Party Crashers
Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion
Eric Oliver & Thomas Wood
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although conspiracy theories have long been a staple of American political culture, no research has systematically examined the nature of their support in the mass public. Using four nationally representative surveys, sampled between 2006 and 2011, we find that half of the American public consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory and that many popular conspiracy theories are differentiated along ideological and anomic dimensions. In contrast with many theoretical speculations, we do not find conspiracism to be a product of greater authoritarianism, ignorance, or political conservatism. Rather, the likelihood of supporting conspiracy theories is strongly predicted by a willingness to believe in other unseen, intentional forces and an attraction to Manichean narratives. These findings both demonstrate the widespread allure of conspiracy theories as political explanations and offer new perspectives on the forces that shape mass opinion and American political culture.
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The Blended Language of Partisanship in the 2012 Presidential Campaign
Roderick Hart & Colene Lind
American Behavioral Scientist, April 2014, Pages 591-616
Abstract:
Here, we track the language patterns of Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates during 2008 and 2012 and contrast them with their Democratic counterparts to better understand the language of partisanship in the U.S. We employ DICTION (www.dictionsoftware.com), an automated text-analysis tool, to process some 8,000 campaign documents. We find (a) that Mitt Romney was an unconventional Republican in 2012 (but not in 2008); (b) that Romney employed both “Republican” and “Democratic” language and did so to good effect (both in the primaries and in the general election); (c) that Barack Obama matched Romney in these ways, departing sharply from his own 2008 campaign style; and (d) that the candidates increasingly resembled one another as election day approached. We conclude that, no matter what their party of origin, all national politicians must be versed in the Democratic/Republican lexicon, a requirement that distinguishes the American political ethos.
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Who Let the (Attack) Dogs Out? New Evidence for Partisan Media Effects
Glen Smith & Kathleen Searles
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Most research examining partisan media effects uses individual differences in exposure to news sources to predict attitude change. In this paper, we improve upon this approach by using variations in cable news coverage to predict subsequent changes in viewer impressions of the candidates. This approach allows us to examine the distinct effects of in-party and out-party candidate coverage. Content analyses and survey data show that partisan media effects result from coverage of the opposition candidate, and not from coverage of the like-minded candidate. Specifically, during the 2008 presidential election, increased coverage of Obama (McCain) on Fox News (MSNBC) made viewers less favorable toward Obama (McCain). Meanwhile, coverage of McCain (Obama) on Fox News (MSNBC) had minimal effects on viewer impressions. These results suggest that media effects persist even during an era dominated by selective exposure.
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Strong Candidate, Nurturant Candidate: Moral Language in Presidential Television Advertisements
Jennifer Filson Moses & Marti Hope Gonzales
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Presidential television advertisements from 1980 through 2012 were examined to test empirically George Lakoff's descriptions of American moral ideology. Advertisements were coded for instantiations of the moral themes that Lakoff asserts underlie liberal and conservative ideology (Strict Father versus Nurturant Parent). Candidates' political-party affiliation, election year, and policy issue(s) addressed in the television advertisement were assessed for their covariance with the use of these moral-metaphorical instantiations. Findings support many of Lakoff's arguments. Republicans and Democrats generally differed in their use of these moral themes, both Strict Father and Nurturant Parent. There were no significant associations between election years (1980–2012) and instantiations of moral metaphors, with the exception of 2008, an anomalous year. Of particular import, we found that although Republicans rely on Strict Father dimensions, and Democrats rely more on Nurturant Parent, the most pronounced difference between parties was on the Nurturant Parent dimension. Implications for Lakoff's work and current moral psychology are discussed.
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The Effect of Redistricting Commissions on District Bipartisanship and Member Ideology
Josh Ryan & Jeffrey Lyons
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties, forthcoming
Abstract:
Reformers advocate the use of commissions rather than legislatures to redistrict as a way of promoting less partisan districts and ideologically moderate congressional members. Much of the evidence in political science suggests that gerrymandering is not a cause of congressional polarization, but whether or not commissions produce different types of districts or members remains an important and unanswered question, especially now that many states have adopted reforms. This article examines whether commissions reduce district partisanship or ideological extremity using time-series-cross-sectional data. We find that bipartisan districts promote member moderation, but there is no evidence that commissions have distinct effects on districts or members as compared to districts drawn by legislatures, consistent with the notion that limiting gerrymandering is not a solution for polarization. These conclusions call into question the appropriateness of redistricting reform, especially when one considers the undemocratic nature of commissions.
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“Taking Back Our Country”: Tea Party Membership and Support for Punitive Crime Control Policies
Justin Pickett, Daniel Tope & Rose Bellandi
Sociological Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
The Tea Party Movement (TPM) emerged shortly after the 2008 election, with members rallying behind the call to “take back our country.” Many observers suggest that the movement represents, in part, a racialized backlash against the election of Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, motivated by perceived threats to the racial hierarchy. Racial threat theory predicts that if the TPM is motivated by and reinforces racial concerns, racialized support for punitive crime policies that disproportionately impact blacks should be higher among Tea Partiers. Drawing on recent national survey data, this study tests this prediction. The results show that TPM membership is positively associated with punitiveness and that this relationship is mediated, in part, by Tea Partiers’ animus toward blacks. We discuss the import of these findings for competing accounts of the TPM, racial threat theory, and the argument that the United States has become a “post-racial society.”
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Consumer Demand for Cynical and Negative News Frames
Marc Trussler & Stuart Soroka
International Journal of Press/Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Commentators regularly lament the proliferation of both negative and/or strategic (“horse race”) coverage in political news content. The most frequent account for this trend focuses on news norms and/or the priorities of news journalists. Here, we build on recent work arguing for the importance of demand-side, rather than supply-side, explanations of news content. In short, news may be negative and/or strategy-focused because that is the kind of news that people are interested in. We use a lab study to capture participants’ news-selection biases, alongside a survey capturing their stated news preferences. Politically interested participants are more likely to select negative stories. Interest is associated with a greater preference for strategic frames as well. And results suggest that behavioral results do not conform to attitudinal ones. That is, regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content.
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The Informational Basis for Mass Polarization
Thomas Leeper
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
If nothing else, democratic politics requires compromise. Mass polarization, where citizens disagree strongly and those disagreements magnify over time, presents obvious threats to democratic well-being. The overwhelming presumption is that if polarization is occurring, a substantial portion of it is attributable to the fragmentation attendant an increasingly choice-laden media environment where individuals expose themselves only to opinion-reinforcing information. Under what conditions does mass opinion polarization occur? Through two over-time laboratory experiments involving information choice behavior, this paper considers, first, the effects of slant in one’s information environment on over-time opinion dynamics and, second, the moderating role of attitude importance on those effects. The experiments reveal that, despite similar information search behavior, those with strong attitudes are dogmatic, resisting even substantial contrary evidence; those with weak attitudes, by contrast, hear opposing arguments and develop moderate opinions regardless of the prevalence of those arguments in their environment. Evaluations of information, rather than information search behavior per se, explain why individuals with strong attitudes polarize and those with weak attitudes do not. Polarization therefore seems to require more than media fragmentation and, in fact, a more important factor may be the strength of citizens’ prior attitudes on particular issues.
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“Do Something” Politics and Double-Peaked Policy Preferences
Patrick Egan
Journal of Politics, April 2014, Pages 333-349
Abstract:
When a public problem is perceived to be poorly addressed by current policy, it is often the case that credible alternative policies are proposed to both the status quo’s left and right. Specially designed national surveys show that in circumstances like these, many Americans’ preferences are not single-peaked on the standard left-right dimension. Rather, they simply want the government to “do something” about the problem and therefore prefer both liberal and conservative policies to the moderate status quo. This produces individual and collective preferences that are double-peaked with respect to the left-right dimension. Double-peakedness is less prevalent on issues where no consensus exists regarding policy goals, and it increases when exogenous events raise the public’s concern about the seriousness of a policy problem.
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Luigi Curini, Willy Jou & Vincenzo Memoli
International Political Science Review, March 2014, Pages 129-152
Abstract:
While the topic of life satisfaction and its determinants has drawn increasing attention among political scientists, most studies have focused mainly on macro-level variables, and often overlooked the role of individuals’ attitudes vis-à-vis their governments. The present article attempts to fill this gap by examining whether citizens’ left–right self-placement and ideological distance from their governments exert an independent effect on life satisfaction. Utilizing a dataset spanning a quarter century and containing nearly 70,000 respondents, we demonstrate a curvilinear relationship between ideological orientations and happiness, with self-identified radicals on both ends of the spectrum happier than moderate citizens. Moreover, we show that while propinquity between self-position and government position contributes to happiness, this effect is highly mediated by individual locations along the left–right spectrum: centrists report higher levels of happiness the closer they are to their government, while the opposite is true for radicals. The normative implication of our findings is that moderate governments may present a comparative advantage in enhancing the overall level of happiness of their citizens.
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Priming under Fire: Reverse Causality and the Classic Media Priming Hypothesis
Austin Hart & Joel Middleton
Journal of Politics, April 2014, Pages 581-592
Abstract:
This study reevaluates the classic “media priming” hypothesis, which argues that, when news coverage raises an issue’s salience, voters align their overall evaluation of the president with their assessment of him on that issue. Conventional studies typically show greater correspondence between issue approval and overall approval among individuals exposed to issue-related news. Although this is taken as evidence of media priming, this phenomenon is also consistent with another explanation. Precisely the opposite, the “projection” hypothesis argues that voters exposed to issue news align their approval of the president on that issue with their prior approval of his overall performance. Existing studies cannot rule out this alternative, so we conduct a survey experiment to evaluate the priming and projection hypotheses jointly. Despite recent evidence in support of projection, we show that the causal arrow runs from issue approval to overall approval (media priming), not the reverse (projection).
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The Macro Sort of the State Electorates
Gerald Wright & Nathaniel Birkhead
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Individual-level studies of partisan and ideological change find that individuals generally adjust their ideological preferences to match their partisan affiliation. In examining this process among the state electorates, we find that contrary to these studies, states have adjusted their partisanship to match their ideology. In addition, we use a measure of state elite ideology to show that state parties have a role in the character of the partisan sort of the states. These results are consistent with political explanations of party strategy and rational mass responses for the character of macro-political change in the states over the last half century.
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Party Cues in Elections under Multilevel Governance: Theory and Evidence from US States
Benny Geys & Jan Vermeir
Journal of the European Economic Association, forthcoming
Abstract:
In federal countries, voters’ ability to evaluate the performance of their leaders might be reduced when different levels of government shape policy outcomes. This can blur political accountability. In this article, we analyze how party cues (i.e., politicians’ party membership acting as a cue towards their characteristics) affect voters’ incomplete information in a federal setting. We theoretically show that party cues allow indirect inference regarding politicians using observed policy outcomes, and can alleviate the accountability problem. Empirical evidence from US presidential election results across all 50 US states over the period 1972–2008 supports this proposition. However, party cues also have a downside in that they may reduce politicians’ effort, particularly when politicians at different levels of government are from different parties.
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Self-stereotyping as “Evangelical Republican”: An Empirical Test
Stratos Patrikios
Politics and Religion, December 2013, Pages 800-822
Abstract:
The prominence of evangelical Christians in the electoral base of the Republican Party is a noted feature of recent American elections. This prominence is linked to a key stereotype that saturates public discourse: “born-again/evangelical Republicanism.” The stereotype fuses religious and partisan social group membership to create a composite social label. Using a social categorization approach, which challenges the assumptions and methods of existing research, the present analysis asks whether voters embrace this stereotype in their definitions of self. The article employs confirmatory factor analysis of religious and partisan identity constructs from a national internet survey, the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and finds evidence of the presence of this religious-partisan stereotype in individual self-views, and of the backlash that it has produced, particularly among citizens that are exposed to public discourse on American elections.
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Polarization and Ideology: Partisan Sources of Low Dimensionality in Scaled Roll Call Analyses
John Aldrich, Jacob Montgomery & David Sparks
Political Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we challenge the conclusion that the preferences of members of Congress are best represented as existing in a low-dimensional space. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations altering assumptions regarding the dimensionality and distribution of member preferences and scale the resulting roll call matrices. Our simulations show that party polarization generates misleading evidence in favor of low dimensionality. This suggests that the increasing levels of party polarization in recent Congresses may have produced false evidence in favor of a low-dimensional policy space. However, we show that focusing more narrowly on each party caucus in isolation can help researchers discern the true dimensionality of the policy space in the context of significant party polarization. We re-examine the historical roll call record and find evidence suggesting that the low dimensionality of the contemporary Congress may reflect party polarization rather than changes in the dimensionality of policy conflict.
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Third-party threat and the dimensionality of major-party roll call voting
Daniel Lee
Public Choice, June 2014, Pages 515-531
Abstract:
This paper assesses the influence of the electoral threat of third parties on major-party roll call voting in the US House. Although low-dimensionality of voting is a feature of strong two-party politics, which describes the contemporary era, there is significant variation across members. I hypothesize that major-party incumbents in districts under a high threat from third-party House candidates cast votes that do not fit neatly onto the dominant ideological dimension. This hypothesis is driven by (1) third party interests in orthogonal issues, and (2) incumbents accounting for those interests when casting votes in order to minimize the impact of third parties. An empirical test using data from the 105th to 109th Congresses provides evidence of this effect.
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Elanor Colleoni, Alessandro Rozza & Adam Arvidsson
Journal of Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates political homophily on Twitter. Using a combination of machine learning and social network analysis we classify users as Democrats or as Republicans based on the political content shared. We then investigate political homophily both in the network of reciprocated and nonreciprocated ties. We find that structures of political homophily differ strongly between Democrats and Republicans. In general, Democrats exhibit higher levels of political homophily. But Republicans who follow official Republican accounts exhibit higher levels of homophily than Democrats. In addition, levels of homophily are higher in the network of reciprocated followers than in the nonreciprocated network. We suggest that research on political homophily on the Internet should take the political culture and practices of users seriously.
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Elizabeth Suhay
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Evidence has accumulated that people often conform to political norms. However, we know little about the mechanisms underlying political conformity. Whose norms are people likely to follow, and why? This article discusses two phenomena — social identity and “self-conscious” emotions — that are key to understanding when and why people follow the crowd. It argues that adherence to in-group norms is a critical basis of status among in-group peers. Conformity generates peer approval and leads to personal pride. Deviance generates disapproval and causes embarrassment or shame. These emotional reactions color an individual’s political perspectives, typically generating conformity. These same mechanisms can spur between-group polarization. In this case, differentiation from the norms of disliked out-groups results in peer approval and pride, and conformity to out-group norms disapproval and embarrassment or shame. This framework is supported by the results of two experiments that examine the influence of group opinion norms over economic and social aspects of citizens’ political ideologies. One exogenously varies the social identity of attitudinal majorities; the other primes the relevant emotions. In addition to contributing to the study of political conformity and polarization, this article adds to our growing understanding of the relevance of social identity and emotion to political life.
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Effects of Verbal Aggression and Party Identification Bias on Perceptions of Political Speakers
Charlotte Nau & Craig Stewart
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two experiments investigated the effects of verbal aggression, specifically character and competence attacks, on perceptions of political speakers. Verbally aggressive political speakers were perceived as less communicatively appropriate and credible than nonaggressive speakers, and were less likely to win agreement with their messages. Some evidence was found that perceptions were biased in favor of those who share a political party identification with the message recipient, and that more strongly Republican Party–identified participants perceived more verbal aggression in messages with no character and competence attacks and considered verbally aggressive Republicans more tactful.
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Emily Vraga et al.
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Winter 2014, Pages 131-150
Abstract:
Shows blending humor and information are on the rise, and many such shows incorporate live studio audiences. Using two separate experimental studies, we test whether audience laughter on humorous political talk shows affects audience perceptions. We find that the effects of audience laughter depend on context, boosting perceptions of host and program credibility when a host is unknown, while reminding viewers of the comedic intentions and appeal of a known comedic host. If humor allows the hosts of comedic political talk shows more freedom to pointedly question their guests without turning off viewers, it may better engage and inform audiences.
http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/02/27/poq.nft082.short?rss=1