Raging Parties
The Partisanship of Bipartisanship: How Representatives Use Bipartisan Assertions to Cultivate Support
Sean Westwood
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do representatives reconcile public expectations of bipartisan lawmaking with the lack of compromise in recent congresses? Representatives -- constrained by the actual content of legislation -- position partisan legislation to increase public support. Because constituents reward this behavior, representatives reap the rewards associated with bipartisanship through rhetoric alone, providing little incentive to engage in actual substantive compromise. With 434,266 floor speeches I show that bipartisanship is evoked uniformly across the ideological spectrum and that there is no relationship between a legislator's propensity for bipartisan rhetoric and her propensity for bipartisan action. Instead marginal legislators who need to secure support from opposition voters are most likely to make bipartisan appeals. With experiments I show that bipartisan appeals increase support and decrease perceived ideological extremity even for overtly partisan legislation with trivial opposition support. Bipartisan assertions influence public opinion far more than actual evidence of opposition support.
Exposure and Aversion to Human Transmissible Diseases Predict Conservative Ideological and Partisan Preferences
Brian O'Shea et al.
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The objective prevalence of and subjective vulnerability to infectious diseases are associated with greater ingroup preference, conformity, and traditionalism. However, evidence directly testing the link between infectious diseases and political ideology and partisanship is lacking. Across four studies, including a large sample representative of the U.S. population (N > 12,000), we demonstrate that higher environmental levels of human transmissible diseases and avoidance of germs from human carriers predict conservative ideological and partisan preferences. During the COVID‐19 pandemic (N = 848), we replicated this germ aversion finding and determined that these conservative preferences were primarily driven by avoidance of germs from outgroups (foreigners) rather than ingroups (locals). Moreover, socially conservative individuals expressed lower concerns of being susceptible to contracting infectious diseases during the pandemic and worried less about COVID‐19. These effects were robust to individual‐level and state‐level controls. We discuss these findings in light of theory on parasite stress and the behavioral immune system and with regard to the political implications of the COVID‐19 pandemic.
Partisan Fertility and Presidential Elections
Gordon Dahl, Runjing Lu & William Mullins
University of California Working Paper, April 2021
Abstract:
This paper documents a new consequence of elections and a new determinant of fertility. A marked partisan change in economic optimism followed the unexpected election of Trump in 2016. We find large downstream fertility effects, with Republican-leaning counties experiencing a sharp increase in fertility relative to Democratic counties: a 0.6 to 1.4% increase in annual births depending on the intensity of partisanship. Hispanics, a group targeted by the Trump campaign, see a relative fertility decline of 1.6 percentage points compared to non-Hispanics. Bolstering the notion that political sentiment is driving these fertility changes, we find that following a Trump pre-election campaign visit, relative Hispanic fertility declines.
How Does Local TV News Change Viewers’ Attitudes? The Case of Sinclair Broadcasting
Matthew Levendusky
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does local television news shape viewers’ national political attitudes? The answer is unclear, because local news typically focuses on local, not national, stories, and is politically neutral. But the rise of Sinclair Broadcasting, now the nation’s second-largest owner of local TV stations, upends that assumption. News on Sinclair-owned stations focuses more on national topics, and presents them with a right-wing slant. Given this, we might expect it to shift its viewers’ attitudes in a pro-Republican direction. Using data on Sinclair’s acquisition of local TV stations between 2008 and 2018, I show that living in an area with a Sinclair-owned TV station lowers viewers’ approval of President Obama during his tenure in office, and makes viewers less likely to vote for the Democratic nominee for president. This has important implications for our understanding of the effects of local TV news, as well as for media trust, as I discuss in the conclusion.
National Conflict in a Federal System
Sanford Gordon & Dimitri Landa
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
To explore the effect of federal institutions on national political conflict, we develop a model of two-level governance with interstate preference heterogeneity and cross-state externalities. Our analysis calls into question the conventional interpretation of federalism as a conflict-minimizing institution. We show that polarization over national policy may be higher in federal than unitary systems, even holding policy demand constant. We also show that the incentives for low and high demanders to engage in costly conflict are contingent on the status quo national policy, and we identify conditions under which those incentives and the deadweight cost of political conflict are higher under federalism than unitary governance. The model helps account for a number of empirical regularities in US politics and policy making.
Intolerance of uncertainty modulates brain-to-brain synchrony during politically polarized perception
Jeroen van Baar, David Halpern & Oriel Feldman Hall
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 18 May 2021
Abstract:
Political partisans see the world through an ideologically biased lens. What drives political polarization? Although it has been posited that polarization arises because of an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world, evidence for this hypothesis remains elusive. We examined the relationship between uncertainty tolerance and political polarization using a combination of brain-to-brain synchrony and intersubject representational similarity analysis, which measured committed liberals’ and conservatives’ (n = 44) subjective interpretation of naturalistic political video material. Shared ideology between participants increased neural synchrony throughout the brain during a polarizing political debate filled with provocative language but not during a neutrally worded news clip on polarized topics or a nonpolitical documentary. During the political debate, neural synchrony in mentalizing and valuation networks was modulated by one’s aversion to uncertainty: Uncertainty-intolerant individuals experienced greater brain-to-brain synchrony with politically like-minded peers and lower synchrony with political opponents — an effect observed for liberals and conservatives alike. Moreover, the greater the neural synchrony between committed partisans, the more likely that two individuals formed similar, polarized attitudes about the debate. These results suggest that uncertainty attitudes gate the shared neural processing of political narratives, thereby fueling polarized attitude formation about hot-button issues.
Temporal Selective Exposure: How Partisans Choose When to Follow Politics
Jin Woo Kim & Eunji Kim
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is widely theorized that echo chambers contribute to polarization, yet behavioral evidence of partisan selective exposure in the real world is surprisingly tenuous. Why do partisans have polarized perceptions even though they have relatively balanced media diets? We argue that partisans vary in terms of when they pay attention to the news, not just in terms of the ideological media sources they follow. By leveraging national election surveys across seven decades, as well as the sudden change in the economic news environment that was induced by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, we show that partisans vary their political attentiveness and media consumption in response to whether news events are congenial to their party. These findings suggest that partisans can subject themselves to biased information flows even if their media diets are balanced. The temporal dynamics of selective exposure carry important implications for mass polarization.
The consequences of online partisan media
Andrew Guess et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 6 April 2021
Abstract:
What role do ideologically extreme media play in the polarization of society? Here we report results from a randomized longitudinal field experiment embedded in a nationally representative online panel survey (N = 1,037) in which participants were incentivized to change their browser default settings and social media following patterns, boosting the likelihood of encountering news with either a left-leaning (HuffPost) or right-leaning (Fox News) slant during the 2018 US midterm election campaign. Data on ≈ 19 million web visits by respondents indicate that resulting changes in news consumption persisted for at least 8 wk. Greater exposure to partisan news can cause immediate but short-lived increases in website visits and knowledge of recent events. After adjusting for multiple comparisons, however, we find little evidence of a direct impact on opinions or affect. Still, results from later survey waves suggest that both treatments produce a lasting and meaningful decrease in trust in the mainstream media up to 1 y later. Consistent with the minimal-effects tradition, direct consequences of online partisan media are limited, although our findings raise questions about the possibility of subtle, cumulative dynamics. The combination of experimentation and computational social science techniques illustrates a powerful approach for studying the long-term consequences of exposure to partisan news.
How Moral Value Commitments Shape Responses to Political Civility and Incivility
Annemarie Walter & Keena Lipsitz
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Citizen exposure to political incivility is increasing. Studies have found heterogeneous responses to incivility, but we know little about what drives this variation. This study investigates whether emotional responses to both civility and incivility are driven by moral value commitments. Drawing on Moral Foundations Theory, we argue that incivility should pose more of a threat to people who embrace an individualizing system of moral regulation than a binding system. To test this, we conduct a 3 × 3 between-subjects survey-embedded vignette experiment with a representative sample of 1,789 U.S. respondents. The vignettes describe interactions between two candidates in a debate. The findings show that respondents clearly distinguish between civil, neutral, and uncivil debate and that these conditions yield distinct emotional responses. Moreover, we show “individualizers” have a stronger emotional response to incivility than “binders.” Responses to civility, however, appear to be unaffected by moral value commitments.
The “Trump effect” on hate crime reporting: Media coverage before and after the 2016 presidential election
Kiesha Warren-Gordon & Gayle Rhineberger
Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, March 2021, Pages 25-45
Abstract:
Hate crimes have a broad impact not just on the victim, but also on people in the community. Since the 2016 presidential election there has been an uptick in hate crimes against people of color, immigrants, non-Christians, LGBTQ+, and other minority populations, possibly due to the “the Trump effect.” By analyzing the newspaper coverage of hate crimes over a seven year period, we assess if the Trump effect impacted newspaper coverage of hate crimes after Trump’s rallies and speeches. Findings suggest that there was an increase in assault and harassment hate crimes after Trump rallies. Implications of these findings are also discussed.
Partisan Affective Polarization: Sorting, Entrenchment, and Fortification
Kristinn Már
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Partisan affective polarization, measured with feeling thermometer ratings, has increased gradually in the United States over a long period. This article describes how affective polarization and its composite parts, rival-party and own-party feelings, have changed over time. It identifies three analytically distinct processes: sorting, which entails a change in group composition; entrenchment, or an increasing gap between aligned and misaligned copartisans; and fortification, a general change in party feelings across partisan subgroups. While scholars often emphasize the importance of sorting, a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis of ANES data shows that entrenchment and fortification explain a larger share of these thermometer trends. Furthermore, asymmetries between the two major parties exist: the lion’s share of colder rival-party feelings among Republicans is centered on race, while Democrats’ rival-party feelings grew similarly cold regardless of their race, religion, or ideological extremity. In addition, the gap in party feelings between well and poorly aligned Democrats appears to have decreased over time. Finally, data from two ANES panels suggest that the same partisans’ feelings are growing colder, not that partisans with warm rival-party feelings are switching parties. These findings have important implications for the study of affective polarization and suggest avenues for future research.
The Gender Backlash in the Vote for Brexit
Jane Green & Rosalind Shorrocks
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite a relationship between gender and support for populist causes in cross-national research, including in the 2016 US Presidential election, the role of gender has been missing in analysis of support for Brexit, most likely because women and men showed no average aggregate-level differences in voting Leave or Remain. This misses an important explanation for Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. We demonstrate how gender-based resentment motivated Leave votes in the EU referendum through perceptions of discrimination against men, among men. Using novel survey measures, we demonstrate (i) the distinct nature of perceptions of discrimination towards men in comparison with discrimination towards women; (ii) the sociological sources of perceptions that men are discriminated against; and (iii) the role of these perceptions in Brexit support. Our findings reveal that the Brexit referendum provided an opportunity to express broader social grievances than have, to date, been identified as relevant. The paper therefore offers a novel contribution to understanding the cultural backlash behind Britain’s vote to leave the EU, and by so doing, insight into the potential for gender-based backlash effects in elections where gender isn’t significantly primed, unlike the 2016 US presidential election where gender was a major political focus.
How Conservatives Lost Confidence in Science: The Role of Ideological Alignment in Political Polarization
Austin Kozlowski
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Confidence in the scientific community became politically polarized in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century, with conservatives displaying lower confidence in scientists than liberals. Using data from the General Social Survey from 1984 to 2016, I show that moral and economic conservatives played distinct but complementary roles in producing this divide. I find that moral conservatives exhibited low confidence in scientists before any substantial division existed between self-identified political conservatives and liberals on this issue. However, as moral conservatism increasingly consolidated under the label of political conservatism, a negative association between political conservatism and confidence in the scientific community emerged. Economic conservatives, by contrast, previously held disproportionately high confidence in scientists, but this positive relationship wanes in the beginning of the twenty-first century. These findings suggest that interpreting political polarization requires attention to the multiple dimensions along which political attitudes are organized and ideological coalitions are formed.
The #MeToo movement and attitudes toward President Trump in the wake of a sexual misconduct allegation
Samara Klar & Alexandra McCoy
Politics, Groups, and Identities, forthcoming
Abstract:
Did sexual misconduct allegations against President Trump affect evaluations of him, particularly among supporters of the #MeToo Movement? In this research note, we present two-wave panel data from a nation-wide sample of 800 Americans conducted immediately before and after a widely publicized accusation of sexual misconduct against Trump. By comparing individuals who had heard about the new accusation against those who had not, we identify if and for whom a new accusation affects views of President Trump. Among Democrats, we find that support for #MeToo is associated with a greater belief in Trump’s accusers and a reduction in approval of the president following a new allegation. Among Republicans, we find no evidence that support for the #MeToo movement affects evaluations toward the President when a new accusation arises. Overall, this study demonstrates both the stubborn persistence of presidential evaluations, as well as evidence that an accusation of sexual assault does erode his popularity – but only among his critics.