Party Commitments
From Gridlock to Polarisation?
Marc Jacob, Barton Lee & Gabriele Gratton
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose a mechanism linking legislative gridlock to voters’ support for candidates who hold extreme policy positions: voters rationally discount policy proposals on gridlocked policy issues because on these issues policy change is unlikely. When voters have preferences that are moderate and broadly aligned with a single party across policy issues, gridlock increases support for extreme co-partisan candidates. We test our mechanism in a large-scale online experiment in which we randomly vary subjects’ perceptions of gridlock and measure subjects’ support for candidates in candidate-choice tasks. We verify that greater perception of gridlock on a specific issue increases moderate, self-identified partisan subjects’ propensity to vote for extreme co-partisan candidates on the gridlocked issue. We show that our experimental evidence is consistent with our mechanism and that other mechanisms are less likely to underlie our main result. We discuss and analyse additional predictions of our mechanism, including a possibly moderating effect of gridlock that occurs when voters have preferences that are extreme and do not align with a single party across issues. Our theory offers a possible causal connection from gridlock to elite polarisation that may inform further empirical work and suggests a novel tradeoff between elite polarisation and policy stability in constitutional design.
Mutual Party Extremism
Ivo Welch
NBER Working Paper, March 2026
Abstract:
With four political candidates competing first in two primaries and then in a general election, even a modestly polarized electorate can sustain (in equilibrium) much more extremist candidates. However, a party can sustain extremism only if the other side is extreme, too. A small moderation of one side’s voting electorate can trigger a discontinuous collapse of candidate extremism on both sides -- a “moderation export” effect. The converse is also true: minute increases in voter polarization on the more moderate side can trigger radical candidate extremism on both sides. Principled candidates can destroy party electability. Distance-related voter abstention favors extremism.
Winning Big, Swinging Wide: Electoral Competition and Ideological Extremism
Kyle Rains
George Mason University Working Paper, February 2026
Abstract:
This paper investigates whether greater electoral security is associated with individual legislators adopting more extreme positions in the U.S. House of Representatives. Building on George Stigler's (1972) theory that larger margins of victory can empower political parties to pursue more extreme policies, the analysis extends his framework to the individual level. Using panel data from the 95th to the 117th Congresses, election results from the MIT Election Lab (2024) are combined with modified Nokken-Poole ideology scores from Voteview (2025) to test whether representatives with greater vote shares exhibit more ideologically extreme roll call behavior. A linear fixed effects model with controls for party-by-Congress, district-by-redistricting cycle, and individual legislators indicates that following the rise of the internet, higher vote shares are positively associated with ideological extremism. Robustness checks, including models accounting for unopposed elections and endogeneity concerns, reinforce this finding. These findings not only support Stigler's original theory but also suggest that the internet has lowered coordination costs for motivated voter subgroups, amplifying polarization among electorally secure legislators.
The ideological orientation of academic social science research, 1960–2024
James Manzi
Theory and Society, March 2026
Abstract:
This study analyzes approximately 600,000 English-language social science abstracts published between 1960 and 2024 to estimate the long-run ideological orientation of disciplinary research output. Large language models (LLMs) were applied to each abstract using a fixed 2025 U.S. ideological spectrum, enabling consistent coding across six decades. Five key findings emerged. First, roughly 90 percent of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024, and the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period. Second, all disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024. Third, policy-proximal disciplines generally showed limited rightward moderation between roughly 1970 and 1990, though policy-distal disciplines did not. Fourth, disciplines with greater leftward orientation generally displayed greater ideological homogeneity. Fifth, sociocultural content was more consistently left-leaning than economic content, and that gap widened over time. Robustness checks using a wide assortment of alternative datasets and analytical methodologies indicated that these findings were unlikely to be artifacts of idiosyncratic assumptions. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the capacity of LLM-based text classification to deliver reliable, large-scale ideological measurement over time, a task previously impractical with human coding alone. Taken together, the analysis provides the first systematic, cross-disciplinary evidence of the long-run political orientation of anglophone social science scholarship, revealing both the persistence and the intensification of its leftward tendencies, particularly in sociocultural domains.
Presidential candidate endorsements by scientific journals decrease trust in science especially for moderate and conservative Americans
Stylianos Syropoulos et al.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Before the 2020 and 2024 US Presidential elections, several scientific journals publicly endorsed the Democratic candidates or opposed the Republican candidate. We conducted three highly-powered, pre-registered online experiments (N = 6,281) to examine how these endorsements affected trust in science. Results revealed significant declines in trust in science, driven primarily by moderate and conservative Americans. Drawing upon on the theoretical perspective that trust in science is not monolithic, but rather composed of distinct dimensions, we examined and observed effects across a range of trust-related domains, including perceptions of scientific integrity (impartiality), competence (ability), benevolence, and generalized trust in scientific institutions. These findings highlight how motivated reasoning can amplify existing skepticism when individuals who already perceive science as aligned with opposing political ideologies read political endorsements from within the scientific community. Amidst increasing science-skepticism and politicization, journals must consider the unintended consequences of political messaging on public perceptions of science.
You’re Making Us Look Bad: Can Partisan Embarrassment Dampen Partisanship and Polarization?
Elizabeth Connors, Taylor Carlson & Steven Webster
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Partisan elites and members of the public often have attitudes or engage in behavior that could embarrass copartisans. We examine this occurrence -- what we call partisan embarrassment -- by investigating how much partisans report feeling this embarrassment, what types of scenarios embarrass partisans, what types of partisans feel this embarrassment, and what the political ramifications of partisan embarrassment could be. We expect that when a copartisan engages in embarrassing behavior, copartisans will want to distance themselves from their party to preserve their own status. We find that about 53.9 percent of American partisans experience partisan embarrassment, but it is highly variable across individuals and scenarios and has limited influence on partisanship, polarization, private or public in-party support, or views about party competence. Consistent with work highlighting the importance and stability of partisan attachments, our findings suggest that partisans are unlikely to punish their party, even when it embarrasses them.
Do they really believe that? Measuring salient conspiracy endorsement
Lisa Basil
Research & Politics, April 2026
Abstract:
Surveys frequently report widespread belief in conspiracy theories, prompting concerns about their democratic consequences. Yet, standard survey measures often implicitly treat agreement as equivalent to politically consequential belief, even though agreement can reflect a range of engagement—from momentary reactions to durable worldviews. This paper argues that an important dimension of belief is often insufficiently captured in existing approaches: salience. I introduce a salience-based measure that incorporates certainty and prior familiarity to distinguish more tentative or situational endorsement from internalized, action-relevant belief. Using original survey data, I show that this measure correlates more strongly with psychological traits associated with conspiracism and better predicts self-reported engagement: including discussing, posting about, and researching conspiracy theories. These results suggest that traditional measures may overstate the prevalence of politically meaningful conspiratorial belief and obscure substantial heterogeneity among those who agree with conspiracy claims. By refining how belief is measured, this paper offers a tool to more accurately identify which survey endorsements are likely to reflect consequential belief.
The Elephant and Donkey in the Room: Time-Varying Effects of Political Dissimilarity on Social Interactions at Work During U.S. Elections
Max Reinwald et al.
Organization Science, March-April 2026, Pages 466-489
Abstract:
Political polarization is recognized as a global risk. Although emerging studies on political dissimilarity at work highlight important implications for how employees behave and interact, findings are at times inconsistent. To provide a more nuanced understanding of when and why political dissimilarity disrupts workplace interactions, we draw on the social identity approach and threat processing to examine how political dissimilarity shapes perceptions of work relationships and behavior before and after election events. Across three studies, we demonstrate that political dissimilarity’s effects depend on political macro events and thus become temporally activated. Study 1, an experience sampling field study during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, showed no significant impact of political dissimilarity on negative interpersonal interactions before the election, but significance emerged on election day and persisted for six days after the election. In Study 2, an online experiment during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, we found that actual political dissimilarity indirectly influenced negative interpersonal interactions via reduced social mindfulness after the election but not beforehand. Study 3, a longitudinal experiment over four weeks during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, replicated the election effect, demonstrating that these effects persisted for at least two weeks and were mediated by cognitive (i.e., perspective-taking) and affective (i.e., empathic concern) subdimensions of social mindfulness. Our findings highlight political orientation as a critical dimension of workplace dissimilarity. Although its impact may be subdued, it becomes pronounced during macro-political events, shaping workplace interactions in significant ways, with the political dissimilarity effects being more easily reactivated in the postelection phase.
Estimating the causal effects of cognitive effort and policy information on party cue influence
Ben Tappin & Ryan McKay
Political Psychology, April 2026
Abstract:
Party cues can influence public opinion, but the extent to which they do so varies dramatically from context to context. Why? The long-standing theory that party cues function as “heuristics” provides an answer, predicting that variation in exposure to policy information, a propensity for effortful thinking, or both causally affects the influence of party cues. However, this prediction has escaped decisive empirical testing to date, leaving in its wake a string of mixed results. Here we characterize the challenges that limit previous tests, and report on two large-scale experiments designed to overcome them. We find that exposure to policy information causally attenuates the influence of party cues, but engagement in effortful thinking per se does not. Our results advance understanding of the “when” and “why” of party cue influence; clarify a number of previously ambiguous findings; and have broad theoretical, methodological, and normative implications for understanding the influence of party cues.
When Conservatives See Red but Liberals Feel Blue: Labeler Characteristics and Variation in Content Annotation
Nora Webb Williams et al.
Journal of Politics, April 2026, Pages 631-646
Abstract:
Human annotation of data, including texts and images, is a bedrock of political science research. Yet, we often fail to consider how the identities of our labelers may systematically affect their annotations and our downstream applications. Collecting annotator demographic information, regardless of task type, can help us establish measurement validity and better appreciate variation in interrater reliability. We may also discover things about our topic that we did not previously appreciate. We demonstrate the benefits of collecting labeler characteristics with two annotation cases, one using images from the United States and the second using text from the Netherlands. For both cases on a range of tasks, we find that annotator gender and political identity are associated with significantly different annotations. We consider three main approaches to addressing labeler characteristic issues: adjusting labels based on labeler identity, weighting composite labels based on target population demographics, and intentionally modeling subgroup variation.