives and Frequency of News Consumption: A Study of Identical and Fraternal Twins
Chance York & Paul Haridakis
Mass Communication and Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research conducted within the Uses and Gratifications paradigm has considered the contribution of numerous background social and psychological characteristics to motives for media use and media consumption patterns. In this study, we explore the extent to which far more fundamental characteristics - genes - explain, in part, motives to use news media and frequency of news use. Utilizing original data collected on identical and fraternal twins (n = 334), we find that latent genetic traits explain a nontrivial amount of variance in two unique news use motives, surveillance and entertainment, as well as frequency of consumption across multiple news sources. Genetic traits were particularly influential in explaining frequency of using sources commonly characterized as ideological, such as Fox News and CNN.