Irreconcilable
Michael Macy, Daniel DellaPosta & Yongren Shi
American Journal of Sociology, March 2015, Pages 1473-1511
Abstract:
Popular accounts of “lifestyle politics” and “culture wars” suggest that political and ideological divisions extend also to leisure activities, consumption, aesthetic taste, and personal morality. Drawing on a total of 22,572 pairwise correlations from the General Social Survey (1972–2010), the authors provide comprehensive empirical support for the anecdotal accounts. Moreover, most ideological differences in lifestyle cannot be explained by demographic covariates alone. The authors propose a surprisingly simple solution to the puzzle of lifestyle politics. Computational experiments show how the self-reinforcing dynamics of homophily and influence dramatically amplify even very small elective affinities between lifestyle and ideology, producing a stereotypical world of “latte liberals” and “bird-hunting conservatives” much like the one in which we live.
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Partisan Conflict and Private Investment
Marina Azzimonti
NBER Working Paper, June 2015
Abstract:
American politics have been characterized by a high degree of partisan conflict in recent years. Combined with a divided government, this has led not only to significant Congressional gridlock, but also to spells of high fiscal policy uncertainty. The unusually slow recovery from the Great Recession during the same period suggests the possibility that the two phenomena may be related. In this paper, I investigate the hypothesis that political discord depresses private investment. To this end, I first present a reduced-form political economy model to illustrate how news about political disagreement affects investment through agents' expectations. I then construct a novel high-frequency indicator of partisan conflict consistent with the model. The index, computed monthly between 1981 and 2015, uses a semantic search methodology to measure the frequency of newspaper articles reporting lawmakers' disagreement about policy. Using a 2SLS approach, I estimate that a 10% increase in the partisan conflict index is associated with a 3.4% decline in aggregate private investment in the US.
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Party Hacks and True Believers: The Effect of Party Affiliation on Political Preferences
Eric Gould & Esteban Klor
Hebrew University of Jerusalem Working Paper, March 2015
Abstract:
This paper examines the effect of party affiliation on an individual’s political views. To do this, we exploit the party realignment that occurred in the U.S. due to abortion becoming a more prominent and highly partisan issue over time. We show that abortion was not a highly partisan issue in 1982, but a person’s abortion views in 1982 led many to switch parties over time as the two main parties diverged in their stances on this issue. We find that voting for a given political party in 1996, due to the individual’s initial views on abortion in 1982, has a substantial effect on a person’s political, social, and economic attitudes in 1997. These findings are stronger for highly partisan political issues, and are robust to controlling for a host of personal views and characteristics in 1982 and 1997. As individuals realigned their party affiliation in accordance with their initial abortion views, their other political views followed suit.
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The Importance of Context in the Genetic Transmission of U.S. Party Identification
Zoltán Fazekas & Levente Littvay
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this study, we discuss one example where behavior genetic findings vary greatly across political contexts. We present original findings on how party identification is heritable around the 2008 election on a sample of twins from Minnesota. As this is in contrast with findings from the late 1980s and with how a mid-2000 study interpreted their results, we explain how the increasing partisan ideological polarization could be responsible for these seemingly contradictory findings. In the Minnesota sample, we show a genetic correlation between party identification and ideology, a finding consistent in the political science literature. We highlight how heritability of political characteristics, like all others, is population specific and highly context dependent stressing its nondeterministic nature.
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Red rural, blue rural? Presidential voting patterns in a changing rural America
Dante Scala, Kenneth Johnson & Luke Rogers
Political Geography, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines individual and aggregate data to document the growing political diversity in rural America. This political diversity is evident in the various economies within rural America. The new rural economy is reflected in recreational counties, where natural and built amenities combined with the provision of services to residents and visitors are the basis for the local economy. Residents of recreational counties tend to be more liberal than their rural peers on a variety of political issues, and supported Barack Obama at significantly higher levels in 2008 and 2012. In contrast, in regions dominated by the old rural economy of farming, political views are more conservative and there is far less support for Democrats in general and President Obama in particular. An analysis of survey data combined with multivariate spatial regression analysis demonstrates that these differences between the old and new rural economy persist even when a variety of demographic, economic, social and geographic variables are controlled.
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Jayme Neiman et al.
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
Words are believed to be indicators of the values that are important to politicians and an impressive amount of empirical research has analyzed variations in language use. While it is generally accepted that there are value differences between Democrats and Republicans, the extent to which these differences are reflected in word usage has been theorized but is largely untested. The connection between values and language is, theoretically, not limited just to politicians, but should be especially evident among politicians as representatives of existing ideological poles. In this article, we examine elite rhetoric through the lens of four value-centered theoretical frameworks (Lakoff’s Parenting Styles model, Moral Foundations Theory, Schwartz’s Values Theory, and Motivated Social Cognition Theory). Contrary to the expectations posited by these four theories, we find little reliable evidence of value-related language differences between Democratic and Republican politicians. Our findings suggest that, at least when it comes to elite rhetoric, widely accepted theoretical claims about the value-based nature of political language and political differences are not consistently supported by empirical analysis.
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The Rich are Different: The Effect of Wealth on Partisanship
Erik Peterson
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Rich voters tend to be Republicans and poor voters tend to be Democrats. Yet, in most settings it is difficult to distinguish the effects of affluence on partisanship from those of closely related variables such as education. To address these concerns I use state lottery and administrative records to examine the effect of changing economic circumstances on the partisanship of over 1,900 registered voters. Winning larger amounts in the lottery produces a small increase in the probability an individual is later a registered Republican, an effect that is larger for those who registered to vote after winning. This suggests that wealth does affect partisanship, particularly for those without preexisting attachments to a political party. Comparing estimates from the lottery to cross-sectional data suggests the latter exaggerates the relationship between wealth and partisanship, although controlling for additional variables produces largely similar estimates.
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Judging Political Hearts and Minds: How Political Dynamics Drive Social Judgments
James Cornwell, Allison Bajger & Tory Higgins
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated how judgments of political messengers depend upon what would benefit one’s preferred candidate. In Study 1a, participants were asked to evaluate the warmth and competence of the writer of a pro- or anti-Obama political message for the 2012 presidential election (Obama/warm; Romney/competent). When judging the messages, warmth was emphasized by Democrats and competence by Republicans. Study 1b replicated these effects for messages about Romney as well. Study 2 examined the 2004 presidential election where perceptions of the party candidates’ warmth and competence reversed (Bush/warm; Kerry/competent). There competence was emphasized by Democrats and warmth by Republicans. Study 3 showed that varying the warmth and competence of each party’s prospective candidates for the 2016 election influences whether warmth or competence is emphasized by Democrats or Republicans. Thus, differences between Republicans and Democrats in emphasizing warmth or competence reflect a dynamic motivated cognition that is tailored to benefit their preferred candidate.
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On the misplaced politics of behavioral policy interventions
David Tannenbaum, Craig Fox & Todd Rogers
University of Chicago Working Paper, March 2015
Abstract:
One common criticism of “nudges” — general-purpose interventions derived from behavioral science that can be applied to a range of policy objectives — is that such interventions are manipulative and coercive. In this article we show that this criticism sometimes reflects a partisan nudge bias, whereby attitudes toward policy goals or policymakers distort feelings about policy interventions. In particular, people find nudges more ethically problematic when applied to policy objectives they oppose (or when applied by policymakers they oppose), than when those same nudges are applied to policy objectives they support (or when applied by policymakers they support). Both political liberal and conservative respondents exhibit partisan nudge bias, as do practicing policymakers. Furthermore, partisan differences disappear when nudges are described without mention of a particular policy objective, suggesting that nudges are not inherently partisan. We argue that an honest debate about the appropriateness of behavioral policy interventions will likely require stripping away details about the policy objectives to which they are applied and the parties that endorse them.
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Cognitive ability and political beliefs in the United States
Noah Carl
Personality and Individual Differences, September 2015, Pages 245–248
Abstract:
Recent evidence indicates that cognitive ability has a monotonically positive relation to socially liberal beliefs and some measures of fiscally conservative beliefs, and that it has a non-monotonic relation to other measures of fiscally conservative beliefs. This study examines the relationship between cognitive ability and political beliefs in a recent, nationally representative sample of American adults. It finds that cognitive ability is positively associated with both socially liberal beliefs and fiscally conservative beliefs. The relationships with socially liberal beliefs are monotonically positive. In contrast, some of the relationships with fiscally conservative beliefs are non-monotonic: Americans of highest ability are less fiscally conservative than those of high ability. The association between cognitive ability and a dimension of fiscal conservatism is reduced substantially when controlling for socio-economic position.
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Verbal ability as a predictor of political preferences in the United States, 1974–2012
Gerhard Meisenberg
Intelligence, May–June 2015, Pages 135–143
Abstract:
The relationship between cognitive ability and stated political preferences in the United States is examined with data from the General Social Survey, which includes a brief vocabulary test (Wordsum) as a measure of verbal ability. Since the 1970s, liberal and conservative self-identification became increasingly identified with the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. Liberal self-identification has increasingly been related to higher Wordsum scores since the 1970s, but liberal-conservative differences rarely exceed the equivalent of 3 IQ points. Among Whites, those identifying themselves as “moderate” or “independent” have lower average Wordsum scores than those with stated ideological or political party preferences, contrary to the hypothesis that higher intelligence is related to less extreme political positions. The relationship between Wordsum and Democratic Party affiliation has moved from negative to neutral since the 1970s. In presidential elections, the most consistent finding is that voters scored substantially higher than non-voters. Those voting for the Democratic candidate had higher average scores than those voting for his Republican opponent since 2000. In regression models that control for demographics, higher Wordsum scores are associated with liberal self-identification but not with political party preferences. In conclusion, higher vocabulary scores are associated with a greater likelihood that people place themselves on the ideological and political spectrum and that they vote in presidential elections, but have only small relationships with liberal-versus-conservative self-identification.
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How Much Disagreement is Good for Democratic Deliberation?
Kevin Esterling, Archon Fung & Taeku Lee
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
The ideal of deliberation requires that citizens engage in reasonable discussion despite disagreements. In practice, if their experience is to match this normative ideal, participants in an actual deliberation should prefer moderate disagreement to conflict-free discussion within homogeneous groups, and to conflict-driven discussion where differences are intractable. This article proposes a research design and methods for assessing the quality of a deliberative event based on the perceptions of the participants themselves. In a structured deliberative event, over 2,000 individuals were assigned to small groups composed of about 10 persons of varying levels of ideological difference to discuss health care reform in California. We find that participants experience higher satisfaction with deliberation under moderate ideological difference than when they are in homogeneous or in highly disparate groups. That moderate disagreement induces optimal deliberation is consistent with normative expectations and empirically demonstrates the deliberative quality of this event.
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Tea Leaves and Southern Politics: Explaining Tea Party Support in the Region
M.V. Hood, Quentin Kidd & Irwin Morris
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: Our research assesses the distinctiveness of Tea Party adherents among mobilized Republicans in the South.
Methods: The data come from an interactive voice response (IVR) survey of households containing at least one Republican primary voter across nine southern states conducted approximately one month before the 2012 presidential election. We analyze the data using multivariate logistic regression.
Results: Unlike other scholarship, we find no evidence that racial animosity drives the movement, but we do find a strong relationship between evangelicalism and Tea Party support. We also find Tea Party adherents are older, more likely to be men, less wealthy, more ideologically conservative, and more partisan than their fellow Republicans.
Conclusions: Tea Party supporters in the South are likely to have a significant impact on the future of the Republican Party — both in the South, and nationally. The fact that our profile of southern Tea Party supporters does not include growing segments of the electorate does not bode well for the future development of the GOP.
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Fox News and Political Knowledge
Elizabeth Schroeder & Daniel Stone
Journal of Public Economics, June 2015, Pages 52–63
Abstract:
The effects of partisan media on political knowledge are theoretically ambiguous. Knowledge effects are important because of their close connection to welfare effects, but the existing empirical literature on knowledge is limited. We study the knowledge effects of the Fox News Channel. Following DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007), we exploit naturally random variation in Fox’s availability to identify causal effects. We use knowledge survey data from 2000, 2004 and 2008; our final sample has nearly one million question-level observations. We first confirm and expand on previous findings of Fox effects on voting. We then present an array of results from our knowledge analysis. While average effects (across issues), over the full time-frame are near-zero and most precise, we find evidence of positive effects both for issues that were more favorable to Republicans and for issues that Fox covered more often, and negative effects for issues Fox neglected. We also present evidence of Fox being associated with a decline in newspaper readership.
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The Politics of Affirmation Theory: When Group-Affirmation Leads to Greater Ingroup Bias
Gaven Ehrlich & Richard Gramzow
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
It has been well established in the literature that affirming the individual self reduces the tendency to exhibit group-favoring biases. The limited research examining group-affirmation and bias, however, is inconclusive. We argue that group-affirmation can exacerbate group-serving biases in certain contexts, and in the current set of studies, we document this phenomenon directly. Unlike self-affirmation, group-affirmation led to greater ingroup-favoring evaluative judgments among political partisans (Experiment 1). This increase in evaluative bias following group-affirmation was moderated by political party identification and was not found among those who affirmed a non-political ingroup (Experiment 2). In addition, the mechanism underlying these findings is explored and interpreted within the theoretical frameworks of self-categorization theory and the multiple self-aspects model (Experiments 2 and 3). The broader implications of our findings for the understanding of social identity and affirmation theory are discussed.
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The Knowledge Gap Versus the Belief Gap and Abstinence-Only Sex Education
Douglas Blanks Hindman & Changmin Yan
Journal of Health Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
The knowledge gap hypothesis predicts widening disparities in knowledge of heavily publicized public affairs issues among socioeconomic status groups. The belief gap hypothesis extends the knowledge gap hypothesis to account for knowledge and beliefs about politically contested issues based on empirically verifiable information. This analysis of 3 national surveys shows belief gaps developed between liberals and conservatives regarding abstinence-only sex education; socioeconomic status–based knowledge gaps did not widen. The findings partially support both belief gap and knowledge gap hypotheses. In addition, the unique contributions of exposure to Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC in this process were investigated. Only exposure to Fox News was linked to beliefs about abstinence-only sex education directly and indirectly through the cultivation of conservative ideology.
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You are either for us or against us: When are ambivalent in-group members sanctioned?
David Somlo, William Crano & Michael Hogg
Social Influence, forthcoming
Abstract:
The subjective group dynamics model describes conditions for sanctioning deviant in-group members. A description of a new or established group member's (the target) attitude toward “Obamacare” was provided to 136 Republican participants. The target expressed a group-normative, ambivalent, or deviant opinion. Participants indicated the self-relevance of Obamacare, and evaluated the target. Neither target status nor attitude affected evaluations for non-vested participants; however, highly vested participants evaluated new ambivalent targets more favorably than established ambivalent targets (p < .05): derogation or sanctioning of ambivalent and deviant targets, that is, was moderated by evaluators’ vested interest and longevity of the target's group membership.
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Are conservatives overconfident?
Pietro Ortoleva & Erik Snowberg
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent studies suggest psychological differences between conservatives and liberals, including that conservatives are more overconfident. We use a behavioral political economy model to show that while this is undoubtedly true for election years in the current era, there is no reason to believe that conservative ideologies are intrinsically linked to overconfidence. Indeed, it appears that in 1980 and before, conservatives and liberals were equally overconfident.