Ideological Intelligence
Hatred Takes An Ideologue: Recognizable Belief Patterns Lead to More Animosity and Disagreement
Tadeas Cely
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
An expanding body of evidence indicates that substantive disagreement fuels political animosity. However, pundits often use terms like ’ideological disagreement’ to describe a broad range of phenomena, diverging from how the concept is understood in classical Conversian literature on beliefs and their structures. This literature suggests that individuals do not uniformly hold or organize their opinions. Building on this foundation, I argue for a critical distinction between disagreements among ideologues -- who are opinionated and aligned in their beliefs -- and disagreements among others. I hypothesize that disagreements among ideologues result in higher expected disagreement and greater mutual animosity. To test this hypothesis, I conducted two survey experiments with representative U.S. samples (N = 2,000 each, in January 2024 and May 2024). Using evaluations of hypothetical profiles of fellow citizens, I demonstrate that opinionatedness and ideological alignment of beliefs significantly reduce interpersonal affinity in contexts of disagreement. In the first study, disagreements with centrists elicit nearly four times less animosity than disagreements with opinionated counterparts. Furthermore, ideological alignment generates almost three times more intense feelings at equivalent levels of substantive (dis)agreement. In the second study, I find that ideologically aligned individuals anticipate higher levels of disagreement with one another compared to non-ideologues, when they observe the same level of disagreement as them. This effect is particularly pronounced among ideologues capable of recognizing ideological patterns in others’ beliefs. These findings highlight the role of opinionatedness and recognizable belief structures, offering a new approach that is generalizable to other divided democracies.
Privacy and Polarization: An Inference-Based Framework
Tommaso Bondi, Omid Rafieian & Yunfei (Jesse) Yao
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Advances in behavioral targeting allow media firms to better monetize based on advertising. However, behavioral ad targeting requires consumer tracking, which has heightened privacy concerns among consumers and regulators. We examine how stricter privacy regulations that ban consumer tracking affect media firms’ content strategies and ideological positioning. We consider a model where media firms choose their ideological positioning and advertising, whereas ideologically heterogeneous consumers select their preferred content based on both their ideology and idiosyncratic taste shocks. We compare two salient informational environments: (1) behavioral ad targeting, where perfect inference about consumers is allowed, and (2) contextual ad targeting, where consumer tracking is banned due to privacy regulations, and media firms can only infer consumer types based on their media choice. We show that privacy regulations that ban behavioral ad targeting incentivize media firms to shift toward more extreme and polarizing positioning in order to draw better inferences about consumer types, even though the shift to more extreme ideological positions can hurt both demand and consumer welfare from content consumption. Compared with the monopoly case, competition increases firms’ inference motives and leads to more polarized content over a wider range of parameters due to an inferential complementarity effect arising from consumer self-selection. Our research uncovers a previously unexplored relationship between privacy and polarization, shedding light on the potential unintended consequences of privacy regulations in media markets.
Pandemics and Elections: Estimating the Net Effect of Pandemic Partisan Retrospection
Neil Hwang et al.
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do voters reward or punish elected officials for pandemics? Recent research on natural disasters finds evidence for partisan retrospection, which maintains that voters’ decisions to reward or punish incumbents following a disaster are influenced by whether or not the elected official is co-partisan. We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic similarly affected voters’ responses to reward or punish incumbents. We contend with increasing COVID-19 infection rates and deaths, voters supported incumbents who were co-partisan and opposed incumbents who were not co-partisan. We look for evidence of pandemic partisan retrospection by estimating the net effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2020 U.S. presidential and Senate elections. We find that voters were more likely to punish incumbents who were not co-partisan and more likely to reward incumbents who were co-partisan in counties with higher pandemic infection and death rates. Our results support pandemic partisan retrospection and suggest that, in the aggregate, the pandemic had an overall impact on voter choice similar to what occurs after natural disasters.
The dynamics of cohort effect in politics
Gilat Levy & Ronny Razin
Journal of Public Economics, July 2025
Abstract:
This paper investigates the dynamic ramifications of cohort effects on politics. We propose a theoretical framework that encompasses a dynamic social-learning model of politics, where cohort effects are endogenously derived from preceding generations’ political decisions. This process underscores the role of political experiences in shaping the beliefs of younger cohorts, which subsequently influence policy decisions as these individuals mature. We demonstrate how these dynamic intergenerational linkages lead to cyclical patterns of polarised and cohesive cohorts. In the proposed model, cohorts emerging during periods of political consensus display less familiarity with optimal policies, resulting, due to random external shocks, in high variance of public opinions. Conversely, cohorts maturing amidst polarisation and political turnover demonstrate greater knowledge about optimal policies, leading to more cohesive public opinions. Notably, our model suggests that transitory shocks can exert persistent influence on politics due to these dynamic linkages. We also present some suggestive evidence, using ANES surveys, showing that different cohorts’ opinions exhibit distinct levels of variance.
Donors and Dollars: Comparing the Policy Views of Donors and the Affluent
Michael Barber et al.
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are campaign donors simply affluent people who happen to give to campaigns, or do donors and the affluent differ in their policy views? The answer to this question shapes our understanding of the impact of money in politics and economic inequality more broadly. To answer this question, we conducted surveys of verified 2017-2018 donors, affluent individuals, and the general population. Comparing the preferences of copartisans reveals both parties’ donors have more ideologically extreme views on domestic policies than either the affluent or general public. On international issues, however, Democratic donors are more pro-internationalist than affluent and general public copartisans while Republican donors are similar to affluent copartisans. These differences are not attributable to demographic composition or level of political interest across the groups. Analyzing variation among donor-types, we find some types are indeed more likely to hold extreme views than others, but differences from the affluent persist regardless of whether the contributor gave to an out-of-state congressional race, donated a small amount, or recently gave to a presidential candidate.
Testing theories of political persuasion using AI
Lisa Argyle et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 6 May 2025
Abstract:
Despite its importance to society and many decades of research, key questions about the social and psychological processes of political persuasion remain unanswered, often due to data limitations. We propose that AI tools, specifically generative large language models (LLMs), can be used to address these limitations, offering important advantages in the study of political persuasion. In two preregistered online survey experiments, we demonstrate the potential of generative AI as a tool to study persuasion and provide important insights about the psychological and communicative processes that lead to increased persuasion. Specifically, we test the effects of four AI-generated counterattitudinal persuasive strategies, designed to test the effectiveness of messages that include customization (writing messages based on a receiver’s personal traits and beliefs), and elaboration (increased psychological engagement with the argument through interaction). We find that all four types of persuasive AI produce significant attitude change relative to the control and shift vote support for candidates espousing views consistent with the treatments. However, we do not find evidence that message customization via microtargeting or cognitive elaboration through interaction with the AI have much more persuasive effect than a single generic message. These findings have implications for different theories of persuasion, which we discuss. Finally, we find that although persuasive messages are able to moderate some people’s attitudes, they have inconsistent and weaker effects on the democratic reciprocity people grant to their political opponents. This suggests that attitude moderation (ideological depolarization) does not necessarily lead to increased democratic tolerance or decreased affective polarization.
Exploiting a Major Blunder to Study Policy Accountability: Trump and His Covid Stance in 2020
Eric Guntermann & Gabriel Lenz
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Most theories of democracy assume that voters punish politicians who pursue unpopular policies. However, empirical evidence supporting this claim remains elusive, partly because politicians strategically avoid adopting unpopular stances. The 2020 US presidential election offers a unique opportunity to investigate this phenomenon. Incumbent President Donald Trump publicly embraced unpopular positions on Covid-19, arguably the campaign’s most critical issue. Using panel survey data, we find many Trump supporters disagreed with his Covid-19 stances and preferred more aggressive government action, yet most remained unaware that his policies conflicted with their views even by the campaign’s end. Among those who recognized this contradiction, few defected; instead, many followed Trump, adjusting their own views to match his positions. Although our statistical power to detect voter defections is limited -- precisely because learning about his stance was uncommon -- Trump’s unpopular positions may still have been decisive given the narrow election margin. Broadly, voters’ failure to perceive or acknowledge conflicts between their policy views and those of favored candidates constrains their ability to hold politicians accountable, highlighting a critical challenge for democratic accountability.
Outgroup Avoidance
Chagai Weiss, Alexandra Siegel & Alexandra Scacco
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Encouraging engagement with outgroup perspectives is a popular strategy to improve intergroup relations. But in deeply divided societies, individuals often actively avoid outgroup members. In a Facebook field experiment, we embedded Palestinian posts in Jewish Israelis’ Facebook timelines for a period of 14 days. We find no effect on attitudes toward the outgroup and a modest decrease in subsequent consumption of outgroup content, a pattern we attribute to participants’ avoidance of constructive engagement. To better understand this avoidance, we conducted a set of survey-embedded behavioral tasks. Results suggest that outgroup avoidance online is widespread, associated with outgroup prejudice, explained by feelings of discomfort, anger, mistrust in outgroups, and pessimism, and challenging to overcome. Our findings indicate that avoidance is a barrier to constructive intergroup engagement in naturalistic settings, rendering many interventions that may be effective in controlled environments difficult to implement or scale in practice.
Less Partisan but No More Competent: Expressive Responding and Fact-Opinion Discernment
Matthew Graham & Omer Yair
Public Opinion Quarterly, Spring 2025, Pages 7-30
Abstract:
Research suggests that partisanship interferes with people’s ability to distinguish between factually verifiable statements and opinion statements. We investigate the degree to which observed partisan bias in fact-opinion discernment is due to expressive responding: partisans may claim that congenial opinions are facts, and that uncongenial facts are opinions, because they want to express their partisan attitude toward the statement. Four experiments (total N = 10,614) show that expressive responding substantially inflates measured partisan differences in fact/opinion classifications, by more than 50 percent in the United States and about 30 percent in Israel. Despite this, we find little evidence that our treatments increased the proportion of correct classifications. In other words, although expressive responding makes people look more partisan than they really are, it does not lead surveys to underestimate the average person’s ability to distinguish fact from opinion. These results are compatible because of a rarely noted implication of expressive responding theory: when the correct answer is party congenial, expressive responding makes people look more competent than they really are. Notably, expressive responding emerged despite the survey instrument’s instructions not to respond in this manner. This suggests that approaches that rely on instructions or requests may be too weak to eliminate expressive responding.
The Growing Conservatism of White Veterans Since the 1970s
Alair MacLean & Steven Cassidy
Armed Forces & Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we assess how the political attitudes of veterans compared to those of nonveterans have changed historically. We draw hypotheses from research and theory suggesting that veterans are relatively conservative due to either selection or socialization. We use General Social Survey data from 1974-1985 and 2010s, which include questions about service length, conservative identity, party affiliation, and beliefs about government spending. The analyses show differences across eras, with data from more recent years showing that veterans are generally more conservative than nonveterans. These differences may stem from selection -- specifically, the transition from the draft era, when between a quarter and more than half of eligible men served, to a volunteer force, when only a much smaller share do so. The article also presents evidence consistent with socialization: veterans who served for longer periods tend to be more conservative than both nonveterans and those who served for shorter periods.