Siding
Partisan Cohorts, Polarization, and the Gingrich Senators
Jordan Ragusa
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although the “Gingrich Senators” thesis solves a vexing issue, a broader theoretical question remains: Why does the House have a polarizing effect on its members that seems to persist even after a representative wins election to the Senate? In the first section, I propose that lawmakers learn partisan norms in the House and simply continue those extreme behavioral routines after switching chambers. And in the second part, I test possible sources of this effect. Results show that senators who came from the House display greater ideological extremism if they (a) served in the House within an extreme partisan cohort and (b) won election to the Senate after representing a partisan district. In contrast, serving within a polarized chamber and during periods of divided party control have no long-term effects on a senator’s ideological extremism. Robustness checks reveal that the effect of a senator’s House partisan cohort persists even when we control for his/her ideological extremism before winning election to the House as well as selection effects caused by electoral dynamics. Additional analyses show that the partisan cohort effect is the largest determinant of partisan learning, exists throughout most of congressional history, is strongest when the parties are homogeneous, and persists for much of a senator’s career. As a whole, the results show that the House’s effect on Senate polarization is not due to a single person or a function of chamber polarization. Rather, the “Housification of the Senate” is a consequence of cohort socializing effects and is observable throughout congressional history.
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What Drives Media Bias? New Evidence From Recent Newspaper Closures
Cagdas Agirdas
Journal of Media Economics, Summer 2015, Pages 123-141
Abstract:
With the advent of the Internet, many U.S. metropolitan areas have seen newspaper closures due to declining revenues. This provides the researcher with an opportunity to analyze the microeconomic sources of media bias. This article uses a large panel dataset of newspaper archives for 99 newspapers over 240 months (1990–2009). The author found that, after controlling for the unemployment rate, the change in unemployment rate, and the political preferences of surrounding metropolitan area, conservative newspapers report 17.4% more unemployment news when the President is a Democrat rather than a Republican, before the closure of a rival newspaper in the same media market. This effect is 12.8% for liberal newspapers. After the closure, these numbers are 3.5% and 1.1%, respectively. This moderation of media bias after closure of a rival newspaper is robust to the inclusion of newspaper size, newspaper fixed-effects or metropolitan area fixed-effects as controls. The author also found that newspapers in smaller metropolitan areas have a larger moderation in their bias. Findings provide support for theories in which media bias is demand-driven, as surviving newspapers aim to increase their sales by gaining the former readers of a closed newspaper in the same media market.
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Unequal Incomes, Ideology and Gridlock: How Rising Inequality Increases Political Polarization
John Voorheis, Nolan McCarty & Boris Shor
University of Oregon Working Paper, August 2015
Abstract:
Income inequality and political polarization have both increased dramatically in the United States over the last several decades. A small but growing literature has suggested that these two phenomena may be related and mutually reinforcing: income inequality leads to political polarization, and the gridlock induced by polarization reduces the ability of politicians to alleviate rising inequality. Scholars, however, have not credibly identified the causal relationships. Using newly available data on polarization in state legislatures and state-level income inequality, we extend previous analyses to the US state level. Employing a relatively underutilized instrumental variables identification strategy allows us to obtain the first credible causal estimates of the effect of inequality on polarization within states. We find that income inequality has a large, positive and statistically significant effect on political polarization. Economic inequality appears to cause state Democratic parties to become more liberal. Inequality, however, moves state legislatures to the right overall. Such findings suggest that the effect of income inequality impacts polarization by replacing moderate Democratic legislators with Republicans.
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Beyond Survey Self-Reports: Using Physiology to Tap Political Orientations
Michael Wagner et al.
International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Autumn 2015, Pages 303-317
Abstract:
Some aspects of our attitudes are composed of things outside of our consciousness. However, traditional survey research does not use measurements that are able to tap into these aspects of public opinion. We describe, recommend, and demonstrate a procedure by which non-self-reported responses can be measured in order to test whether these responses have independent effects on individuals’ preferences. We use one of the better-known physiological measures — electrodermal activity or skin conductance — and illustrate its potential by reporting our own study of attitudes toward President Barack Obama. We find that both self-reported emotional responses and physiological responses to Obama’s image independently correlate with variation in the intensity of attitudes regarding his job approval and his central policy proposal: health-care reform.
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Richard Ebstein et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 August 2015
Abstract:
Twin and family studies suggest that political attitudes are partially determined by an individual's genotype. The dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) exon III repeat region that has been extensively studied in connection with human behaviour, is a plausible candidate to contribute to individual differences in political attitudes. A first United States study provisionally identified this gene with political attitude along a liberal–conservative axis albeit contingent upon number of friends. In a large sample of 1771 Han Chinese university students in Singapore, we observed a significant main effect of association between the DRD4 exon III variable number of tandem repeats and political attitude. Subjects with two copies of the 4-repeat allele (4R/4R) were significantly more conservative. Our results provided evidence for a role of the DRD4 gene variants in contributing to individual differences in political attitude particularly in females and more generally suggested that associations between individual genes, and neurochemical pathways, contributing to traits relevant to the social sciences can be provisionally identified.
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Ideological Migration in Partisan Strongholds: Evidence from a Quantitative Case Study
Torben Lütjen & Robert Matschoß
The Forum, July 2015, Pages 311–346
Abstract:
Geographic sorting of the electorate along partisan lines has received increased attention by scholars following the publication of Bill Bishop’s and Robert Cushing’s The Big Sort (2008). The evidence presented in this paper stems from an original public opinion survey in two Wisconsin landslide counties. We find that the majority among migrants to these partisan strongholds have shared the partisanship of the respective political majority. Using logistic regression analysis, we show that partisanship as well as specific lifestyle preferences mattered in people’s decisions to migrate into these partisan strongholds. We also find that partisanship is a factor in potential out-migration: residential satisfaction is lower among the respective political minorities, and relevant shares of the political minority say they consider moving away for political reasons. Among the members of the minority who consider leaving the county about one third say they do so because they dislike the politics of the people there. Our findings on the two counties, each a prototypical Democratic and Republican stronghold, lend further support to the Big Sort hypothesis.
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A "Sorted" America? Geographic Polarization and Value Overlap in the American Electorate
Ryan Strickler
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: Geographic political polarization is an increasingly salient topic of academic and popular discourse. Using Bill Bishop's bestseller The Big Sort as a foil, this article tests the claim that America has split into “ideologically inbred” “red” and “blue” communities.
Method: Drawing on Bishop's concept of “landslide” Democratic and Republican counties, the article uses survey data to measure the overlap in opinion between respondents from opposing “landslide” counties. This is done both graphically and with a quantitative measure developed by Levendusky and Pope (2011).
Results: Across economic, social, and cultural value dimensions, there is vastly more common ground than difference between respondents from “landslide” Democratic and Republican counties.
Conclusion: Hyperbolic claims of a “sorted” country aside, geographic polarization in the United States is limited at best. Partisan polarization could be a real and consequential phenomenon in the electorate, but it has little geographic, “red versus blue” manifestation.
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The Dynamics of State Policy Liberalism, 1936–2014
Devin Caughey & Christopher Warshaw
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Applying a dynamic latent-variable model to data on 148 policies collected over eight decades (1936–2014), we produce the first yearly measure of the policy liberalism of U.S. states. Our dynamic measure of state policy liberalism marks an important advance over existing measures, almost all of which are purely cross-sectional and thus cannot be used to study policy change. We find that, in the aggregate, the policy liberalism of U.S. states steadily increased between the 1930s and 1970s and then largely plateaued. The policy liberalism of most states has remained stable in relative terms, though several states have shifted considerably over time. We also find surprisingly little evidence of multidimensionality in state policy outputs. Our new estimates of state policy liberalism have broad application to the study of political development, representation, accountability, and other important issues in political science.
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Tweeting From Left to Right: Is Online Political Communication More Than an Echo Chamber?
Pablo Barberá et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and nonpolitical issues, explored whether online communication resembles an “echo chamber” (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a “national conversation.” We observed that information was exchanged primarily among individuals with similar ideological preferences in the case of political issues (e.g., 2012 presidential election, 2013 government shutdown) but not many other current events (e.g., 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2014 Super Bowl). Discussion of the Newtown shootings in 2012 reflected a dynamic process, beginning as a national conversation before transforming into a polarized exchange. With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination; this is an important asymmetry with respect to the structure of communication that is consistent with psychological theory and research bearing on ideological differences in epistemic, existential, and relational motivation. Overall, we conclude that previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.
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Twitter Language Use Reflects Psychological Differences between Democrats and Republicans
Karolina Sylwester & Matthew Purver
PLoS ONE, September 2015
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that political leanings correlate with various psychological factors. While surveys and experiments provide a rich source of information for political psychology, data from social networks can offer more naturalistic and robust material for analysis. This research investigates psychological differences between individuals of different political orientations on a social networking platform, Twitter. Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that the language used by liberals emphasizes their perception of uniqueness, contains more swear words, more anxiety-related words and more feeling-related words than conservatives’ language. Conversely, we predicted that the language of conservatives emphasizes group membership and contains more references to achievement and religion than liberals’ language. We analysed Twitter timelines of 5,373 followers of three Twitter accounts of the American Democratic and 5,386 followers of three accounts of the Republican parties’ Congressional Organizations. The results support most of the predictions and previous findings, confirming that Twitter behaviour offers valid insights to offline behaviour.
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Americans' Attitudes Toward the Political Parties and the Party System
Howard Gold
Public Opinion Quarterly, Fall 2015, Pages 803-819
Abstract:
Drawing on survey data from ANES, Gallup, Pew, and other polls, this article examines attitudes toward the parties and the party system from 1996 to 2014. A previous Poll Trends analysis of the parties, through 1995, found antipathy toward the party system but not toward the parties themselves. The data since 1996 demonstrate that extreme discontent now extends beyond the party system to the Republican and Democratic parties. The data also show that Americans have grown more likely to see sharp differences between the major parties, and to perceive both parties as too ideological. As for the party system, Americans express a high degree of ambivalence. On one hand, many believe that the major parties do not do an adequate job of representing the people, and that the country needs a third political party. On the other hand, there is skepticism that a third party would improve the quality of American democracy. Surveys continually register almost no support or even willingness to seriously consider support for a third-party candidate.
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Elite Polarization and Public Opinion: How Polarization Is Communicated and Its Effects
Joshua Robison & Kevin Mullinix
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
Elite polarization has reshaped American politics and is an increasingly salient aspect of news coverage within the United States. As a consequence, a burgeoning body of research attempts to unravel the effects of elite polarization on the mass public. However, we know very little about how polarization is communicated to the public by news media. We report the results of one of the first content analyses to delve into the nature of news coverage of elite polarization. We show that such coverage is predominantly critical of polarization. Moreover, we show that unlike coverage of politics focused on individual politicians, coverage of elite polarization principally frames partisan divisions as rooted in the values of the parties rather than strategic concerns. We build on these novel findings with two survey experiments exploring the influence of these features of polarization news coverage on public attitudes. In our first study, we show that criticism of polarization leads partisans to more positively evaluate the argument offered by their non-preferred party, increases support for bi-partisanship, but ultimately does not change the extent to which partisans follow their party’s policy endorsements. In our second study, we show that Independents report significantly less political interest, trust, and efficacy when polarization is made salient and this is particularly evident when a cause of polarization is mentioned. These studies have important implications for our understanding of the consequences of elite polarization — and how polarization is communicated — for public opinion and political behavior in democratic politics.
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Partisanship and Confidence in the Vote Count: Evidence from U.S. National Elections since 2000
Michael Sances & Charles Stewart
Electoral Studies, December 2015, Pages 176–188
Abstract:
To what degree are evaluations of political processes affected by political outcomes? In this paper, we explore this question by combining 30 national U.S. surveys from 2000 to 2012, improving on previous analyses in three ways. First, our measure asks directly about the counting of votes, rather than broader democratic processes. Second, we control for endogeneity by comparing the same respondents pre- and post-election, and by comparing respondents whose preferred candidate barely won to those whose candidate barely lost. Third, we reveal previously unknown within-country variation in this effect. We find losers are significantly more likely to believe votes were improperly counted, an effect that has grown over time and that is stronger for more remote levels of government.
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The Educative Effects of Extreme Television Media
Benjamin Taylor
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates whether exposure to extreme television media informs citizens about politics. Using lab experiments with both student and non-student samples, I find that extreme media produce higher levels of political knowledge and that they also produce higher levels of negative affect among viewers compared with control groups. I also show that extreme media are at least as informative as traditional news. This research adds to the growing literature on media effects in a polarized media environment, showing that extreme television media can have a beneficial impact on at least one important area of U.S. politics: citizen competence. To account for external validity and popular conceptions on extreme media’s non-informative nature, I use cross-sectional data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey finding that extreme television viewership correlates with greater political knowledge, while controlling for other known predictors.
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David Jones
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars of political parties and elections around the globe have devoted extensive study toward understanding how party polarization affects the criteria voters use to determine their party preferences in elections. In American politics, previous empirical research suggests that congressional job performance ratings do not affect public attitudes toward parties and therefore have no significant ramifications for the electoral fortunes of parties. Building on the existing literature from American and comparative traditions, I demonstrate that congressional performance evaluations can be important for American parties and elections, but this depends on the extent of party polarization in Congress. First, when congressional parties are more distinct, congressional performance evaluations have a greater effect on the relative favorability of the majority party brand: when citizens like how Congress is performing under the leadership of the majority party, this boosts the favorability of that party overall. Second, because partisan polarization increases the effect of congressional performance evaluations on party brand favorability, partisan polarization also increases the role played by congressional performance evaluations in a variety of elections outside of Congress. These results inform our understanding of public opinion, parties, and elections, both in the U.S. and from a comparative perspective.
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Polarization as a Function of Citizen Predispositions and Exposure to News on the Internet
David Tewksbury & Julius Matthew Riles
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Summer 2015, Pages 381-398
Abstract:
Observers of democratic polities decry a seeming increase in social and political polarization. This article outlines the conditions under which Internet-based news exposure can facilitate polarization. Analyses of data from a nationally representative United States panel study reveal that frequency of news consumption over the Internet can widen disagreements between Democrats and Republicans over a wide range of social and political issues. The results reveal few signs of a similar Internet news exposure effect for disagreement linked to race and income. These findings point to some possible mechanisms of, and limitations to, processes driving social and political polarization.