Talking Past Each Other
Generically partisan: Polarization in political communication
Gustavo Novoa et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 21 November 2023
Abstract:
American political parties continue to grow more polarized, but the extent of ideological polarization among the public is much less than the extent of perceived polarization (what the ideological gap is believed to be). Perceived polarization is concerning because of its link to interparty hostility, but it remains unclear what drives this phenomenon. We propose that a tendency for individuals to form broad generalizations about groups on the basis of inconsistent evidence may be partly responsible. We study this tendency by measuring the interpretation, endorsement, and recall of category-referring statements, also known as generics (e.g., “Democrats favor affirmative action”). In study 1 (n = 417), perceived polarization was substantially greater than actual polarization. Further, participants endorsed generics as long as they were true more often of the target party (e.g., Democrats favor affirmative action) than of the opposing party (e.g., Republicans favor affirmative action), even when they believed such statements to be true for well below 50% of the relevant party. Study 2 (n = 928) found that upon receiving information from political elites, people tended to recall these statements as generic, regardless of whether the original statement was generic or not. Study 3 (n = 422) found that generic statements regarding new political information led to polarized judgments and did so more than nongeneric statements. Altogether, the data indicate a tendency toward holding mental representations of political claims that exaggerate party differences. These findings suggest that the use of generic language, common in everyday speech, enables inferential errors that exacerbate perceived polarization.
Support for Gun Reform in the United States: The Interactive Relationship Between Partisanship and Trust in the Federal Government
Michael Hansen & Mila Seppälä
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies find that trust in the government is statistically related to support for gun control laws in the United States. Another finding in the literature is that Democratic partisans support gun restrictions at a statistically higher percentage than do Republicans -- with the reverse relationship existing for loosening gun laws. While a recent study did find an interactive relationship between trust in government and political ideology (Ryan et al. in Polit Behav 44(2):725–748, 10.1007/s11109-020-09633-2, 2022), no study explores whether the impact of trust in government on support for gun reform is, in fact, a function of partisanship. In this study, we test whether there is an interactive relationship between trust in the government and partisan identification in predicting support for gun reform. Using the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), we estimate logistic regression models that find an interactive effect between trust and partisanship. For Republicans, an increase in trust in government leads to a dramatic increase in support for gun control proposals, and a substantial decrease in support for gun rights expansion. For Democrats, trust in the government has almost no impact on support for gun reform. Further, we find that political ideology has only a small substantive relationship with attitudes on gun reform when interacted with both partisanship and trust in the federal government. The practical takeaway is that to increase support for gun control among Republicans, advocates must also recognize the role of governmental distrust in attitude formation among this partisan group.
Polarization and Policy Design
Giovanni Andreottola & Christopher Li
Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Voters in the United States and elsewhere are becoming increasingly polarized. Does polarization lead to more-divisive policies? We examine this question in a model of distributive politics and find that polarization can have a nonmonotonic effect on equity. Endogenous political turnover and policy uncertainty play key roles for our results. We also find that polarization may motivate politicians to improve the efficiency of policies and that proportional systems may induce less-equitable policies compared with majoritarian systems.
My kind of people: Political polarization, ideology, and firm location
Benjamin Barber & Daniel Blake
Strategic Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
With increased political polarization, Americans are displaying more animus across, and affinity within, ideological identity groups. We argue this dynamic incentivizes firms to minimize ideological misalignments across their workforce by locating new establishments in areas that are ideologically proximate to their current operations. We further argue that the desire to minimize ideological distance to new establishments is stronger in knowledge-intensive industries and young organizations. We find support for these arguments through the analysis of over 220,000 new establishment openings from 2009 to 2014. Critically, we find the effect of ideological distance on location is stronger when societal polarization is high. Our theory, and findings, contribute to several literatures and advance our understanding of the impact of polarization on strategy.
Selective Memory and Perceived Political Polarization
Phoebe Cai
Harvard Working Paper, November 2023
Abstract:
Social scientists have documented that U.S. voters on both sides of the political spectrum hold exaggerated beliefs about the extremity of the attitudes held by both Democrats and Republicans. Such misperceptions are linked to higher levels of political engagement and affective polarization. To understand the drivers of these misperceptions, I run an online experiment on Prolific comparing subjects' memory of extreme and moderate statements, before and after a distraction task. I find that extreme political views are over-represented in memory, leading individuals to exaggerate their perception of the average view on each side. This effect does not arise when participants instead view statements from an apolitical domain, suggesting that the results are driven by specific features of the political statements. A second experiment on Twitter provides ecological validity, finding that these memory-based distortions in perceptions of political beliefs also arise when subjects view tweets.
Let the people’s will prevail: Self-uncertainty and authoritarianism predict support for populism
Oluf Gøtzsche-Astrup & Michael Hogg
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed a widespread rise of right-wing populism -- an ideology maintaining that the will of the people is supreme, but is subverted by antagonistic elites. Drawing on uncertainty-identity theory, three studies (total N = 5,882) tested the hypothesis that uncertainty would only strengthen support for populism among low authoritarian respondents. Studies 1 and 2 were secondary analyses of American National Election Survey (ANES) 2012 and 2016 data. They supported our key hypotheses in explaining support for the populist American Tea Party (Study 1, N = 1,917), and support for right-wing populist ideology and voting preference for Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton (Study 2, N = 2,520). Study 3 (N = 1,445) experimentally manipulated self-uncertainty to allow a causal interpretation, and focused on right-wing populist ideology. The results are discussed in terms of their contribution to uncertainty-identity theory, and their societal relevance in an environment of growing populism.
How does American public opinion react to overt anti-democratic behavior by politicians? Quasi-experimental evidence from the January 6 insurrection
Sam van Noort
Electoral Studies, December 2023
Abstract:
Do American politicians that clearly violate democratic norms lose significant public support, or does public opinion impose little constraint on anti-democratic politicians? Existing studies have examined this fundamental question using hypothetical survey experiments which, while valuable, suffer from ecological validity and weak treatment concerns. I overcome these problems by studying a novel quasi-experiment created by the fact that Donald Trump’s incitement of the January 6 insurrection unexpectedly occurred while Gallup was conducting a nationally representative public opinion survey using random digit dialing. Comparing party identification among respondents that happened to be interviewed just before, and just after, January 6, 2021 suggests that the Republican Party retained 78% of its pre-insurrection support base during the first 1.5 weeks. Even this modest loss was short-lived -- in February 2021 the Republican Party already stood at 93% of its pre-insurrection support level. While not zero, the public constraint on anti-democratic behavior is remarkably limited.
Polarization and Place-Based Representation in US State Legislatures
Charles Hunt & Stella Rouse
Legislative Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent scholarship has shown that legislators with deeper local roots and other preexisting place-based attachments to their districts enjoy far-reaching electoral advantages over their more “carpetbagging” colleagues. In this article, we consider how local roots, and its intersection with legislative polarization, influences legislative behavior, using a dataset of nearly 5,000 state legislators and novel measures of their local roots. We hypothesize that state legislators with deep local roots in their districts should be less ideologically polarized than their less-rooted colleagues. This is precisely what we find. Using Shor-McCarty ideology measures, we show that the most locally rooted legislators are 16% less ideologically extreme than their unrooted counterparts. These effects are comparable to or exceed those of district partisanship, chamber seniority, or other legislator characteristics. Collectively, these findings show that legislators’ local roots not only affect their electoral fortunes, but also have major implications for legislative activity and party polarization.
Who is To Blame? Partisans’ Use of Blame Spreading in Reaction to Unfair or Dishonest Behavior
Amy Meli
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Blame attribution research suggests partisans acknowledge evidence that portrays copartisans negatively but blame externalities for negative events. This study identifies another blame attribution pattern. When people observe unfair/dishonest behavior by a copartisan, instead of shifting blame entirely to others, they engage in blame-spreading. I conduct two tests: a survey of undergraduate students who watched part of a 2020 Presidential debate and a survey experiment of a random sample of adults that randomizes the party affiliation of the debate participant engaging in unfair/dishonest behavior. When the unfair actor is a copartisan, people blame both participants equally. When the unfair actor is in the out-party, people blame the out-party actor. These findings suggest individuals acknowledge undesirable behavior among copartisans, but seek to justify it by identifying blame-worthy behavior by others, thus providing an additional mechanism in motivated reasoning whereby individuals acknowledge events while finding a way to justify such behavior.