Party line
Travis Baker
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Americans expect the president to lead Congress, but Congress's partisan divide typically widens on presidential priorities. More often, presidents are reduced to leading their copartisans rather than Congress as a whole, but why? In this paper, I argue that competition for White House control creates incentives for parties to disagree on presidents' policy agendas, regardless of the contents of those agendas. I use an original data set of members' roll-call vote decisions on presidents' agendas between 1971 and 2010 to show that partisan polarization is larger on presidents' priorities and largest on their top priorities, above and beyond what we would expect from members' ideologies and standard party effects. These findings persist over time and under a wide range of alternative model specifications, bringing us closer to understanding the partisan conflict so prevalent in today's politics.
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Stefan Pfattheicher & Simon Schindler
PLoS ONE, April 2016
Abstract:
The present research investigates the associations between holding favorable views of potential Democratic or Republican candidates for the US presidency 2016 and seeing profoundness in bullshit statements. In this contribution, bullshit is used as a technical term which is defined as communicative expression that lacks content, logic, or truth from the perspective of natural science. We used the Bullshit Receptivity scale (BSR) to measure seeing profoundness in bullshit statements. The BSR scale contains statements that have a correct syntactic structure and seem to be sound and meaningful on first reading but are actually vacuous. Participants (N = 196; obtained via Amazon Mechanical Turk) rated the profoundness of bullshit statements (using the BSR) and provided favorability ratings of three Democratic (Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley, and Bernie Sanders) and three Republican candidates for US president (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump). Participants also completed a measure of political liberalism/conservatism. Results revealed that favorable views of all three Republican candidates were positively related to judging bullshit statements as profound. The smallest correlation was found for Donald Trump. Although we observe a positive association between bullshit and support for the three Democrat candidates, this relationship is both substantively small and statistically insignificant. The general measure of political liberalism/conservatism was also related to judging bullshit statements as profound in that individuals who were more politically conservative had a higher tendency to see profoundness in bullshit statements. Of note, these results were not due to a general tendency among conservatives to see profoundness in everything: Favorable views of Republican candidates and conservatism were not significantly related to profoundness ratings of mundane statements. In contrast, this was the case for Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley. Overall, small-to-medium sized correlations were found, indicating that far from all conservatives see profoundness in bullshit statements.
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Jordan Ragusa & Anthony Gaspar
Political Research Quarterly, June 2016, Pages 361-372
Abstract:
Does the Tea Party affect how lawmakers vote? Given the possible spurious effect of a representative's ideology, we leverage natural variation in the Tea Party's existence and examine this question through the lens of party switching. Like when lawmakers change parties, representatives who (1) joined Tea Party Caucus and (2) had a large volume of Tea Party activists in their district underwent a significant shift to the right in the 112th Congress. We believe these findings support both legislative-centered and extended network theorists. An additional analysis reveals that, unlike Democrats and non-Tea Party aligned Republicans who also shifted to the extremes in the 112th Congress, Tea Party Republicans did not "bounce back" in the 113th Congress. Lastly, we find no equivalent rightward shift in comparable conservative caucuses or among Republicans with similar ideologies and districts. In the end, although the Tea Party is not a "party" in the classic sense of the word, we claim that it is having "party like" effects in Congress. In the conclusion section, we discuss the implications of these results for the stability of the current two-party system. Given our findings, a major realignment or split within the Republican Party would not be surprising.
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Partisan underestimation of the polarizing influence of group discussion
Jessica Keating, Leaf Van Boven & Charles Judd
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, July 2016, Pages 52-58
Abstract:
Group polarization occurs when people's attitudes become more extreme following discussion with like-minded others. We hypothesized that people underestimate how much a relatively brief group discussion polarizes their own attitudes. People often perceive their own attitudes as unbiased and stable over time. Therefore, people's polarized postdiscussion attitudes may cause them to misremember their pre-discussion attitudes as having been more extreme than they were. In two experiments, participants engaged in 15-minute discussions with 4-6 like-minded others regarding two political topics: whether Barack Obama or George W. Bush was the better president (Experiment 1) and whether they supported Barack Obama or Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential election (Experiment 2). Group discussion polarized participants' attitudes, and participants misremembered their pre-discussion attitudes as having been more extreme than they actually were. Participants' polarized post-discussion attitudes significantly predicted their recalled pre-discussion attitudes, controlling for their actual pre-discussion attitudes, suggesting that their post-discussion attitudes guided reconstruction of their pre-discussion attitudes. These findings have implications for people's awareness of psychological biases and for the societal effects of partisan enclavement.
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Walking the Line: The White Working Class and the Economic Consequences of Morality
Monica Prasad, Steve Hoffman & Kieran Bezila
Politics & Society, June 2016, Pages 281-304
Abstract:
Over one-third of the white working class in America vote for Republicans. Some scholars argue that these voters support Republican economic policies, while others argue that these voters' preferences on cultural and moral issues override their economic preferences. We draw on in-depth interviews with 120 white working-class voters to defend a broadly "economic" interpretation: for this segment of voters, moral and cultural appeals have an economic dimension, because these voters believe certain moral behaviors will help them prosper economically. Even the very word "conservative" is understood as referencing not respect for tradition generally, but avoidance of debt and excessive consumption specifically. For many respondents, the need to focus on morality and personal responsibility as a means of prospering economically - what we call "walking the line" - accords with the rhetoric they associate with Republicans. Deindustrialization may have heightened the appeal of this rhetoric.
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Just the Facts? Partisan Media and the Political Conditioning of Economic Perceptions
Ian Anson
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the effects of biases in economic information on partisans' economic perceptions. In survey experiments, I manipulate the presence of partisan cues and the direction of proattitudinal information in news stories about the American economy. Results demonstrate that although proattitudinal tone in factual economic news stories most strongly affects partisans' economic perceptions, inclusion of partisan cues alongside proattitudinal information results in weaker shifts in economic sentiment relative to stories lacking partisan content. These findings suggest that the relatively subtle process of agenda setting in economic news may be the most effective tool used by partisan news outlets to drive polarization in citizens' factual economic perceptions.
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Divisive Topics as Social Threats
Joseph Simons & Melanie Green
Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current work provides evidence for a psychological obstacle to the resolution of divisive social issues (e.g., affirmative action, drug legalization); specifically, people approach discussions of these issues with a threatened mind-set. Across three studies, it is shown that the prospect of discussing topics which divide social opinion is associated with threatened responding (the dissensus effect). Divisive discussion topics are associated with both a greater level of self-reported threat (Studies 1 and 3) and a greater tendency to perceive neutral faces as threatening (Study 2). Furthermore, the effect is shown to be robust across manipulations of social opinion (ratings of multiple social issues in Studies 1 and 2; fictional polling data in Study 3), and was not reducible to individual attitude extremity (Studies 1 and 3) or a valence effect (Study 2).
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Revisiting the Myth: New Evidence of a Polarized Electorate
Marc Hetherington, Meri Long & Thomas Rudolph
Public Opinion Quarterly, Spring 2016, Pages 321-350
Abstract:
This study uncovers strong evidence that polarization has developed in presidential candidate trait evaluations. Unlike for ideology or policy preferences, the distribution of trait evaluations has become increasingly bimodal and clustered toward the poles. This change stems in part from a more polarized choice set, but perceptions of candidate extremeness are asymmetric, with partisans perceiving the other party's candidate, but not their own, as extreme. In addition, the increased salience of racial and moral issues helps explain trait polarization. Racial attitudes among Republicans have become both more conservative over time and more potent in explaining trait evaluations; among Democrats, racial attitudes have neither changed over time nor become more potent. Moral values among Democrats have grown more liberal over time and more potent in explaining trait evaluations. Among Republicans, however, moral values have not become more conservative, but have become a more potent predictor of trait evaluations. We discuss the implications of the emergence of trait polarization for understanding problematic features of contemporary American politics.
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On the determinants of political polarization
Daryna Grechyna
Economics Letters, July 2016, Pages 10-14
Abstract:
In this article, we aim to identify the main determinants of political polarization using Bayesian Model Averaging to overcome the problem of model uncertainty. We find that the level of trust within a country and the degree of income inequality are the most robust determinants of political polarization.
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Choosing peers: Homophily and polarization in groups
Mariagiovanna Baccara & Leeat Yariv
Journal of Economic Theory, September 2016, Pages 152-178
Abstract:
This paper studies the formation of peer groups entailing the joint production of public goods. In our model agents choose their peers and have to pay a connection cost for each member added to the group. After groups are formed, each agent selects a public project to make a costly contribution to, and all members of the group experience the benefits of these contributions. Since agents differ in how much they value one project relative to the other, the group's preferences affect the generated profile of public goods. We characterize mutually optimal groups, groups that are optimal for all their members. When contribution costs are low relative to connection costs, mutually optimal groups must be sufficiently homogeneous. As contribution costs increase relative to connection costs, agents desire more connections, which in turn raises the risk of free riding. Extreme peers are then more appealing, since they are more willing to contribute, and polarization arises.
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Sympathy for the Devil: How Broadcast News Reduces Negativity Toward Political Leaders
Glen Smith
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines whether broadcast news reduces negativity toward political leaders by exposing partisans to opposing viewpoints. For analysis, both exposure to broadcast news and variation in media content are used to predict changes in feelings toward the candidates during the 2008 presidential election. The results suggest that increased exposure to broadcast news increased partisans' favorability toward the out-party candidate. In addition, increased coverage of the candidates was followed by increased favorability among members of the opposing party. These results demonstrate the benefits of exposure to two-sided communications flows for the reduction of animosity between the political parties. Moreover, these results suggest that public negativity toward political leaders might be even worse if not for the large amount of overlap between the audiences for partisan and mainstream news outlets.
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Fair and Balanced? Quantifying Media Bias through Crowdsourced Content Analysis
Ceren Budak, Sharad Goel & Justin Rao
Public Opinion Quarterly, Spring 2016, Pages 250-271
Abstract:
It is widely thought that news organizations exhibit ideological bias, but rigorously quantifying such slant has proven methodologically challenging. Through a combination of machine-learning and crowdsourcing techniques, we investigate the selection and framing of political issues in fifteen major US news outlets. Starting with 803,146 news stories published over twelve months, we first used supervised learning algorithms to identify the 14 percent of articles pertaining to political events. We then recruited 749 online human judges to classify a random subset of 10,502 of these political articles according to topic and ideological position. Our analysis yields an ideological ordering of outlets consistent with prior work. However, news outlets are considerably more similar than generally believed. Specifically, with the exception of political scandals, major news organizations present topics in a largely nonpartisan manner, casting neither Democrats nor Republicans in a particularly favorable or unfavorable light. Moreover, again with the exception of political scandals, little evidence exists of systematic differences in story selection, with all major news outlets covering a wide variety of topics with frequency largely unrelated to the outlet's ideological position. Finally, news organizations express their ideological bias not by directly advocating for a preferred political party, but rather by disproportionately criticizing one side, a convention that further moderates overall differences.
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Are Conservatives Happier than Liberals? Not Always and not Everywhere
Olga Stavrova & Maike Luhmann
Journal of Research in Personality, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research has shown that conservatives report higher levels of subjective well-being than liberals (happiness gap). We investigate to what extent this phenomenon exists in different time periods within the United States (Study 1, N = 40,000) and in different countries (Study 2, N = 230,000). Consistent with our hypotheses grounded in the "shared reality" and person-culture fit literature, conservatives were happier and more satisfied with their lives than liberals to the extent that the conservative political ideology prevailed in their socio-cultural context, be it a specific time period in the U.S. or a specific country. These results show that the happiness gap between conservatives and liberals is less universal than previously assumed.
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The Impact of Uncertainty, Threat, and Political Identity on Support for Political Compromise
Ingrid Haas
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This work examines the impact of uncertainty and threat on support for political compromise. In Study 1, uncertainty, threat, and support for compromise were measured. Uncertainty increased support for compromise only when paired with positive or neutral affect. Studies 2 and 3 used an experimental design to examine the impact of incidental affect on support for political compromise as a function of political identification. Uncertainty was more likely to increase support for compromise in positive or neutral contexts and for political moderates and liberals. The combination of uncertainty and threat led conservatives to express reduced support for compromise.