Going wide
Centrist by Comparison: Extremism and the Expansion of the Political Spectrum
Gabor Simonovits
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
While it is well understood that policy suggestions outside the range of mainstream debate are prevalent in various policy domains of American politics, their effects remain unexplored. In this paper, we suggest that proposing policies far from the political mainstream can re-structure voter perceptions of where alternatives lie in the ideological space. We provide support for this hypothesis using results from six survey experiments. We find that the introduction of extreme alternatives into the public discourse makes mainstream policies on the same side of the spectrum look more centrist in the public eye, thus increasing support for these moderate alternatives.
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Ideologically Extreme Candidates in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1948-2012
Marty Cohen et al.
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 2016, Pages 126-142
Abstract:
Scholars routinely cite the landslide defeats of Barry Goldwater and George McGovern as evidence that American electorates punish extremism in presidential politics. Yet systematic evidence for this view is thin. In this article we use postwar election outcomes to assess the electoral effects of extremism. In testing ten models over the seventeen elections, we find scant evidence of extremism penalties that were either substantively large or close to statistical significance.
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Jonathan Winburn, Michael Henderson & Conor Dowling
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
States have increasingly taken the process of redistricting out of the hands of elected legislators and placed it with the public. The shift is in part driven by a concern that legislators are motivated to partition districts to advantage their own and their political party's electoral prospects, whereas citizens are not. We know little, however, about the preferences of the public when it comes to redistricting. One party-based argument is that individuals should prefer to share a district with as many like-minded partisans as possible to maximize their legislative representation, whereas other arguments suggest that nonpartisan factors, such as sharing a district with their community, may be more important. Using a novel experimental design, we find that for most participants, the draw to share a district with copartisans is stronger than a preference for preserving a community (county) within the district even when participants are specifically instructed to attend to local jurisdictional boundaries.
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Bleeding-heart conservatives and hard-headed liberals: The dual processes of moral judgements
Dylan Lane & Danielle Sulikowski
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conservatives differ from liberals in a variety of domains, including exhibiting greater fear and disgust sensitivity. Additionally, experimental procedures to reduce reasoning ability lead to stronger endorsement of conservative views. We propose that dual-process models of moral judgements can account for these findings, with conservatives relying on System 1 (fast, emotional) and liberals relying on System 2 (slow, reasoned) processes. To test this theory, we had liberal and conservative participants respond to moral dilemmas under cognitive load or with no load. As predicted, liberals took longer to respond under cognitive load than under no load, indicating a reliance on controlled reasoning processes. Conservatives' response times were not affected by cognitive load. These differences cannot be accounted for by group differences in logical reasoning or working memory capacity. Instead, as predicted, logical reasoning ability positively predicted the time that liberals, but not conservatives, spent contemplating the dilemmas. These findings suggest that differential reliance on Systems 1 and 2 may be a fundamental aspect of left-right political orientation. They also challenge intuitionist models of morality and politics and suggest a dual-process theory of morality could account for some of the discrepancies in the political psychology literature.
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Gender Differences in the Effects of Personality Traits on Party Identification in the United States
Ching-Hsing Wang
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines whether the Big Five personality traits have different effects on male and female party identification in the United States. Research has found associations between personality traits and partisanship in the United States. However, there is solid evidence of gender differences in personality traits, and past studies have not yet considered whether personality-partisanship relationship might be gender-differentiated. This study finds that with the increase of agreeableness, women tend to be Republicans, but men tend to be Democrats. Furthermore, as openness to experience increases, women are more likely to be strong partisans, but men are more likely to be independents or leaning partisans. To sum up, this study provides evidence that the effects of the Big Five personality traits on party identification vary by gender and suggests that it is wrong to assume that the Big Five personality traits have the same impacts on male and female party identification.
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Lay Belief in Biopolitics and Political Prejudice
Elizabeth Suhay, Mark Brandt & Travis Proulx
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Building on psychological research linking essentialist beliefs about human differences with prejudice, we test whether lay belief in the biological basis of political ideology is associated with political intolerance and social avoidance. In two studies of American adults (Study 1: N = 288, Study 2: N = 164), we find that belief in the biological basis of political views is associated with greater intolerance and social avoidance of ideologically dissimilar others. The association is substantively large and robust to demographic, religious, and political control variables. These findings stand in contrast to some theoretical expectations that biological attributions for political ideology are associated with tolerance. We conclude that biological lay theories are especially likely to be correlated with prejudice in the political arena, where social identities tend to be salient and linked to intergroup competition and animosity.
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Ideological Differences in Anchoring and Adjustment During Social Inferences
Chadly Stern & Tessa West
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research has demonstrated that conservatives perceive greater similarity to political ingroup members than do liberals. In two studies, we draw from a framework of "anchoring and adjustment" to understand why liberals and conservatives differ in their perceptions of ingroup similarity. Results indicate that when participants made judgments under time pressure, liberals and conservatives did not differ in assuming ingroup similarity. However, when participants were given sufficient time to make judgments, liberals assumed less similarity than conservatives did, suggesting that liberals adjusted their judgments to a greater extent than conservatives did (Studies 1 and 2). In examining an underlying motivational process, we found that when conservatives' desire to affiliate with others was attenuated, they adjusted their initial judgments of ingroup similarity to a similar extent as liberals did (Study 2). We discuss implications for research on ideology and social judgment.
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Richard Lau et al.
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the effects of our modern media environment on affective polarization. We conducted an experiment during the last month of the 2012 presidential election varying both the choice of media sources available about the major presidential candidates, and the tone of political advertisements presented to subjects. We posit that voters in a high-choice, ideologically-diverse media environment will exhibit greater affective polarization than those in a "mainstream" ideologically neutral environment. We also hypothesize that subjects who are exposed to negative rather than positive political advertisements will show increased affective polarization. We provide causal evidence that the combination of a high-choice ideologically diverse media environment and exposure to negative political ads, significantly increases affective polarization. We also find that both overall information search and selective exposure to information are influenced by our experimental manipulations, with the greatest amount of search, and the most biased search, conducted by Romney supporters in the Negative Ads, Diverse Media condition.
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Varieties of American Popular Nationalism
Bart Bonikowski & Paul DiMaggio
American Sociological Review, October 2016, Pages 949-980
Abstract:
Despite the relevance of nationalism for politics and intergroup relations, sociologists have devoted surprisingly little attention to the phenomenon in the United States, and historians and political psychologists who do study the United States have limited their focus to specific forms of nationalist sentiment: ethnocultural or civic nationalism, patriotism, or national pride. This article innovates, first, by examining an unusually broad set of measures (from the 2004 GSS) tapping national identification, ethnocultural and civic criteria for national membership, domain-specific national pride, and invidious comparisons to other nations, thus providing a fuller depiction of Americans' national self-understanding. Second, we use latent class analysis to explore heterogeneity, partitioning the sample into classes characterized by distinctive patterns of attitudes. Conventional distinctions between ethnocultural and civic nationalism describe just about half of the U.S. population and do not account for the unexpectedly low levels of national pride found among respondents who hold restrictive definitions of American nationhood. A subset of primarily younger and well-educated Americans lacks any strong form of patriotic sentiment; a larger class, primarily older and less well educated, embraces every form of nationalist sentiment. Controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and partisan identification, these classes vary significantly in attitudes toward ethnic minorities, immigration, and national sovereignty. Finally, using comparable data from 1996 and 2012, we find structural continuity and distributional change in national sentiments over a period marked by terrorist attacks, war, economic crisis, and political contention.
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Jean Twenge et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, October 2016, Pages 1364-1383
Abstract:
In three nationally representative surveys of U.S. residents (N = 10 million) from 1970 to 2015, more Americans in the early 2010s (vs. previous decades) identified as Independent, including when age effects were controlled. More in the early 2010s (vs. previous decades) expressed polarized political views, including stronger political party affiliation or more extreme ideological self-categorization (liberal vs. conservative) with fewer identifying as moderate. The correlation between party affiliation and ideological views grew stronger over time. The overall trend since the 1970s was toward more Americans identifying as Republican or conservative. Older adults were more likely to identify as conservative and Republican. More Millennials (born 1980-1994) identify as conservative than either GenXers or Boomers did at the same age, and fewer are Democrats compared with Boomers. These trends are discussed in the context of social identification processes and their implications for the political dynamics in the United States.
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"That's not how it works": Economic indicators and the construction of partisan economic narratives
Ian Anson
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines the processes through which partisans update their (biased) economic judgments during periods of mixed and asymmetric economic performance. I show evidence that citizens express relatively unbiased perceptions of the movement of the stock market, suggesting that partisans do not engage in processes of motivated reasoning when reporting judgments of widely available economic data. Instead, partisans respond to fluctuations in stock market performance by revising their assumptions about the way the economy works: in response to positive or negative developments, the stock market is perceived to be more or less important for the health of the broader US economy depending upon Americans' partisan worldviews. This form of biased narrative construction has substantial importance in light of a "two-speed" post-Great Recession economy.
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Michael Robinson et al.
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Ideological liberals may focus on mental operations to a greater extent than bodily operations, whereas this pattern may be reversed among conservatives. Although there are suggestive sources of evidence, prior research has not directly examined relations between political ideology and this mind-body distinction. The present investigation did so by content-coding texts using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program and its cognitive and bodily process categories. Three studies involving posts to political news websites (Study 1), presidential State of the Union addresses (Study 2), and writing samples by laypersons (Study 3) converged on the hypothesis that texts produced by those with liberal ideologies would score positively in mind-body terms (reflecting a greater relative mental focus), whereas texts produced by those with conservative ideologies would score negatively in mind-body terms (reflecting a greater bodily focus), a novel linguistic signature of political ideology.
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Larry Bartels
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 2016, Pages 143-165
Abstract:
The logic of electoral competition suggests that candidates should have to adopt moderate issue positions to win majority support. But U.S. presidential candidates consistently take relatively extreme positions on a variety of important issues. Some observers have attributed these "polarized" positions to the extreme views of the parties' core supporters. I characterize the issue preferences of core Republicans, core Democrats, and swing voters over the past three decades and assess how well the positions of presidential candidates reflect those preferences. I find that Republican candidates have generally been responsive to the positions of their base. However, Democratic candidates have often been even more extreme than the Democratic base, suggesting that electoral polarization is due in significant part to candidates' own convictions rather than the need to mollify core partisans. Neither party's presidential candidates have been more than minimally responsive to the views of swing voters.
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Daniel Rempala, Bradley Okdie & Kilian Garvey
Motivation and Emotion, October 2016, Pages 703-719
Abstract:
Two studies examined the degree to which participants' were aware of their morality-based motivations when determining their political affiliations. Participants from the U.S. indicated what political party (if any) they affiliated with and explained their reasons for that affiliation. For participants who identified as "Liberal/Democrat" or "Conservative/Republican," coders read the responses and identified themes associated with Moral Foundations Theory. In Study 1, thematic differences between liberals and conservatives paralleled previous research, although the extent of the disparities was more pronounced than expected, with the two groups showing little overlap. In Study 2, the actual influence of Moral Foundations (as measured by the Moral Foundations Questionnaire) was dramatically greater than was indicated by the coding of participants' open-ended responses. In addition, actual disparities in use of Moral Foundations between liberals and conservatives were greater than participants' stereotyped perceptions. We discuss how this research furthers our understanding of conscious motivations for political affiliation and can help to facilitate political discourse.
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Why Are "Others" So Polarized? Perceived Political Polarization and Media Use in 10 Countries
JungHwan Yang et al.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, September 2016, Pages 349-367
Abstract:
This study tests the associations between news media use and perceived political polarization, conceptualized as citizens' beliefs about partisan divides among major political parties. Relying on representative surveys in Canada, Colombia, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we test whether perceived polarization is related to the use of television news, newspaper, radio news, and online news media. Data show that online news consumption is systematically and consistently related to perceived polarization, but not to attitude polarization, understood as individual attitude extremity. In contrast, the relationships between traditional media use and perceived and attitude polarization is mostly country dependent. An explanation of these findings based on exemplification is proposed and tested in an experimental design.
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Parenthood and the polarisation of political attitudes in Europe
Susan Banducci et al.
European Journal of Political Research, November 2016, Pages 745-766
Abstract:
Becoming a parent can affect the lives of men and women by introducing salient new social roles and identities, altered social networks and tighter constraints on financial resources and time. Even though modern family life has evolved in many important respects, parenthood continues to shape the lives of men and women in very different ways. Given that parenthood can change the lives of men and women in profoundly different ways, it seems that it would bring about changes in the way women and men think about politics and policy issues. Using data from the Wave 4 of the European Social Survey, this article investigates how parenthood, and the distinctions of motherhood and fatherhood, influence attitudes. The findings suggest that parenthood can have a polarising effect on attitudes, and that the polarising effect is most evident in countries where there is less support from the state for parental responsibilities.