Blues and Reds
Patterns of Affective Polarization toward Parties and Leaders across the Democratic World
Andres Reiljan et al.
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research indicates that affective polarization pervades contemporary democracies worldwide. Although some studies identify party leaders as polarizing agents, affective polarization has been predominantly conceptualized as a product of in-/out-party feelings. This study compares levels of party affective polarization (PAP) and leader affective polarization (LAP) cross-nationally, using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Applying like-dislike scales and an identical index to both concepts, we reveal that while the two strongly correlate, LAP is systematically lower than PAP. The United States emerges as an exceptional case, being the only country where LAP significantly exceeds PAP. Drawing on regime input/output and institutions as theoretical building blocks, we explore cross-national variations and show that the relative strength of LAP vis-à-vis PAP is increased by presidential regime type, poor government performance, and low party system fragmentation. The findings of this study contribute to the thriving research on affective polarization and personalization of politics.
Economic insecurity and political preferences
Walter Bossert et al.
Oxford Economic Papers, July 2023, Pages 802–825
Abstract:
Economic insecurity has attracted growing attention, but there is no consensus as to its definition. We characterize a class of individual economic-insecurity measures based on the time profile of economic resources. We apply this economic-insecurity measure to political-preference data in the USA, UK, and Germany. Conditional on current economic resources, economic insecurity is associated with both greater political participation (support for a party or the intention to vote) and more support for conservative parties. In particular, economic insecurity predicts greater support for both Donald Trump before the 2016 US Presidential election and the UK leaving the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Partisan (A)Symmetries in Hardball
William Kidd
University of California Working Paper, May 2023
Abstract:
Constitutional hardball is when partisan actors engage in legal tactics that violate democratic norms for political advantage. Despite both political parties having the material motivations for hardball, the Republican Party engages in hardball more than the Democratic Party. This asymmetry in elite behavior could reflect differences in support for hardball among each sides’ coalitions. However, I draw on a long line of social science research to argue that both white and non-white partisans should be similarly disposed towards hardball. This article then marshals data from the American National Election Survey (ANES) and original surveys to test that argument. In support of my hypotheses, I find white and non-white members of both parties have similar levels of support and similar motivations for hardball. The real-world asymmetry we see is therefore likely due to differences among elites, not voters. If Democratic elites pursue more aggressive tactics, their base should follow them.
Political Attitudes and Disease Threat: Regional Pathogen Stress Is Associated With Conservative Ideology Only for Older Individuals
Gordon Brown et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
What environmental factors are associated with individual differences in political ideology, and do such associations change over time? We examine whether reductions in pathogen prevalence in U.S. states over the past 60 years are associated with reduced associations between parasite stress and conservatism. We report a positive association between infection levels and conservative ideology in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. However, this correlation reduces from the 1980s onwards. These results suggest that the ecological influence of infectious diseases may be larger for older people who grew up (or whose parents grew up) during earlier time periods. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the political affiliation of 45,000 Facebook users, and find a positive association between self-reported political affiliation and regional pathogen stress for older (>40 years) but not younger individuals. It is concluded that the influence of environmental pathogen stress on ideology may have reduced over time.
Unsubscribed and Undemanding: Partisanship and the Minimal Effects of a Field Experiment Encouraging Local News Consumption
Daniel Hopkins & Tori Gorton
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, July 2023
Abstract:
Local newspapers convey extensive subnational political information but have dwindling audiences. In a nationalized and polarized information environment, can online interventions increase state/local news consumption and with what effects? We explore this question via a pre-registered experiment randomizing Pennsylvania residents (n=5,059) to staggered interventions encouraging news consumption from leading state newspapers. 2,529 individuals were offered free online subscriptions, but only 44 subscribed; we find little evidence of treatment effects on knowledge, engagement, or attitudes. We then administered a second treatment element -- promoting subnational news directly via Facebook feeds -- with a higher application rate but similarly limited impacts. Observational analyses of these respondents and separate national samples show that Democratic political partisanship has come to predict local newspaper subscriptions. Contemporary local newspapers may face a demand-side dilemma: the engaged citizens who formerly read them now prefer national, partisan content.
Trial by ideology: Ideological differences in responses to errors in determining guilt in the United States
Stephanie Mallinas, Douglas Kievit & Ashby Plant
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In many domains of social life, people risk wrongly accusing an innocent person (i.e., false alarm error) or failing to catch a guilty person (i.e., miss error). Do liberals and conservatives differ in their concern about these types of errors? Across six studies, we found that conservatives were more bothered by miss errors than liberals, whereas liberals were more bothered by false alarm errors than conservatives. These associations were driven by social as opposed to economic ideology (Studies 1b-3b). Further, conservatives were more bothered by less threatening miss errors than liberals, but liberals and conservatives were equally bothered by clearly threatening miss errors (Studies 2a & 2b), suggesting that threat is a mechanism for the association between conservatism and miss concern. In Study 3a, social conservatism related to increased concern about miss errors when they occurred in authoritative contexts, but not when they occurred in authority-void contexts. In contrast, social liberalism related to increased concern about false alarm errors regardless of authoritative context. Studies 3a and 3b also demonstrated that belief in retributive justice, moralization of respect for authority, and threat sensitivity statistically mediated the association between social conservatism and miss concern, whereas moralization of fairness and egalitarian concerns mediated the association between social liberalism and false alarm concern. Together these studies provide a nuanced examination of the role of political ideology in responses to errors in determinations of guilt.
How Political Content in Us Weekly Can Reduce Polarized Affect Toward Elected Officials
Jennifer Wolak
PS: Political Science & Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Politicians invest a lot of energy into managing their image, with the hope that the public views them favorably. In sharing details about themselves, elected officials want to be seen as people, not just as politicians. Are these efforts successful? I explore this question using an experiment inspired by a column in the celebrity entertainment magazine Us Weekly. I find that politicians who share nonpolitical autobiographical details about themselves secure warmer evaluations from the public. Reading this type of personalizing information also can contribute to ratings of elected officials that are less polarized by partisanship. While personalizing information boosts favorability toward politicians across party lines, members of the opposing party are particularly likely to report warmer affect toward the politician about whom they read. This suggests that this type of soft news coverage has the potential to depolarize partisan evaluations of politicians.
(A)symmetries in Memory and Directed Forgetting of Political Stimuli
Andrew Franks, Hajime Otani & Gavin Roupe
Experimental Psychology, June 2023, Pages 68–80
Abstract:
As political information becomes increasingly prevalent in all forms of media, it is becoming increasingly important to understand when and why biases in remembering such information occur. Using an item-method directed forgetting procedure, we conducted two online experiments to determine the efficacy of admonitions to forget politically charged stimuli that were either congruent or incongruent with participants’ political beliefs. Participants viewed slideshows wherein each item combined the face of a famous politician (Donald Trump or Joe Biden) with a word that was positive, negative, or neutral in emotional valence. Each slide was followed by an instruction to remember or forget. After a brief filler task, a recognition test assessed their memory for both remember and forget slides and (in Experiment 2) assessed their beliefs about the truth of each word/face pairing and beliefs about the accuracy of their memory. The results showed that for both liberal and conservative participants, politically congruent stimuli were more conducive to recognition memory and more resistant to directed forgetting than politically incongruent or neutral stimuli. There were small asymmetries wherein conservatives showed greater biases in memory and other cognitive measures. We discuss possible explanations of the results and their implications.
The Career Consequences of Workplace Protest Participation: Theory and Evidence from the NFL “Take a Knee” Movement
Alexandra Rheinhardt, Ethan Poskanzer & Forrest Briscoe
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite recognizing potential ramifications for employees who protest in the workplace, researchers rarely explore the career consequences that stem from such instances of workplace protest participation. We integrated research on employee activism, workplace deviance, and careers to theorize that workplace protest represents a perceived deviation from workplace norms that can influence an individual’s organizational and labor market mobility outcomes. We investigated this premise with the 2016 National Football League “take a knee” protests as a strategic research setting. The results indicate that protesting is associated with an increase in organizational exit although this effect is moderated by the degree to which the organization is sensitive to the underlying social movement (with an organization’s movement sensitivity operationalized with a four-part index composed of the team’s managers, personnel decision makers, owners, and customers). Protesting also is associated with labor market sorting across organizations as players who protest are more likely to make subsequent transitions to more movement-sensitive teams compared with players who do not protest. Overall, our findings offer contributions for research on employee activism, workplace deviance, and careers.
Can ❤s Change Minds? Social Media Endorsements and Policy Preferences
Pierluigi Conzo et al.
Social Media + Society, June 2023
Abstract:
We investigate the effect of social media endorsements (likes, retweets, shares) on individuals’ policy preferences. In two pre-registered online experiments (N = 1,384), we exposed participants to non-neutral policy messages about the COVID-19 pandemic (emphasizing either public health or economic activity as a policy priority) while varying the level of endorsements of these messages. Our experimental treatment did not result in aggregate changes to policy views. However, our analysis indicates that active social media users did respond to the variation in engagement metrics. In particular, we find a strong positive treatment effect concentrated on a minority of individuals who correctly answered a factual manipulation check regarding the endorsements. Our results suggest that though only a fraction of individuals appear to pay conscious attention to endorsement metrics, they may be influenced by these social cues.
Commemorating local victims of past atrocities and far-right support over time
Oguzhan Turkoglu, Ruth Ditlmann & Berenike Firestone
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 11 July 2023
Abstract:
Does public remembrance of past atrocities lead to decreased support for far-right parties today? Initiatives commemorating past atrocities aim to make visible the victims and crimes committed against them. This runs counter to revisionist actors who attempt to downplay or deny atrocities and victims. Memorials for victims might complicate such attempts and reduce support for revisionist actors. Yet, little empirical evidence exists on whether that happens. In this study, we examine whether exposure to local memorials that commemorate victims of atrocities reduces support for a revisionist far-right party. Our empirical case is the Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”) memorial in Berlin, Germany. It commemorates victims and survivors of Nazi persecution in front of their last freely chosen place of residence. We employ time-series cross-sectional analyses and a discontinuity design using a panel dataset that matches the location and date of placement of new Stolpersteine with the election results from seven elections (2013 to 2021) at the level of polling station areas. We find that, on average, the presence of Stolpersteine is associated with a 0.96%-point decrease in the far-right vote share in the following election. Our study suggests that local memorials that make past atrocities visible have implications for political behavior in the present.