Red lines and blue lines
Adam Fetterman, Ryan Boyd & Michael Robinson
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, September 2015, Pages 1195-1206
Abstract:
Posited motivational differences between liberals and conservatives have historically been controversial. This motivational interface has recently been bridged, but the vast majority of studies have used self-reports of values or motivation. Instead, the present four studies investigated whether two classic social motive themes - power and affiliation - vary by political ideology in objective linguistic analysis terms. Study 1 found that posts to liberal chat rooms scored higher in standardized affiliation than power, whereas the reverse was true of posts to conservative chat rooms. Study 2 replicated this pattern in the context of materials posted to liberal versus conservative political news websites. Studies 3 and 4, finally, replicated a similar interactive (ideology by motive type) pattern in State of the State and State of the Union addresses. Differences in political ideology, these results suggest, are marked by, and likely reflective of, mind-sets favoring affiliation (liberal) or power (conservative).
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Chad Kinsella, Colleen McTague & Kevin Raleigh
Applied Geography, August 2015, Pages 404-419
Abstract:
"Geographic polarization", the spatial concentration of "like" voting behavior, is a phenomenon closely related to "partisan polarization", the intensification of diametrically ideological positions, is understudied, and is critical to the understanding of current American electoral behavior. To date, few studies have examined geographic polarization, and those that do have done so at the scales of regions, states, and counties. However, local influences operating within areas smaller than counties influence voting behavior and can produce geographic polarization. To address these scalar and methodological shortcomings, this research focuses on the smallest political units, precincts, using a case study of the Greater Cincinnati Metropolitan Area. Presidential election data from 1976 through 2008 were collected by precincts, analyzed using spatial statistics, and mapped to examine evolving geographic polarization over this 32-year period. The results measured at the precinct-scale, suggest an increased concentration of partisan behavior and emphasize a local residential spatial pattern of geographic polarization.
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Information, Inequality, and Mass Polarization: Ideology in Advanced Democracies
Torben Iversen & David Soskice
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Growing polarization in the American Congress is closely related to rising income inequality. Yet there has been no corresponding polarization of the U.S. electorate, and across advanced democracies, mass polarization is negatively related to income inequality. To explain this puzzle, we propose a comparative political economy model of mass polarization in which the same institutional factors that generate income inequality also undermine political information. We explain why more voters then place themselves in the ideological center, hence generating a negative correlation between mass polarization and inequality. We confirm these conjectures on individual-level data for 20 democracies, and we then show that democracies cluster into two types: one with high inequality, low mass polarization, and polarized and right-shifted elites (e.g., the United States); and the other with low inequality and high mass polarization with left-shifted elites (e.g., Sweden). This division reflects long-standing differences in educational systems, the role of unions, and social networks.
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Does Media Coverage of Partisan Polarization Affect Political Attitudes?
Matthew Levendusky & Neil Malhotra
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in the partisan polarization of the American electorate. Scholarly investigation of this topic has coincided with the media's portrayal of a polity deeply divided along partisan lines. Yet little research so far has considered the consequences of the media's coverage of political polarization. We show that media coverage of polarization increases citizens' beliefs that the electorate is polarized. Furthermore, the media's depiction of a polarized electorate causes voters to moderate their own issue positions but increases their dislike of the opposing party. These empirical patterns are consistent with our theoretical argument that polarized exemplars in journalistic coverage serve as anti-cues to media consumers. Our findings have important implications for understanding current and future trends in political polarization.
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Party Competition and Conflict in State Legislatures
Kelsey Hinchliffe & Frances Lee
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article examines the relationship between party competition for control of governing institutions and legislative party polarization. Although the competition/cohesion thesis dates to the 1940s, it has never before been subject to a test with data from the 50 states. Drawing upon newly available data, we take stock of the evidence. Five measures of party competition are used: (1) the number of recent shifts of party control, (2) an index of party competition for state offices, (3) the closeness of presidential elections in the state, (4) the effective number of political parties in the state, and (5) the ratio of Republicans to Democrats in the electorate. Nearly all of these measures correlate with higher levels of party polarization in both the lower and upper chambers, and none are associated with a lower level of polarization.
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Liberals Condemn Sacrilege Too: The Harmless Desecration of Cerro Torre
Jeremy Frimer, Caitlin Tell & Jonathan Haidt
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are social conservatives the only ones who use concerns about sacred objects or practices when making moral judgments, such as when they defend the "sanctity of marriage"? Or do liberals condemn sacrilege too? A third possibility is that all talk about sanctity and sacrilege is merely post hoc justification of moral judgments based solely on the perception of harm to sentient or anthropomorphized beings. We present evidence that liberals, like conservatives, morally condemn harmless violations of their own sacred objects. In most cases of liberal sacrilege (e.g., environmental destruction), sentient beings suffer. To deconflate desecration from harm, we examined a context in which someone altered an object that was lifeless yet sacred to a group of liberals - the mountain Cerro Torre. Three studies found that liberals condemned the alteration of the mountain as a harmless desecration. Defending sacred values may bind group members into a cohesive moral community.
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The Effects of Issue Salience, Elite Influence, and Policy Content on Public Opinion
David Ciuk & Berwood Yost
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
When do citizens rely on party cues, and when do they incorporate policy-relevant information into their political attitudes? Recent research suggests that members of the public, when they possess some policy-relevant information, use that information as much as they use party cues when forming political attitudes. We aim to advance this research by specifying conditions that motivate people to use content over cues and vice versa. Specifically, we believe that increased issue salience motivates people to go beyond heuristics and engage in the systematic processing of policy-relevant information. Using data from a survey experiment that isolates the effects of policy-relevant information, party cues, and issue salience, we find that people are more likely to incorporate policy-relevant information when thinking about hydraulic fracturing (fracking), a relatively high-salience issue. When thinking about storm-water management, a relatively low-salience issue, people are more likely to rely on party cues.
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Scholarly elites orient left, irrespective of academic affiliation
Idan Solon
Intelligence, July-August 2015, Pages 119-130
Abstract:
I substantiate a parsimonious delineation between liberals and conservatives: liberals demonstrate greater consideration toward the less represented, whether the less represented constitute minority demographic segments or alternatives to orthodoxy. Highly intelligent individuals are more likely to engage in both kinds of consideration toward the less represented because of their greater tendencies to perceive an external control ideology, to empathize and to trust. I argue that, contrary to Carl (2015), the liberal prevalence in academia is not attributable to bias by discrimination or self-selection. I also review evidence that scholarly elites orient predominately toward the left, irrespective of academic affiliation, and I introduce additional evidence supporting this point. Carl (2015) argued that a U-shaped relationship between intelligence and Democratic Party affiliation was unreflective of a general relationship between intelligence and leftism due to the Democratic Party's economic centrism on a global scale. However, a similar, U-shaped relationship is obtained from data from multiple countries. Additionally, the empirical findings presented by Carl (2015) and others demonstrate a U-shaped relationship between intelligence and liberal positions across many issues and establish the turning point of the U-shaped curve relating intelligence and left-wing party (and ideological) affiliation in the United States to occur at roughly the 80th intelligence percentile. While Carl (2015) acknowledged accordance with Solon (2014) on many non-economic and economic results, Carl (2015) presented data for some economic issues in support of an apparent association between intelligence and non-left-wing positions, for which I present four explanations that are consistent with a general correlation between intelligence and prosociality.
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Kristen Deppe et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, July 2015, Pages 314-331
Abstract:
Prior research finds that liberals and conservatives process information differently. Predispositions toward intuitive versus reflective thinking may help explain this individual level variation. There have been few direct tests of this hypothesis and the results from the handful of studies that do exist are contradictory. Here we report the results of a series of studies using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) to investigate inclinations to be reflective and political orientation. We find a relationship between thinking style and political orientation and that these effects are particularly concentrated on social attitudes. We also find it harder to manipulate intuitive and reflective thinking than a number of prominent studies suggest. Priming manipulations used to induce reflection and intuition in published articles repeatedly fail in our studies. We conclude that conservatives - more specifically, social conservatives - tend to be dispositionally less reflective, social liberals tend to be dispositionally more reflective, and that the relationship between reflection and intuition and political attitudes may be more resistant to easy manipulation than existing research would suggest.
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Pablo Hernandez & Dylan Minor
Harvard Working Paper, July 2015
Abstract:
We explore how political identity affects trust. Using an incentivized experimental survey conducted on a representative sample of the U.S. population, we vary information about partners' partisan identity to elicit trust behavior, beliefs about trustworthiness, and actual reciprocation. By eliciting beliefs, we are able to assess whether differences in trust rates are due to stereotyping or a "taste for discrimination." By measuring actual trustworthiness, we are able to determine whether beliefs are statistically correct. We find that trust is pervasive and depends on the partisan identity of the trustee. Differential trust rates are explained by incorrect stereotypes about the other's lack of trustworthiness rather than by a "taste for discrimination." Given the importance of beliefs, we run additional treatments in which we disclose previous reciprocation rates before participants decide whether to trust. We find that beliefs are slightly more optimistic compared with the previous treatments, suggesting that incorrect stereotypes are hard to change.
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Ideology, Learning, and Policy Diffusion: Experimental Evidence
Daniel Butler et al.
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We introduce experimental research design to the study of policy diffusion in order to better understand how political ideology affects policymakers' willingness to learn from one another's experiences. Our two experiments - embedded in national surveys of U.S. municipal officials - expose local policymakers to vignettes describing the zoning and home foreclosure policies of other cities, offering opportunities to learn more. We find that: (1) policymakers who are ideologically predisposed against the described policy are relatively unwilling to learn from others, but (2) such ideological biases can be overcome with an emphasis on the policy's success or on its adoption by co-partisans in other communities. We also find a similar partisan-based bias among traditional ideological supporters, who are less willing to learn from those in the opposing party. The experimental approach offered here provides numerous new opportunities for scholars of policy diffusion.
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The Role of Persuasion in Deliberative Opinion Change
Sean Westwood
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does discussion lead to opinion change during deliberation? I formulate and test hypotheses based on theories of persuasion, and examine them against other possible sources of deliberative opinion change. Through detailed analysis of a nationally representative deliberative event I create a full discussion network for each small group that deliberated by recording who said what, the argument quality for what was said, and to whom it was directed. I find that well-justified arguments made in the context of direct engagement between peers are a consistent predictor of opinion change. Individual-level persuasion, not knowledge-driven refinement or extremity, drives most opinion change. These results show that further deliberative research needs to account for persuasion when explaining deliberative opinion change.