Party crashing
Polarization and the Decline of the American Floating Voter
Corwin Smidt
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The observed rate of Americans voting for a different party across successive presidential elections has never been lower. This trend is largely explained by the clarity of party differences reducing indecision and ambivalence and increasing reliability in presidential voting. American National Election Studies (ANES) Times Series study data show that recent independent, less engaged voters perceive candidate differences as clearly as partisan, engaged voters of past elections and with declining rates of ambivalence, being undecided, and floating. Analysis of ANES inter-election panel studies shows the decline in switching is present among nonvoters too, as pure independents are as reliable in their party support as strong partisans of prior eras. These findings show parties benefit from the behavioral response of all Americans to polarization. By providing an ideological anchor to candidate evaluations, polarization produces a reliable base of party support that is less responsive to short-term forces.
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The Policy Effects of the Partisan Composition of State Government
Devin Caughey, Chris Warshaw & Yiqing Xu
MIT Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
How much does it matter which party controls the government? There are a number of reasons to believe that the partisan composition of state government should affect policy. But the existing evidence that electing Democrats instead of Republicans into office leads to more liberal policies is surprisingly weak, inconsistent, and contingent. We bring clarity to this debate with the aid of a new measure of the policy liberalism of each state from 1936-2014, using regression discontinuity and dynamic panel analyses to estimate the policy effects of the partisan composition of state legislatures and governorships. We find that until the 1980s, partisan control of state government had negligible effects on policy liberalism, but that since then partisan effects have grown markedly. Even today, however, the policy effects of partisan composition pale in comparison to the policy differences across states. They are also small relative to the partisan divergence in legislative voting records.
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(Mis)perceptions of Partisan Polarization in the American Public
Matthew Levendusky & Neil Malhotra
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Few topics in public opinion research have attracted as much attention in recent years as partisan polarization in the American mass public. Yet, there has been considerably less investigation into whether people perceive the electorate to be polarized and the patterns of these perceptions. Building on work in social psychology, we argue that Americans perceive more polarization with respect to policy issues than actually exists, a phenomenon known as false polarization. Data from a nationally representative probability sample and a novel estimation strategy to make inferences about false polarization show that people significantly misperceive the public to be more divided along partisan lines than it is in reality. Also, people's misperceptions of opposing partisans are larger than those about their own party. We discuss the implications of these empirical patterns for American electoral politics.
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Michaela Huber et al.
PLoS ONE, September 2015
Abstract:
We examined the effects of incidental anger on perceived and actual polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the context of two national tragedies, Hurricane Katrina (Study 1) and the mass shooting that targeted Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona (Study 2). We hypothesized that because of its relevance to intergroup conflict, incidental anger exacerbates the political polarization effects of issue partisanship (the correlation between partisan identification and partisan attitudes), and, separately, the correlation between conservative partisan identification and perceived polarization between Democrats and Republicans. We further hypothesized that these effects would be strongest for Republican identification because Republican leaders were targets of public criticism in both tragedies and because conservative (Republican) ideology tends to be more sensitive to threat. In the studies, participants first completed an emotion induction procedure by recalling autobiographical events that made them angry (Studies 1 & 2), sad (Studies 1 & 2), or that involved recalling emotionally neutral events (Study 2). Participants later reported their attitudes regarding the two tragedies, their perceptions of the typical Democrat's and Republican's attitudes on those issues, and their identification with the Democratic and Republican parties. Compared with incidental sadness (Studies 1 and 2) and a neutral condition (Study 2), incidental anger exacerbated the associations between Republican identification and partisan attitudes, and, separately between Republican identification and perceived polarization between the attitudes of Democrats and Republicans. We discuss implications for anger's influence on political attitude formation and perceptions of group differences in political attitudes.
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From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?
Matthew Feinberg & Robb Willer
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, December 2015, Pages 1665-1681
Abstract:
Much of contemporary American political rhetoric is characterized by liberals and conservatives advancing arguments for the morality of their respective political positions. However, research suggests such moral rhetoric is largely ineffective for persuading those who do not already hold one's position because advocates advancing these arguments fail to account for the divergent moral commitments that undergird America's political divisions. Building on this, we hypothesize that (a) political advocates spontaneously make arguments grounded in their own moral values, not the values of those targeted for persuasion, and (b) political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective. We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation's official language. Mediation and moderation analyses further indicated that reframed moral appeals were persuasive because they increased the apparent agreement between the political position and the targeted individuals' moral values.
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Stories or Science? Facts, Frames, and Policy Attitudes
John Sides
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
How much do factual information and other kinds of frames affect policy attitudes? And whose attitudes are most malleable? I address these questions via two original survey experiments about the estate tax. I demonstrate that correct information about who is potentially subject to the estate tax increased support for the estate tax. Furthermore, this information did not appear any less persuasive than pro- or antitax arguments that emphasized values such as equality or fairness. Finally, the effects of this information were concentrated among lower income conservatives and Republicans. These findings contrast with previous research on estate tax attitudes and have broader implications for the study of political information, framing, and policy attitudes.
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Lucian Gideon Conway et al.
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research suggests that liberals are more complex than conservatives. However, it may be that liberals are not more complex in general, but rather only more complex on certain topic domains (while conservatives are more complex in other domains). Four studies (comprised of over 2,500 participants) evaluated this idea. Study 1 involves the domain specificity of a self-report questionnaire related to complexity (dogmatism). By making only small adjustments to a popularly used dogmatism scale, results show that liberals can be significantly more dogmatic if a liberal domain is made salient. Studies 2-4 involve the domain specificity of integrative complexity. A large number of open-ended responses from college students (Studies 2 and 3) and candidates in the 2004 Presidential election (Study 4) across an array of topic domains reveals little or no main effect of political ideology on integrative complexity, but rather topic domain by ideology interactions. Liberals are higher in complexity on some topics, but conservatives are higher on others. Overall, this large dataset calls into question the typical interpretation that conservatives are less complex than liberals in a domain-general way.
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Diversity and trust: The role of shared values
Sjoerd Beugelsdijk & Mariko Klasing
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social diversity has been linked to a range of socio-economic and political outcomes, generally showing that higher diversity is associated with lower socio-economic performance. In this paper we focus on the extent to which key human values and beliefs are shared in society, which captures a dimension of diversity not previously discussed. We assess the importance of value diversity by focusing on its role in fostering generalized trust within societies. We find that value diversity, in particular with regard to political ideological values concerning income redistribution and the role of the government in influencing markets, is important for understanding the international variation in trust, with high diversity being associated with lower levels of trust. This relationship is robust to controlling for various other determinants of trust, including other dimensions of diversity, and holds at various levels of aggregation.
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D.J. Flynn & Laurel Harbridge
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars are increasingly interested in how partisan conflict in Congress affects public evaluations of institutional performance. Yet, existing research overlooks how the public responds to one of the most widely discussed consequences of partisan conflict: legislative gridlock. We develop expectations about how partisan conflict resulting in partisan wins, losses, and gridlock will affect evaluations of Congress, and how these relationships will differ across consensus and non-consensus issues. Results from two survey experiments indicate that partisan conflict resulting in a victory for one's own party boosts approval relative to compromise, but conflict resulting in gridlock substantially damages approval. However, the degree to which gridlock decreases approval hinges on the type of policy under consideration. On consensus issues, citizens reward legislative action by either party - their party or the opposing party - over gridlock.
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Late to the parade: Party switchers in contemporary US southern legislatures
Seth McKee & Antoine Yoshinaka
Party Politics, November 2015, Pages 957-969
Abstract:
We undertake an examination of southern state legislators who changed their party affiliation between 1992 and 2012. Not surprisingly, the vast majority went from being Democrats to Republicans, and this change has fuelled the dynamics at the national level by pulling the Republican Party further to the right and Democrats to the left. Hence, these are the incumbent party switchers we evaluate. With the use of constituency, electoral and contextual data on both switchers and non-switchers, we assess which factors influence the likelihood that a Democratic office-holder will switch to the GOP (Grand Old Party). We find that the typical demographic correlates of southern Republicanism, such as race and education, do indeed have a significant effect on the probability of the GOP label being adopted. In addition, the disruptive effect of redistricting induces switches, as does a change in the party of the elected governor. However, electoral pressure does not have an independent effect on party switching. Our results suggest that party switching is a response to several district-level factors as well as the broader political context within the state. We conclude with a discussion of why increasing partisan polarization and the maturation of the southern GOP is likely to forestall future party switching.
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Jay Hmielowski, Michael Beam & Myiah Hutchens
International Journal of Public Opinion Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent studies have shown evidence of increasing levels of attitude polarization in the United States. This study adds to this line of inquiry by examining whether important structural changes to the media system in 1996, which included the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the introduction of Fox News, affected TV news' contribution to affective polarization. Using the American National Election Studies (ANES) cumulative data file, we test the media's contribution to affective polarization before and after 1996 using spline regression. Our results show an increase in affective polarization over time, with greater increases after 1996. In addition, we show that after 1996, TV news use contributes to increasing levels of affective polarization in the United States.