Party Vibes
Love Blinds? Winners, In-Party Favoritism, and Support for Violations of Democratic Norms
Yu-Shiuan Huang
British Journal of Political Science, May 2026
Abstract:
Why are electoral winners more willing to support democratic norm violations? Using a mediator blockage survey experiment in the United States, I find that winners endorse norm erosion due to heightened in-party favoritism following their party’s electoral victory. The experiment successfully manipulated in-party favoritism, the mediator, demonstrating that respondents exposed to a winning signal, suggesting their party is likely to secure both the presidency and control of Congress, exhibit greater in-party favoritism. This increase significantly predicts a greater tendency to perceive norm-eroding policies, such as banning protests or disqualifying candidates, as democratic and to support these policies. Additionally, winners are less likely to evaluate these policies through a lens of strategic political calculation, that is, whether these policies benefit their party directly or indirectly, challenging the prevailing view that winners tolerate norm violations for instrumental reasons.
Partisan Homogeneity at Work: Employee Satisfaction, Human Capital, and Labor Productivity
Gilles Hilary et al.
Georgetown University Working Paper, May 2026
Abstract:
We merge employment records for 24 million individuals with U.S. voter registration data from 2012 to 2022 to examine how workplace political homogeneity affects corporate behavior. Greater homogeneity, defined as the absolute difference between Republican and Democratic employee shares, boosts employee job satisfaction and improves perceptions of corporate culture. These effects are concentrated among firms with more voters and in areas with strong hostility toward the other party. Homogeneous firms attract more talent, particularly highly educated, innovation-oriented workers. In support of the Social Identity Theory, these results suggest that partisan homophily reduces interpersonal friction and fosters psychological safety. Workplace homogeneity drives labor productivity and innovation gains. These economic effects center on firms with strong employee perceptions of culture and high worker inflows. In addition, results are mostly driven by non-executive employees, highlighting the importance of examining partisan homogeneity through the ranks. Our findings suggest that political alignment among employees acts as a non-pecuniary amenity, enhancing innovation by improving firm culture and attracting high-caliber human capital.
Generational Shifts and Gendered Divides: Exploring Attitudes on Social, Cultural, and Political Issues in the United States
April Clark et al.
Social Science Quarterly, May 2026
Objective: We examine how gendered differences in political attitudes have evolved in the United States across generations and historical contexts. Utilizing Gallup Poll Social Survey Series (GPSS) data (2000–2024), we analyze public opinion across three issue domains: care and social protection, social stability and societal change, and morality and rights conflict.
Methods: Cross-classified random effects modeling assesses whether gender gaps reflect generational replacement (cohort effects) or changes over time (period effects).
Results: Period effects account for much of the observed change in socio-political attitudes, while cohort effects play a limited role. Although men and women differ in their opinions, their attitudes generally move in parallel, leaving the gender gap stable over time. Women consistently express greater concern than men on issues including hunger and homelessness, crime and violence, drug use, healthcare access, and the environment.
Conclusion: These findings challenge narratives of increasing gender polarization. Despite intensified public discourse on issues such as race, abortion, gun policy, and LGBTQ+ rights, gender gaps remain relatively stable, suggesting that perceived polarization may reflect elite-driven framing more than mass-level divergence.
Do ICE Arrests Spark Political Action?
Hans Hassell, Taylor Hill & John Holbein
Florida State University Working Paper, May 2026
Abstract:
Does U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity trigger electoral mobilization? Theory and prior evidence suggest it should: historical enforcement has driven citizens to the polls, contemporary enforcement has sparked widespread protests, and detention and deportation impose exceptionally high stakes on affected communities. The second Trump administration's enforcement surge represents perhaps the most theoretically favorable conditions ever observed for detecting such a response. Using data from 2023 to 2025, we test whether recent ICE activity has translated into changes in voter registration and political donations using a nationwide county × day panel. Using difference-in-differences, event study, and regression discontinuity in time designs, we find largely null or near-null estimates. For voter registration, modest effects are confined to certain minority groups and counties with high concentrations of Democratic voters, foreign-born residents, or Hispanic populations, while for other groups and places, effects are statistically indistinguishable from zero. For donations, we detect substantively negligible effects -- equivalent to roughly one additional donor contributing ≈$200 per county, present only on the day of arrest. Moreover, these effects are offsetting, positive for both Democrats and Republicans, and somewhat sensitive to violations of parallel trends. Our findings hold across a battery of explanations for the null and survive a demanding critical-case test using ICE activity in Minnesota in late 2025 and early 2026. Even where ICE activity generated substantial attention, effects are indistinguishable from zero. Together, our results suggest that even historically unprecedented immigration enforcement, in even the most salient local contexts, does not automatically translate into political mobilization. These findings contribute to the contested literature on the political consequences of the state's exercise of punitive power.
Generational and Ideological Divides in Support for Speech-Suppressing Protest
Kevin Jay Wallsten
PS: Political Science & Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the centrality of tolerance and free expression to liberal democracy, little is known about the American public’s attitudes toward disruptive protest actions that suppress constitutionally protected speech. Drawing on a nationally representative survey, this article examines the acceptance of shouting down speakers, blocking audiences from attending events, and using violence to stop public speeches across two different question formats: (1) an abstract, “non-group” question; and (2) a “most-offensive-idea” question in which respondents evaluate tactics aimed at speech that they find personally offensive. Across both formats, Gen Z is significantly more accepting of shoutdowns, blockades, and violence than older cohorts. Ideological differences, however, depend heavily on the measurement approach, with liberals and conservatives diverging on the non-group questions but converging on the most-offensive-idea questions. Together, these results reveal a robust generational divide in permissiveness toward speech-suppressing protest and more conditional, context-dependent ideological differences.
Election Outcomes and Affective Polarization in the United States
Joseph Phillips & Seth Warner
Political Research Quarterly, June 2026, Pages 399-409
Abstract:
Do election outcomes exacerbate affective polarization? While polarization often rises during campaigns and correlates with democratic backsliding, isolating the effect of winning or losing has proven difficult because of the need for a pre-election baseline and to generalize across multiple elections. In this study, we leverage pre- and post-election questions about partisan affect in the American National Election Study between 1996 and 2024. Our first analysis studies how respondents’ attitudes changed based on their party’s success in its bid for the White House. Our second analysis extends this to hundreds more races, applying a regression discontinuity design to attitudes after close subnational election results. Both analyses support the conclusion that the losing side drives the post-election gap in polarization, and that they do so by feeling less warmly toward their own party. In the United States, political loss may erode in-group attachment more than it fuels out-group hostility.
Partisan (In)Tolerance and Affective Polarization
James Tilley, Teresa Bejan & Sara Hobolt
British Journal of Political Science, May 2026
Abstract:
Political tolerance of others’ civil liberties is an essential and everyday condition of democratic politics without which citizens cannot engage constructively with those of different views. In this paper, we combine insights from political theory and political behaviour to develop and test the concept of ‘partisan intolerance’. We conceptualize partisan intolerance as the gap between a person’s willingness to interfere with contentious activities by in-partisans versus the same activities by out-partisans. Using two pre-registered experiments, we find high levels of partisan intolerance in Britain. Moreover, while partisan intolerance is not associated with abstract measures of political tolerance, we find a strong association with affective partisan polarization. Our findings thus suggest that increasing affective polarization among partisans is accompanied by a high degree of intolerance towards their opponents’ basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and the right to protest.
Politics embodied: How politics shapes and is shaped by the bodily experience of emotions
Andrea Vik et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 19 May 2026
Abstract:
Political emotions are widely acknowledged as key drivers of political participation and polarization. Yet while it is well established that political emotions matter, far less is known about how they are felt and represented in the body. Across a preregistered, nationally representative study (N = 992), we introduce an embodied approach to political emotion using the validated emBODY-tool, which allows participants to map where in the body they experience sensations when feeling canonical emotions (e.g., anger) and their political counterparts (e.g., “political anger”). Specifically, we address three questions: 1) how political emotions are embodied and differ from their nonpolitical counterparts, 2) whether political dispositions influence how these political emotions are embodied, and 3) how their embodied experience interacts with political dispositions in explaining political attitudes and behavior. Pixelwise bodily sensation maps and aggregated “embodied impact” metrics show that political anger, anxiety, depression, disgust, and hope do not merely mirror their canonical forms, but take on distinct bodily patterns. Political ideology, but not political sophistication, modulates these bodily experiences, with Democrat-leaning participants reporting more intense sensations for negative political emotions, suggesting the presence of “ideological bodies.” Crucially, political participation is not explained by how intensely people report feeling emotions, but is instead closely linked to how strongly these emotions are embodied in the body. Together, our findings underscore the body’s central role in democratic engagement by showing how political contexts shape embodied emotional experience and how these embodied experiences shape politics and democracy.
Extreme justifications fuel polarization
Christiane Buschinger et al.
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does polarisation -- as measured by mistreatment of political rivals -- spread? In an online experiment, participants choose between splitting financial resources equally or discriminating against a supporter of the opposing political party. We vary the information subjects receive about others’ choices and justifications for discrimination. Exposure to extreme justifications for discrimination increases discrimination -- particularly in a polarized environment, when many others are already discriminating -- and it leads participants to adopt more extreme justifications themselves. Our findings suggest a self-reinforcing dynamic that may fuel polarisation: Exposure to extreme statements increases polarisation and the prevalence of extreme reasoning.
From Politics to the Bench: Partisan Determinants of Support for Gubernatorial Judicial Appointments
Aiden Parker & Jesse Usher Barrett
Political Research Quarterly, June 2026, Pages 641-655
Abstract:
Partisan identity increasingly structures how Americans interpret the operation of democratic institutions, including the routine procedures meant to function impartially. This study examines how partisan identity shapes public evaluations of one such procedure, gubernatorial appointments to state supreme courts during competitive election years. Using a survey experiment in which respondents evaluated a hypothetical appointment under varied partisan conditions, we find that co-partisans express substantially greater support for the appointment procedure, while out-party respondents are more likely to oppose it. These effects appear regardless of respondents’ affect toward either party, suggesting that partisan identity, rather than sentiment, drives evaluations of this democratic process. Our findings indicate that support for these procedures is often conditional on partisan alignment, raising concerns about the durability of shared democratic norms.