Picking sides
Income Inequality, Media Fragmentation, and Increased Political Polarization
John Duca & Jason Saving
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
The increasing polarization of congressional voting has been linked to legislators' inability to reach consensus on many pressing economic issues. We examine two potential factors driving polarization: greater income inequality and the increasingly fragmented state of American media. Using cointegration techniques, we find evidence indicating that media fragmentation has played a more important role than inequality. Periods of rising media fragmentation are followed by increased polarization. If recent patterns of media structure and income inequality persist, a polarized policymaking environment will likely continue to impede efforts to address major challenges, such as the long-run fiscal imbalances facing the United States.
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Measuring Polarization in High-Dimensional Data: Method and Application to Congressional Speech
Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse Shapiro & Matt Taddy
NBER Working Paper, July 2016
Abstract:
We study trends in the partisanship of Congressional speech from 1873 to 2009. We define partisanship to be the ease with which an observer could infer a congressperson’s party from a fixed amount of speech, and we estimate it using a structural choice model and methods from machine learning. The estimates reveal that partisanship is far greater today than at any point in the past. Partisanship was low and roughly constant from 1873 to the early 1990s, then increased dramatically in subsequent years. Evidence suggests innovation in political persuasion beginning with the Contract with America, possibly reinforced by changes in the media environment, as a likely cause. Naive estimates of partisanship are subject to a severe finite-sample bias and imply substantially different conclusions.
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Culturally Antagonistic Memes and the Zika Virus: An Experimental Test
Dan Kahan et al.
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, July 2016
Abstract:
This paper examines a remedy for a defect in existing accounts of public risk perceptions. The accounts in question feature two dynamics: the affect heuristic, which emphasizes the impact of visceral feelings on information processing; and the cultural cognition thesis, which describes the tendency of individuals to form beliefs that reflect and reinforce their group commitments. The defect is the failure of these two dynamics, when combined, to explain the peculiar selectivity of public risk controversies: despite their intensity and disruptiveness, such controversies occur less frequently than the affect heuristic and the cultural cognition thesis seem to predict. To account for this aspect of public risk perceptions, the paper describes a model that adds the phenomenon of culturally antagonistic memes — argumentative tropes that fuse positions on risk with contested visions of the best life. Arising adventitiously, antagonistic memes transform affect and cultural cognition from consensus-generating, truth-convergent influences on information processing into conflictual, identity-protective ones. The paper supports this model with experimental results involving perceptions of the risk of the Zika virus: a general sample of U.S. subjects, whose members were not polarized when exposed to neutral information, formed culturally polarized affective reactions when exposed to information that was pervaded with antagonistic memes linking Zika to global warming; when exposed to comparable information linking Zika to unlawful immigration, the opposed affective stances of the subjects flipped in direction. Normative and prescriptive implications of these results are discussed.
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Religious Identity and Descriptive Representation
Walter Schmidt & Matthew Miles
Politics and Religion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drawing on the descriptive representation literature, we argue that religious identity is a social identity similar to gender or race, which leads a person to feel represented by someone who shares their religious identity. We argue that religious identity motivates approbation for public officials that is distinct from partisanship. We find that constituents who share the religious identity of their congressional representatives are significantly more likely to approve of their representative's performance in office. In addition, those who share a religious identity with President Obama are more trusting of him; particularly among those for whom religion is important. Finally, we find that shared religious identity moderates the relationship between partisanship and trust in the President. All else equal, Republicans who share a religious identity with President Obama are 500% more likely to trust him than a Republican who does not.
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Bryan Gervais & Jeffrey Taylor
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: We aim to fill a gap in the voter heuristic literature by estimating the impact of subparty cues — labels that connect candidates to an intraparty faction — on perceptions of candidates’ ideological positions. We argue that the Tea Party label acts as a subpartisan cue, and should affect perceptions of both Republicans and their Democratic opponents.
Methods: We measure ideological perceptions using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), and measure Tea Party “saliency” based on how often candidates were linked with the Tea Party in news media. Using probit regression, we estimate the impact of Tea Party saliency on ideological perceptions of candidates.
Results: We find that Republican candidates often associated with the Tea Party are more likely to be perceived as conservative or very conservative, even when we control for candidate and voter ideology, while their Democratic opponents are perceived to be more moderate.
Conclusion: The results suggest that extremizing cues like the Tea Party label can have a moderating effect on opponents. These findings shed new light on the role and interaction of party-related voting cues, and have important implications for elections, campaigns, and voter opinion and behavior.
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Cognitive Ability Rivals the Effect of Political Sophistication on Ideological Voting
Stig Hebbelstrup Rye Rasmussen
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article examines the impact of cognitive ability on ideological voting. We find, using a U.S. sample and a Danish sample, that the effect of cognitive ability rivals the effect of the traditionally strongest predictor of ideological voting, political sophistication. Furthermore, the results are consistent with the effect of cognitive ability being partly mediated by political sophistication. Much of the effect of cognitive ability remains, however, and is not explained by differences in education or openness to experience either. The implications of these results for democratic theory are discussed.
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Residential Building Restrictions, Cost of Living, and Partisanship
Jason Sorens
Dartmouth College Working Paper, July 2016
Abstract:
Why have richer U.S. states become more Democratic and poorer states more Republican? I find that this phenomenon actually reflects cost of living, driven by residential building restrictions. Such restrictions have come under intense scrutiny from economists in recent years. By making housing supply less responsive to price, land-use regulation increases house prices in locations that are highly desirable for either amenities or production. High house prices are the most important component of general cost of living. High cost of living deters in-migration of lower-income households, especially those that do not highly value amenities. Holding median household income constant, higher-cost locations will tend over time to attract and keep households that highly value amenities. It is hypothesized that these households will be more Democratic. Accordingly, raising residential building requirements in high-amenity areas should cause those areas to move gradually to the left. The hypotheses are tested on a variety of individual- and state-level data.
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Shona Tritt et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conservatives are often thought to have a negativity bias — responding more intensely to negative than positive information. Yet, recent research has found that greater endorsement of conservative beliefs follows from both positive and negative emotion inductions. This suggests that the role of affect in political thought may not be restricted to negative valence, and more attention should be given to how conservatives and liberals respond to a wider range of stimulation. In this vein, we examined neural responses to a full range of affective stimuli, allowing us to examine how self-reported ideology moderated these responses. Specifically, we explored the relationship between political orientation and 2 event-related potentials (1 late and 1 early) previously shown to covary with the subjective motivational salience of stimuli — in response to photographs with standardized ratings of arousal and valence. At late time points, conservatives exhibited sustained heightened reactivity, compared with liberals, specifically in response to relatively unarousing and neutral stimuli. At early time points, conservatives exhibited somewhat enhanced neural activity in response to all stimulus types compared with liberals. These results may suggest that conservatives experience a wide variety of stimuli in their environment with increased motivational salience, including positive, neutral, and low-arousal stimuli. No effects of valence were found in this investigation. Such findings have implications for the development and refinement of psychological conceptions of political orientation.
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Kelly Garrett, Brian Weeks & Rachel Neo
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article has 2 goals: to provide additional evidence that exposure to ideological online news media contributes to political misperceptions, and to test 3 forms this media-effect might take. Analyses are based on representative survey data collected during the 2012 U.S. presidential election (N = 1,004). Panel data offer persuasive evidence that biased news site use promotes inaccurate beliefs, while cross-sectional data provide insight into the nature of these effects. There is no evidence that exposure to ideological media reduces awareness of politically unfavorable evidence, though in some circumstances biased media do promote misunderstandings of it. The strongest and most consistent influence of ideological media exposure is to encourage inaccurate beliefs regardless of what consumers know of the evidence.
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Are neoliberals more susceptible to bullshit?
Joanna Sterling, John Jost & Gordon Pennycook
Judgment and Decision Making, July 2016, Pages 352–360
Abstract:
We conducted additional analyses of Pennycook et al.’s (2015, Study 2) data to investigate the possibility that there would be ideological differences in “bullshit receptivity” that would be explained by individual differences in cognitive style and ability. As hypothesized, we observed that endorsement of neoliberal, free market ideology was significantly but modestly associated with bullshit receptivity. In addition, we observed a quadratic association, which indicated that ideological moderates were more susceptible to bullshit than ideological extremists. These relationships were explained, in part, by heuristic processing tendencies, faith in intuition, and lower verbal ability. Results are inconsistent with approaches suggesting that (a) there are no meaningful ideological differences in cognitive style or reasoning ability, (b) simplistic, certainty-oriented cognitive styles are generally associated with leftist (vs. rightist) economic preferences, or (c) simplistic, certainty-oriented cognitive styles are generally associated with extremist (vs. moderate) preferences. Theoretical and practical implications are briefly addressed.
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Network Structure and Patterns of Information Diversity on Twitter
Jesse Shore, Jiye Baek & Chrysanthos Dellarocas
Boston University Working Paper, July 2016
Abstract:
Social media have great potential to support diverse information sharing, but there is widespread concern that platforms like Twitter do not result in communication between those who hold contradictory viewpoints. Because users can choose whom to follow, prior research suggests that social media users exist in “echo chambers” or become polarized. We seek evidence of this in a complete cross section of hyperlinks posted on Twitter, using previously validated measures of the political slant of news sources to study information diversity. Contrary to prediction, we find that the average account posts links to more politically moderate news sources than the ones they receive in their own feed. However, members of a tiny network core do exhibit cross-sectional evidence of polarization and are responsible for the majority of tweets received overall due to their popularity and activity, which could explain the widespread perception of polarization on social media.
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Civic education: Do liberals do it better?
Jason Gainous & Allison Martens
Journal of Political Ideologies, Fall 2016, Pages 261-279
Abstract:
Recent research has found that civic education improves the democratic capacity of students and that teachers who employ an ‘open classroom’ approach seem to perform better at accomplishing this goal. We build on behavioural literature suggesting that variation in personality traits across ideology may account for why liberal middle school teachers would be more likely to foster an open classroom climate and as a result do a better job than their conservative counterparts at stimulating in their students’ political knowledge, an important component of democratic capacity. We estimate a series of quasi-experimental multilevel models using data from a survey of American students and teachers. The results indicate that liberal teachers tend to use an open classroom approach more frequently and that the students with the highest levels of political knowledge are in classes taught by liberal teachers. This effect holds up when controlling for individual-level predictors of student knowledge.
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A few bad apples: Communication in the presence of strategic ideologues
Daniel Stone
Southern Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
I propose a very simple model of strategic communication. The motivation is to help explain widespread persistent disagreement about objective facts. In the model, there is a message sender and a receiver, and two possible states of the world, left or right. The sender is one of three types: honest, or a leftist or rightist “ideologue.” The honest type observes a private signal in {0,1,...,N}, with higher values implying stronger support for the right state, and reports the observed value truthfully. Ideologues strategically choose any message from this set to maximize the receiver's belief in their preferred state, ignoring any private information they may have. I show that a small presence of ideologues can have a large effect on communication: while we might expect ideologues to just send extreme messages, in most equilibria ideologues use “strategic understatement,” and in many cases actually mix over all non-neutral (non-N∕2) messages to mimic honest types and gain credibility. This distorts the interpretation of these messages such that all messages on a side of the spectrum (above or below N∕2) have the same effect on receiver beliefs. This coarsened communication is less informative than even the weakest non-neutral messages in the absence of ideologues. I show by example how ideologues can cause large delays in the time required for receiver beliefs to converge to truth.
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Group identification as a means of attitude restoration
Joshua Clarkson et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2017, Pages 139–145
Abstract:
This paper investigates the possibility that individuals selectively identify with groups as a means of restoring certainty in their attitudes. Specifically, we contend that (i) groups offer social validation in the form of attitudinal norms, (ii) individuals heighten their identification with groups that offer norms that are consistent with attitudes that have been undermined, and (iii) access to these norms reduces attitude uncertainty. Two experiments support this hypothesis by demonstrating greater identification following a loss of attitude certainty, though only with groups offering relevant attitudinal norms. Moreover, this identification is subsequently shown to promote attitude restoration in the form of increased certainty. Consequently, groups serve an important role in attitude restoration by protecting attitudes against uncertainty when a relevant group is available to bolster the attitude.
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Alexa Tullett et al.
Journal of Research in Personality, August 2016, Pages 123–132
Abstract:
Four studies examined the relationship between political orientation and data selection. In each study participants were given the opportunity to select data from a large data set addressing a specific issue: the justness of the world (Pilot Study), the efficacy of social safety nets (Studies 1–3), and the benefits of social media (Study 3). Participants were given no knowledge of what the data would tell them in advance. More conservative participants selected less data, and in Study 3 this relationship was partly accounted for by an increased tendency to question the value of science as a way of learning about the world. These findings may reveal one factor contributing to political polarization: an asymmetrical interest in scientific data.
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Mixed Partisan Households and Electoral Participation in the United States
Eitan Hersh & Yair Ghitza
Yale Working Paper, June 2016
Abstract:
Research suggests that partisans are increasingly avoiding members of the other party — in their choice of neighborhood, social network, even their spouse. But little is known about partisan intermingling in the United States, since surveys rarely shed light on groups. Leveraging a national database of voter registration records, we analyze mixed-partisan households in the U.S. Three in ten married couples have mismatched party affiliations. We first evaluate the rate of sorting, as well as the relationship between inter-party marriage and gender, age, and geography. Then, we test whether mixed-partisan couples participate less actively in politics. We find that voter turnout is strongly correlated with the party of one’s spouse. A partisan who is married to a co-partisan is far more likely to vote. The effect is especially pronounced in closed primaries, suggesting an effect of cohabitation, not just low-participation voters sorting into mixed-party marriages.
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History Made: The Rise of Republican Tim Scott
Scott Huffmon, Gibbs Knotts & Seth McKee
PS: Political Science & Politics, July 2016, Pages 405-413
Abstract:
In a time of unprecedented racial polarization in partisan voting, and in a staunchly Republican Deep South state, one black Republican managed to reach the pinnacle of public office. This article examines Tim Scott’s rise by analyzing precinct-level data to better understand his 2010 election to the US House and data from the Winthrop Poll to explore his more recent US Senate victory. To better understand support for Scott, we also report results from an embedded-survey experiment to assess respondents’ favorability toward Scott when he is characterized by two different frames: (1) “Tea Party favorite,” and (2) “first African American Senator from South Carolina since Reconstruction.” We found that conservatives, evangelicals, and less-educated individuals respond more positively to Scott when he is described as a “Tea Party favorite.” More than an intriguing case study, Scott’s rise tells a broader story of the complicated relationships among race, ideology, and partisanship in the contemporary American South.
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Re-construing politics: The dual impacts of abstraction on political ideology
Eugene Chan
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The influence of construal level on political ideology is unclear. Some research says that abstraction polarizes political attitudes by making liberals more liberal and conservatives more conservative. Other research instead argues that an abstract construal causes people to exhibit similar political attitudes as each other. The current research presents two experiments in which abstraction polarizes political attitudes on issues of social inequality. However, abstraction also increases traditionalism, and so it increases a preference for maintaining the societal status quo, such as by increasing one's disagreement with or opposition to homosexuality. The dual impacts of abstraction parallel the two distinct dimensions of political ideology (i.e., acceptance of social inequality and preference for the status quo), both of which prior research on construal level has not yet considered. Overall, the current findings indicate that the effects of construal level and the dimensions underlying political ideology need to be teased apart to fully understand the exact relationship between the two.