I'm right, you're wrong
Lilliana Mason
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Disagreements over whether polarization exists in the mass public have confounded two separate types of polarization. When social polarization is separated from issue position polarization, both sides of the polarization debate can be simultaneously correct. Social polarization, characterized by increased levels of partisan bias, activism, and anger, is increasing, driven by partisan identity and political identity alignment, and does not require the same magnitude of issue position polarization. The partisan-ideological sorting that has occurred in recent decades has caused the nation as a whole to hold more aligned political identities, which has strengthened partisan identity and the activism, bias, and anger that result from strong identities, even though issue positions have not undergone the same degree of polarization. The result is a nation that agrees on many things but is bitterly divided nonetheless. An examination of ANES data finds strong support for these hypotheses.
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Corinne Bendersky
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, July 2014, Pages 163–168
Abstract:
Ideological conflicts, like those over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), are highly intractable, as demonstrated by the October 2013 partial government shutdown. The current research offers a potential resolution of ideological conflicts by affirming an opponent’s status. Results of one experiment collected during the 2013 government shutdown and a second conducted shortly after the implementation of the health insurance marketplaces in early 2014 indicate that status affirmation induces conciliatory attitudes and a willingness to sacrifice one’s own outcomes in favor of ideological opponents’ by decreasing adversarial perceptions. These studies demonstrate that status is an important social dimension whose affirmation by an ideological opponent buffers the integrity of one’s identity, thereby reducing defensiveness and resistance to compromising in political conflicts.
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The Culture War and Issue Salience: An Analysis of American Sentiment on Traditional Moral Issues
Andrew Wroe, Edward Ashbee & Amanda Gosling
Journal of American Studies, May 2014, Pages 595-612
Abstract:
Despite much talk of a culture war, scholars continue to argue over whether the American public is divided on cultural and social issues. Some of the most prominent work in this area, such as Fiorina's Culture War?, has rejected the idea. However, this work has in turn been criticized for focussing only on the distribution of attitudes within the American public and ignoring the possibility that the culture war may also be driven by the increasing strength with which sections of the population hold their opinions. This paper tests the strength, or saliency, hypothesis using individual-level over-time data and nonlinear regression. It finds (1) that there was a steady and significant increase in concern about traditional moral issues between the early 1980s and 2000, but (2) that the over-time increase was driven by an upward and equal shift in the importance attached to traditional moral issues by Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, evangelicals and non-evangelicals, and frequent and infrequent worshippers alike. While the first finding offers support for the saliency hypothesis and the culture war thesis, the second challenges the idea that Americans are engaged in a war over culture. Both findings enhance but also complicate our theoretical understanding of the culture war, and have important real-world consequences for American politics.
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Reframing Polarization: Social Groups and “Culture Wars”
Christopher Muste
PS: Political Science & Politics, April 2014, Pages 432-442
Abstract:
Recent analyses of American politics often invoke the term “culture war” depicting sharp and increasing divisions within the American polity. Most of this research defines culture in terms of values and beliefs about social issues and defines polarization in terms of partisan and issue divisions. I evaluate the claim of worsening “culture wars” by using a conceptualization of political culture that focuses on social groups and measuring polarization as both social group members’ attitudes toward their own social in-groups and out-groups, and the effects of group attitudes on partisanship. Analyzing inter-group attitudes from 1964 to 2012 for social group cleavages defined by race, class, age, sex, and religion shows that polarization in attitudes toward social groups is minimal and generally stable, and most group members feel positively toward out-groups. Partisan and issue polarization seen in prior research do not extend to deep or increasing inter-group hostility that could reinforce issue-based and partisan polarization.
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Jojanneke van der Toorn et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2014, Pages 50–60
Abstract:
Ideological differences in nationalism and patriotism are well-known and frequently exploited, but the question of why conservatives exhibit stronger national attachment than liberals has been inadequately addressed. Drawing on theories of system justification and political ideology as motivated social cognition, we proposed that increased patriotism is one means of satisfying the system justification goal. Thus, we hypothesized that temporarily activating system justification motivation should raise national attachment among liberals to the level of conservatives. Three experiments conducted in New York, Arkansas, and Wisconsin support this hypothesis. In the first two experiments, liberals exhibited weaker national attachment than conservatives in the absence of system justification activation, consistent with prior research. However, exposure to system criticism (Experiment 1) and system-level injustice (Experiment 2) caused liberals to strengthen their national attachment, eliminating the ideological gap. Using a system dependence manipulation in Experiment 3, this pattern was conceptually replicated with respect to patriotic but not nationalistic attachment, as hypothesized. Thus, chronic and temporary variability in system justification motivation helps to explain when liberals and conservatives do (and do not) differ in terms of national attachment and why.
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Verbal intelligence is correlated with socially and economically liberal beliefs
Noah Carl
Intelligence, May–June 2014, Pages 142–148
Abstract:
Research has consistently shown that intelligence is positively correlated with socially liberal beliefs and negatively correlated with religious beliefs. This should lead one to expect that Republicans are less intelligent than Democrats. However, I find that individuals who identify as Republican have slightly higher verbal intelligence than those who identify as Democrat (2–5 IQ points), and that individuals who supported the Republican Party in elections have slightly higher verbal intelligence than those who supported the Democratic Party (2 IQ points). I reconcile these findings with the previous literature by showing that verbal intelligence is correlated with both socially and economically liberal beliefs (β = .10–.32). My findings suggest that higher intelligence among classically liberal Republicans compensates for lower intelligence among socially conservative Republicans.
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A Primary Cause of Partisanship? Nomination Systems and Legislator Ideology
Eric McGhee et al.
American Journal of Political Science, April 2014, Pages 337–351
Abstract:
Many theoretical and empirical accounts of representation argue that primary elections are a polarizing influence. Likewise, many reformers advocate opening party nominations to nonmembers as a way of increasing the number of moderate elected officials. Data and measurement constraints, however, have limited the range of empirical tests of this argument. We marry a unique new data set of state legislator ideal points to a detailed accounting of primary systems in the United States to gauge the effect of primary systems on polarization. We find that the openness of a primary election has little, if any, effect on the extremism of the politicians it produces.
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A Theory of Partisan Sorting and Geographic Polarization: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Jason Anastasopoulos
Harvard Working Paper, March 2014
Abstract:
Do partisans sort? If so, why? I address both questions in this paper by developing the Migration-Assimilation-Polarization (MAP) theory of partisan sorting which is tested using Hurricane Katrina migration to Houston, Texas as a natural experiment. According to the MAP Theory, conservative flight induced by changes in diversity provides a mechanism for partisan sorting which can at least partially account for trends in geographic polarization. Using a variety of empirical tools including synthetic controls, I demonstrate that Hurricane Katrina migration led to increases in conservative white flight and geographic polarization between Houston and surrounding counties.
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Does More Speech Correct Falsehoods?
Edward Glaeser & Cass Sunstein
Journal of Legal Studies, January 2014, Pages 65-93
Abstract:
According to a standard principle in free-speech law, the remedy for falsehoods is more speech, not enforced silence. But empirical research demonstrates that corrections of falsehoods can backfire, by increasing people’s commitment to their inaccurate beliefs, and that presentation of balanced information can promote polarization, thus increasing preexisting social divisions. We attempt to explain these apparently puzzling phenomena by reference to what we call asymmetric Bayesianism: purported corrections may be taken to establish the truth of the proposition that is being denied, and the same information can have diametrically opposite effects if those who receive it have opposing antecedent convictions. We also show that the same information can activate radically different memories and associated convictions, thus producing polarized responses to that information, or what we call a memory boomerang. These explanations help account for the potential influence of surprising validators.
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The Imperfect Beliefs Voting Model
Benjamin Ogden
Boston University Working Paper, April 2014
Abstract:
In real-life elections, voters do not have full information over the policy platforms proposed by political parties. Instead, they may form (potentially incorrect) beliefs based upon the information provided by the candidates, with noise generated by the fact that different cultural groups have difficulty communicating with each other. I propose a new voting model to represent this interaction of beliefs, culture, and communication. The model shows that if policy preferences are uncorrelated with social groups, the classic median voter theorem is recovered. However, when they are correlated, I find that we should expect divergence away from the median voter as both parties gain more from appealing to the voters with whom they can communicate more easily. Therefore, as the population becomes polarized on cultural grounds, we should expect them to become polarized on political grounds as well, providing an explanation for recent political polarization in the United States. Under realistic assumptions, this division increases with the presence of extreme voters within the party bases, and decreases with the presence of a natural majority party. The model is applied to an examination of the size of government and the level of redistribution, with results more in line with the empirical evidence than models with perfect observability, and to make predictions about the informativeness of campaign advertising.
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The President, Polarization and the Party Platforms, 1944–2012
Soren Jordan, Clayton McLaughlin Webb & Dan Wood
The Forum, May 2014, Pages 169–189
Abstract:
Scholars generally agree that political elites in the US are polarized. Yet most of our evidence, especially longitudinal evidence, is built on proxy measures of elite ideology that fail to identify the unique dimensions that drive the cleavages between the parties. And our understanding of when elite polarization reemerged is also unclear. This study leverages the party platforms, along with the tools of content analysis, to shed new light on elite polarization. We find that, consistent with the literature, elite polarization is an asymmetric phenomenon driven by Republicans primarily motivated by economic issues. Further, we show that modern elite polarization emerged starting with the 1980 election.
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John Paul Wilson & Nicholas Rule
PLoS ONE, April 2014
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that perceivers can accurately extract information about perceptually ambiguous group memberships from facial information alone. For example, people demonstrate above-chance accuracy in categorizing political ideology from faces. Further, they ascribe particular personality traits to faces according to political party (e.g., Republicans are dominant and mature, Democrats are likeable and trustworthy). Here, we report three studies that replicated and extended these effects. In Study 1a, we provide evidence that, in addition to showing accuracy in categorization, politically-conservative participants expressed a bias toward categorizing targets as outgroup members. In Study 1b, we replicate this relationship with a larger sample and a stimulus set consisting of faces of professional politicians. In Study 2, we find that trait ascriptions based on target political affiliation are moderated by perceiver political ideology. Specifically, although Democrats are stereotyped as more likeable and trustworthy, conservative participants rated faces that were categorized as Republicans in Study 1a as more likeable and trustworthy than faces categorized as Democrats. Thus, this paper joins a growing literature showing that it is critical to consider perceiver identity in examining perceptions of identities and traits from faces.
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Ricardo Perez Truglia & Guillermo Cruces
Harvard Working Paper, April 2014
Abstract:
This paper exploits the unique institutional setting of U.S. campaign finance to provide new evidence on social incentives in political participation. We conducted a field experiment in which letters with individualized information about campaign contributions were sent to 91,998 contributors in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The effect of those letters on recipients’ subsequent contributions are examined using administrative data. We find that exogenously making an individual’s contributions more visible to her neighbors significantly increased her subsequent contributions if the majority of her neighbors support her same party, but decreased her contribution if the majority of her neighbors support the opposite party. This constitutes evidence that individuals give preferential treatment to neighbors of the same party. In another treatment arm, we randomized the information observed by recipients about neighbors’ contribution behavior. Consistent with existing evidence on social norms, individuals contribute more when neighbors of the same party contribute higher average amounts. Furthermore, we find that the individuals also care about the total amounts raised by the same and opposite parties. These findings result in implications for fundraising strategies, the design of optimal disclosure policies and the understanding of geographic polarization.
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Ricardo Perez Truglia
Harvard Working Paper, April 2014
Abstract:
The sorting of individuals into areas with like-minded neighbors has led to considerable geographic polarization in the United States. This paper argues that this phenomena is exacerbated by conformity effects, defined as the tendency of individuals to be more politically active when surrounded by like-minded neighbors. Disentangling conformity effects from sorting effects constitutes a difficult empirical challenge: it is difficult to separate whether Democrats are more politically active when living near other Democrats, or whether more active Democrats are more likely to live near other Democrats. We present quasi-experimental evidence with contributors to U.S. presidential campaigns. We matched data from the administrative records of the Federal Election Commission to mail forwarding data from the United States Postal Service to form a unique panel of nearly 100,000 contributors who changed residence over the period 2008-2013. We disentangle conformity effects by exploiting the timing of residential mobility in an event-study fashion. We find evidence of significant conformity effects: living in a ZIP-code where the share of same-party neighbors is 10% higher increases an individual's own likelihood of contributing by about 1.1%. We are able to conduct counterfactual analysis by combining the quasi-experimental estimates with an stylized model. The evidence suggests that geographic polarization in contributions during the 2012 U.S. presidential cycle was nearly 20% higher than it would have been in the absence of conformity effects.
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The serial reproduction of conflict: Third parties escalate conflict through communication biases
Tiane Lee, Michele Gelfand & Yoshihisa Kashima
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2014, Pages 68–72
Abstract:
We apply a communication perspective to study third party conflict contagion, a phenomenon in which partisan spectators to others’ disputes not only become involved in, but escalate, the dispute to a multitude of others. Using the serial reproduction method, we demonstrate the role of third parties’ communication biases in conflict escalation, revealing that successive generations of partisan observers share and reproduce conflict narratives that become increasingly biased in their moral framing, attributions for the conflict, evaluations of the disputing parties, and quest for revenge. Despite equal fault between the disputing parties at the beginning, these communication biases increased, rather than subsided, with each iteration throughout communication chains, cumulating in distortions and group biases far above and beyond initial ingroup favoritism. Implications for strategies to debias conflict information transmission are discussed.
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Belief polarization is not always irrational
Alan Jern, Kai-min Chang & Charles Kemp
Psychological Review, April 2014, Pages 206-224
Abstract:
Belief polarization occurs when 2 people with opposing prior beliefs both strengthen their beliefs after observing the same data. Many authors have cited belief polarization as evidence of irrational behavior. We show, however, that some instances of polarization are consistent with a normative account of belief revision. Our analysis uses Bayesian networks to characterize different kinds of relationships between hypotheses and data, and distinguishes between cases in which normative reasoners with opposing beliefs should both strengthen their beliefs, cases in which both should weaken their beliefs, and cases in which one should strengthen and the other should weaken his or her belief. We apply our analysis to several previous studies of belief polarization and present a new experiment that suggests that people tend to update their beliefs in the directions predicted by our normative account.
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The Consequences of Broader Media Choice: Evidence from the Expansion of Fox News
Daniel Hopkins & Jonathan Ladd
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Winter 2014, Pages 115-135
Abstract:
In recent decades, the diversity of Americans' news choices has expanded substantially. This paper examines whether access to an ideologically distinctive news source — the Fox News cable channel — influences vote intentions and whether any such effect is concentrated among those likely to agree with Fox's partisan viewpoint. To test these possibilities with individual-level data, we identify local Fox News availability for 22,595 respondents to the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey. Overall, we find a pro-Republican average treatment effect that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Yet, when separating respondents by party, we find a sizable effect of Fox access only on the vote intentions of Republicans and pure independents, a result that is bolstered by placebo tests. Contrary to fears about pervasive media influence, access to an ideologically distinctive media source reinforces the loyalties of co-partisans and possibly persuades independents without influencing out-partisans.
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Nominal Partisanship: Names as Political Identity Signals
R. Urbatsch
PS: Political Science & Politics, April 2014, Pages 463-467
Abstract:
Sending a signal of partisan identity carries greater expressive benefit, but also greater expected cost, for members of the public when they are more exposed to adherents of the other party. To see whether the cost or the benefit dominates in the decision to send partisan signals, this article considers partisan signals sent by names of newborns, particularly girls named “Reagan,” in US state-years from 1976 to 2011. Results indicate that the benefits of expressing identity increase more than do costs in the face of a large out-group: higher proportions of Democrats in a state increase the relationship between Republican populations and the tendency to name daughters “Reagan.”
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Jennifer Brundidge et al.
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined the association between political ideology and linguistic indicators of integrative complexity and opinion leadership in U.S. political blog posts (N = 519). Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis, we found that the posts of conservative bloggers were more integratively simple than those of liberal bloggers. Furthermore, in support of a proposed opinion leadership model of integrative complexity, the relationship between ideology and integrative complexity was mediated by psychological distancing (an indicator of a hierarchical communication style). These findings demonstrate an ideological divide in the extent to which the blogosphere reflects deliberative democratic ideals.
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Peter Hatemi et al.
Behavior Genetics, May 2014, Pages 282-294
Abstract:
Almost 40 years ago, evidence from large studies of adult twins and their relatives suggested that between 30 and 60 % of the variance in social and political attitudes could be explained by genetic influences. However, these findings have not been widely accepted or incorporated into the dominant paradigms that explain the etiology of political ideology. This has been attributed in part to measurement and sample limitations, as well the relative absence of molecular genetic studies. Here we present results from original analyses of a combined sample of over 12,000 twins pairs, ascertained from nine different studies conducted in five democracies, sampled over the course of four decades. We provide evidence that genetic factors play a role in the formation of political ideology, regardless of how ideology is measured, the era, or the population sampled. The only exception is a question that explicitly uses the phrase “Left–Right”. We then present results from one of the first genome-wide association studies on political ideology using data from three samples: a 1990 Australian sample involving 6,894 individuals from 3,516 families; a 2008 Australian sample of 1,160 related individuals from 635 families and a 2010 Swedish sample involving 3,334 individuals from 2,607 families. No polymorphisms reached genome-wide significance in the meta-analysis. The combined evidence suggests that political ideology constitutes a fundamental aspect of one’s genetically informed psychological disposition, but as Fisher proposed long ago, genetic influences on complex traits will be composed of thousands of markers of very small effects and it will require extremely large samples to have enough power in order to identify specific polymorphisms related to complex social traits.
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Homophily in the Guise of Cross-Linking: Political Blogs and Content
Karine Nahon & Jeff Hemsley
American Behavioral Scientist, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines the behavior of influential political blogs (conservative and liberal) in reference to external viral content during March 2007 and June 2009. We analyze homophily and cross-ideological (heterophily) practices. We propose a multidimensional model that employs both qualitative and quantitative methods for examining homophily behaviors by looking at three dimensions: blog-to-blog, blog-to-video, blog post-to-video. Findings show that while homophily patterns prevail, some limited occurrences of cross-ideological practices exist. The cross-linking practices may include deliberative motives, but in essence they are not created for the purposes of discourse. Instead, these cross-linking practices strengthen previously held political stances of the users who create them and negatively portray and reframe content of alternative views. This represents homophily in the guise of cross-linking.
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Implications of Pro- and Counterattitudinal Information Exposure for Affective Polarization
Kelly Garrett et al.
Human Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The American electorate is characterized by political polarization, and especially by increasingly negative affective responses toward opposing party members. To what extent might this be attributed to exposure to information reinforcing individuals' partisan identity versus information representing the views of partisan opponents? And is this a uniquely American phenomenon? This study uses survey data collected immediately following recent national elections in two countries, the United States and Israel, to address these questions. Results across the two nations are generally consistent, and indicate that pro- and counterattitudinal information exposure has distinct influences on perceptions of and attitudes toward members of opposing parties, despite numerous cross-cultural differences. We discuss implications in light of recent evidence about partisans' tendency to engage in selective exposure.