The stand
Linda Skitka, Brittany Hanson & Daniel Wisneski
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
People are more likely to become politically engaged (e.g., vote, engage in activism) when issues are associated with strong moral convictions. The goal of this research was to understand the underlying motivations that lead to this well-replicated effect. Specifically, to what extent is moralized political engagement motivated by proscriptive concerns (e.g., perceived harms, anticipated regret), prescriptive concerns (e.g., perceived benefits, anticipated pride), or some combination of these processes? And are the motivational pathways between moral conviction and political engagement the same or different for liberals and conservatives? Two studies (combined N = 2,069) found that regardless of political orientation, the association between moral conviction and political engagement was mediated by the perceived benefits of preferred but not the perceived harms of non-preferred policy outcomes, and by both anticipated pride and regret, findings that replicated in two contexts: legalizing same-sex marriage and allowing concealed weapons on college campuses.
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Informed Preferences? The Impact of Unions on Workers' Policy Views
Sung Eun Kim & Yotam Margalit
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite declining memberships, labor unions still represent large shares of electorates worldwide. Yet their political clout remains contested. To what extent, and in what way, do unions shape workers' political preferences? We address these questions by combining unique survey data of American workers and a set of inferential strategies that exploit two sources of variation: the legal choice that workers face in joining or opting out of unions and the over-time reversal of a union's policy position. Focusing on the issue of trade, we offer evidence that unions influence their members' policy preferences in a significant and theoretically predictable manner. In contrast, we find that self-selection into membership accounts at most for a quarter of the observed "union effect." The study illuminates the impact of unions in cohering workers' voice and provides insight on the role of information provision in shaping how citizens form policy preferences.
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Devin Caughey, James Dunham & Chris Warshaw
MIT Working Paper, August 2016
Abstract:
Since the mid-20th century, elite political behavior has increasingly nationalized. In Congress, for example, within-party geographic cleavages have declined, roll-call voting has become increasingly one-dimensional, and Democrats and Republicans have diverged along this main dimension of national partisan conflict. The existing literature finds that citizens have displayed only a delayed and attenuated echo of elite trends. We show, however, that a very different picture emerges if we focus not on individual citizens but on the aggregate characteristics of geographic constituencies. Using estimates of the economic, racial, and social policy liberalism of the average Democrat, Independent, and Republican in each state-year 1946-2014, we demonstrate a surprisingly close correspondence between mass and elite trends. Specifically, we find that: (1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has increased dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress; (2) economic, racial, and social liberalism have become highly correlated across state-party publics, just as they have across members of Congress; (3) ideological variation across state-party publics is now almost completely explained by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate; and (4) senators' liberalism is strongly predicted by the liberalism of their state-party subconstituency, even controlling for their party affiliation and their state public's overall liberalism. Taken together, this correspondence between elite and mass patterns suggests that members of Congress are actually quite in synch with their constituencies, if not with individual citizens.
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The Political Domain Appears Simpler to the Politically Extreme Than to Political Moderates
Joris Lammers et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does political preference affect categorization in the political domain? Eight studies demonstrate that people on both ends of the political spectrum - strong Republicans and strong Democrats - form simpler and more clustered categories of political stimuli than do moderates and neutrals. This pattern was obtained regardless of whether stimuli were politicians (Study 1), social groups (Study 2), or newspapers (Study 3). Furthermore, both strong Republicans and strong Democrats were more likely to make inferences about the world based on their clustered categorization. This was found for estimating the likelihood that geographical location determines voting (Study 4), that political preference determines personal taste (Study 5), and that social relationships determine political preference (Study 6). The effect is amplified if political ideology is salient (Study 7) and remains after controlling for differences in political sophistication (Study 8). The political domain appears simpler to the politically extreme than to political moderates.
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Individual Differences in Group Loyalty Predict Partisan Strength
Scott Clifford
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
The strength of an individual's identification with their political party is a powerful predictor of their engagement with politics, voting behavior, and polarization. Partisanship is often characterized as primarily a social identity, rather than an expression of instrumental goals. Yet, it is unclear why some people develop strong partisan attachments while others do not. I argue that the moral foundation of Loyalty, which represents an individual difference in the tendency to hold strong group attachments, facilitates stronger partisan identification. Across two samples, including a national panel and a convenience sample, as well as multiple measures of the moral foundations, I demonstrate that the Loyalty foundation is a robust predictor of partisan strength. Moreover, I show that these effects cannot be explained by patriotism, ideological extremity, or directional effects on partisanship. Overall, the results provide further evidence for partisanship as a social identity, as well as insight into the sources of partisan strength.
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A House Divided? Roll Calls, Polarization, and Policy Differences in the U.S. House, 1877-2011
David Bateman, Joshua Clinton & John Lapinski
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The study of political conflict in legislatures is fundamental to understanding the nature of governance, but also difficult because of changes in membership and the issues addressed over time. Focusing on the enduring issue of civil rights in the United States since Reconstruction, we show that using current methods and measures to characterize elite ideological disagreements makes it hard to interpret or reconcile the conflicts with historical understandings because of their failure to adequately account for the policies being voted upon and the consequences of the iterative lawmaking process. Incorporating information about the policies being voted upon provides a starkly different portrait of elite conflict - not only are contemporary parties relatively less divided than is commonly thought, but the conflict occurs in a smaller, and more liberal, portion of the policy space. These findings have important implications for a broad range of work that uses elite actions to compare political conflict/polarization across time.
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American Party Women: A Look at the Gender Gap within Parties
Tiffany Barnes & Erin Cassese
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on the gender gap in American politics has focused on average differences between male and female voters. This has led to an underdeveloped understanding of sources of heterogeneity among women and, in particular, a poor understanding of the political preferences of Republican women. We argue that although theories of ideological sorting suggest gender gaps should exist primarily between political parties, gender socialization theories contend that critical differences lie at the intersection of gender and party such that gender differences likely persist within political parties. Using survey data from the 2012 American National Election Study, we evaluate how party and gender intersect to shape policy attitudes. We find that gender differences in policy attitudes are more pronounced in the Republican Party than in the Democratic Party, with Republican women reporting significantly more moderate views than their male counterparts. Mediation analysis reveals that the gender gaps within the Republican Party are largely attributable to gender differences in beliefs about the appropriate scope of government and attitudes toward gender-based inequality. These results afford new insight into the joint influence of gender and partisanship on policy preferences and raise important questions about the quality of representation Republican women receive from their own party.
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The Curvilinear Relationship Between Attitude Certainty and Attitudinal Advocacy
Lauren Cheatham & Zakary Tormala
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do people advocate more on behalf of their own attitudes and opinions when they feel certain or uncertain? Although considerable past research suggests that people are more likely to advocate when they feel highly certain, there also is evidence for the opposite effect - that people sometimes advocate more when they experience a loss of certainty. The current research seeks to merge these insights. Specifically, we explore the possibility that the relationship between attitude certainty and attitudinal advocacy is curvilinear. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find evidence for a J-shaped curve: Advocacy intentions (and behavior) peak under high certainty, bottom out under moderate certainty, and show an uptick under low (relative to moderate) certainty. We document this relationship and investigate its potential mechanisms in three studies by examining advocacy intentions and the actual advocacy messages participants write when they feel high, moderate, or low certainty.
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Assessing the Breadth of Framing Effects
Daniel Hopkins & Jonathan Mummolo
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, November 2016
Abstract:
Issue frames are a central concept in studying public opinion, and are thought to operate by foregrounding related considerations in citizens' minds. But scholarship has yet to consider the breadth of framing effects by testing whether frames influence attitudes beyond the specific issue they highlight. For example, does a discussion of terrorism affect opinions on proximate issues like crime or even more remote issues like poverty? By measuring the breadth of framing effects, we can assess the extent to which citizens' political considerations are cognitively organized by issues. We undertake a population-based survey experiment with 3,318 respondents which includes frames related to terrorism, crime, health care, and government spending. The results demonstrate that framing effects are narrow, with limited but discernible spillover on proximate, structurally similar issues. Discrete issues not only organize elite politics but also exist in voters' minds, a finding with implications for studying ideology as well as framing.
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Ideological Segregation among Online Collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedians
Shane Greenstein, Yuan Gu & Feng Zhu
NBER Working Paper, October 2016
Abstract:
Do online communities segregate into separate conversations when contributing to contestable knowledge involving controversial, subjective, and unverifiable topics? We analyze the contributors of biased and slanted content in Wikipedia articles about U.S. politics, and focus on two research questions: (1) Do contributors display tendencies to contribute to sites with similar or opposing biases and slants? (2) Do contributors learn from experience with extreme or neutral content, and does that experience change the slant and bias of their contributions over time? The findings show enormous heterogeneity in contributors and their contributions, and, importantly, an overall trend towards less segregated conversations. A higher percentage of contributors have a tendency to edit articles with the opposite slant than articles with similar slant. We also observe the slant of contributions becoming more neutral over time, not more extreme, and, remarkably, the largest such declines are found with contributors who interact with articles that have greater biases. We also find some significant differences between Republicans and Democrats.
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Interpreting and Tolerating Speech: The Effects of Message, Messenger, and Framing
David Doherty & James Stancliffe
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
We report findings from an experiment where participants read a story about a speech that sharply criticized U.S. foreign policy. The story varied how elites framed the speech, the speaker's apparent ethnicity, and the content of the speech. We assess how each of these factors affected not only tolerance judgments but also inferences about the speaker's motives and the likely consequences of the speech - considerations that play a central role in free speech jurisprudence. Troublingly, we find that the effects of elite framing and the speaker's apparent ethnicity are often comparable with the effect of the speech explicitly calling for violence. Our design also allows us to assess the extent to which the effectiveness of elite framing is constrained by "facts on the ground." However, we find little evidence that the framing effects we identify depend on the content of the speech or the speaker's ethnicity.