On Sides
Why moderate voters choose extreme candidates: Voter uncertainty as a driver of elite polarization
Minjae Kim, Daniel DellaPosta & Liam Essig
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Representative democracy depends on elected officials reflecting voters' policy preferences. Yet, US elected officials are more ideologically extreme than even the voters from their own party. This disparity is especially puzzling in light of recent studies reinforcing the view that voters are highly motivated by policy preferences and ideological fit when selecting among candidates. Using both agent-based computational models and an online vignette experiment, we uncover a novel mechanism through which candidates who rigidly back the party's ideological priorities, even when doing so is unpopular among the party's own voters, may paradoxically benefit because partisan voters under conditions of uncertainty infer that such candidates are also likelier than more moderate and representative candidates to support the party's other (more popular) positions. This dynamic alone can produce a world with moderately partisan voters but extreme politicians, not despite but precisely because of those voters' motivation to see their (relatively moderate) policy preferences reflected by their elected representatives.
Clarifying the diploma divide: The growing importance of higher education for political identity
Michael Prinzing & Michael Vazquez
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Higher education is widely believed to have a liberalizing effect on students, yet empirical findings are mixed. In two studies (total N = 483,885), we investigated the "diploma divide" in the United States. In the past half-century, we found that adults with more education have consistently held more left-leaning views on social but not economic issues. Before the 2010s, however, there were no meaningful, educational differences in the degree to which people identified as liberal versus conservative. In the years since, college graduates have increasingly identified as liberal, while those with some or no college education remained steady. Moreover, in the mid-1990s, students did not come to identify as more left-leaning during their time in higher education. However, they have increasingly done so in the years since. Such within-person changes differ across fields of study, demographics, and other individual characteristics, but are minimally related to the kinds of institutions that students attend. Overall, these findings reveal a striking change in the relationship between higher education and political identity. They also undermine sweeping claims about liberalizing effects of education, calling instead for fine-grained theories about how, when, and for whom attending higher education affects which aspects of ideology.
Ideological (a)Symmetry in Research Evaluations: The Case of Research on Ideological Versus Racial Group Differences
Julia Elad-Strenger, Alyce Thiel & Thomas Kessler
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research investigates how political ideology shapes laypeople's evaluation of scientific studies examining cognitive differences between groups. In three experiments in Germany and the United States, participants evaluated identical research reports that varied only in the intergroup context -- racial (Blacks/Whites) or ideological (liberals/conservatives) -- and in which group appeared cognitively superior. Leftists/Liberals consistently rated studies favouring liberals over conservatives as more methodologically sound, less biased and more worthy of pursuit than parallel studies reporting Whites outperforming Blacks. Only White US conservatives (but not German rightists or Black US conservatives) showed a 'mirror image' pattern. Although both ideological groups' research evaluations aligned with ideological in-group favouritism, only left-leaning participants tuned their evaluations to what they deemed socially acceptable research. These results contribute to debates over ideological (a)symmetry in lay assessments of contentious research, demonstrate its context dependence and expose a left-right asymmetry in the motivational processes underlying judgements of controversial science.
Media effects revisited: Corporate scandals, partisan narratives, and attitudes toward cryptocurrency regulation
Pepper Culpepper, Taeku Lee & Ryan Shandler
Political Science Research and Methods, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article advances the literature on media effects by examining how contrasting partisan narratives influence support for regulation after a real-world corporate scandal. Using both multi-wave observational and randomized experimental data, we show that self-selected media exposure and experimentally assigned information shape public opinion in distinct ways. While scandals are narratives of regulatory failure, partisan media environments differently attribute blame for that failure. In two separate observational waves, only Democrats exposed to news about the FTX bankruptcy increased their support for crypto regulation. In the experiment, only Republicans shifted in favor of regulation. Research on media effects needs to take into account not only media content, but also the partisan information environments that expose citizens to that content.
The Poverty of Moral Foundation Messaging
Darren Hawkins et al.
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prominent scholars have argued that reframing political positions and issues in terms of moral foundations that appeal to conservatives or liberals can attract more individual-level support for those positions, even when such support would be unexpected. Such a change of attitude would be promising for those looking to narrow ideological divides. As two independent research teams, we set out to explore the promising evidence along these lines and to identify further nuances in the arguments. We tested moral reframing in the context of five issue areas: the environment, tax policy, immigration, English as an official language, and universal healthcare. We consistently found null results, not just for overall samples but for sub-groups that have been hypothesized as the most likely to be affected by moral reframing. Using Bayes factors, the observed data are 100 times more likely to occur under the null hypothesis (of no effect) than the moral foundations hypothesis. We explored the reasons for these null results by examining possibilities such as misunderstanding the treatment, the negative or positive valence of the treatment, and small sample sizes. We found no plausible explanation for the absence of treatment effect. Moral reframing techniques may be less helpful to persuasion than previous research suggests.
From Conflict to Cohesion: Structural Similarity Dampens Uncivil Discourse in Polarized Social Groups
Matthew Yeaton, Sarayu Anshuman & Sameer Srivastava
American Journal of Sociology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social groups are arenas for both cohesion and conflict. Whereas prevailing theories focus on how these processes unfold at the boundaries between groups, the authors focus on the tensions that emerge within groups and that give rise to uncivil discourse. They develop a novel theoretical account of its network-structural antecedents. In polarized online groups, they hypothesize that the greater the structural similarity between two individuals, the less likely they will be to direct uncivil language toward one another. They further argue that this relationship will be moderated by the degree of group polarization. Using a node embedding algorithm (i.e., node2vec) to derive an omnibus measure of interpersonal structural similarity, they find support for the theory using a dataset that encompasses more than 25 million comments made by over 1.7 million users in six polarized communities on Reddit. They discuss implications for research on intergroup animosity, group polarization, the measurement of structural similarity, and the interplay of structure and culture.
Reducing affective polarization does not affect false news sharing or truth discernment
Carter Anderson et al.
Research & Politics, January 2026
Abstract:
Why do people spread false news online? Previous studies have linked affective polarization with misinformation sharing and belief. Contrary to these largely observational findings, however, we show that experimentally improving people's feelings about opposing partisans (versus members of their own party) has no measurable effect on people's intentions to share true news, false news, or the difference between them, known as discernment. By contrast, we find evidence that a reminder of accuracy can modestly improve truth discernment among people who report sharing political news. These results suggest the need for a reexamination of the role of affective polarization in the dissemination of misinformation online.
Understanding Partisan Bias in Judgments of Misinformation: Identity Protection Versus Differential Knowledge
Tyler Hubeny, Lea Nahon & Bertram Gawronski
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
People overaccept information that supports their identity and underaccept information that opposes their identity -- a phenomenon known as partisan bias. Although partisan-bias effects in judgments of misinformation are robust and pervasive, there is ongoing debate about whether partisan-bias effects arise from identity-protective motivated reasoning or differential knowledge of identity-congenial versus identity-uncongenial information. Prior empirical work has been unable to differentiate the two accounts because of a reliance on groups with pre-existing differences in knowledge (e.g., Democrats and Republicans). The current research addresses this issue by using randomly assigned rather than pre-existing identities. Across two experiments (Ntotal = 1,411), adult U.S. Prolific workers showed lower thresholds for accepting information that is congenial versus uncongenial to a randomly assigned identity, despite having no differences in prior knowledge. These results support theories that emphasize identity protection as a factor underlying partisan bias in the acceptance of misinformation, with important practical implications for misinformation interventions.
The Tate-space on YouTube: Ambient ideology and the limits of platform moderation
Bernhard Rieder, Bastian August & Brogan Latil
New Media & Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates the persistence and transformation of Andrew Tate's presence on YouTube following the removal of his official channels in August 2022. Combining two empirical approaches — a small-scale analysis of top-ranked videos from YouTube search results in 2022 and 2024, and a large-scale data set of over 112k videos — we examine how Tate-related content continues to circulate and how the platform moderates such material. Our findings show that Tate remains highly visible through a diffuse and decentralized network of actors who repackage his messaging into interviews, remixes, and YouTube-native formats. This configuration produces what we term the "Tate-space": an ambient ideological environment where motivational rhetoric, aspirational masculinity, and far-right talking points converge. We find that YouTube's substantial moderation efforts are outpaced by the speed and scale of recommendation-driven circulation and that deplatforming, while symbolically significant, fails to disrupt the cultural and logistical dynamics that sustain Tate's influence.
Tweeting for a Win: How the Competitiveness of a Congressional District Affects Party Nominee Language Use on Twitter
Robert Stise, Huma Rasheed & Dannagal Young
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Several political and social factors (e.g.; social and geographic sorting, partisan gerrymandering) have contributed to a decrease in competitive congressional districts across the United States. We hypothesize and test whether candidates running in non-competitive partisan districts use more moral and emotional language in their campaign communication compared to candidates running in more competitive districts. We anchor our discussion in the concept of identity ownership, a concept that captures how political elites perform partisan prototypicality to appeal to increasingly homogeneous and ideologically extreme constituents. Using computational analysis to explore the content of over 17,000 tweets from 20 districts, this study investigates the moral and emotional content of candidate's online campaign communications during the 2022 congressional midterm election campaign. Consistent with the hypotheses, moral and emotional language were more prevalent in less competitive congressional districts (compared to more competitive ones), and during primary races compared to the general election. Implications for democratic health are discussed.
Do Donors Punish Extremist Primary Nominees? Evidence from Congress and American State Legislatures
Andrew Myers
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Fundraising is a critical element of legislative elections, yet problems of measurement and strategic candidate emergence have prevented researchers from evaluating how running extremist candidates affects parties' fundraising prospects. This article combines an original candidate ideology scaling with a regression discontinuity design in primary elections in Congress, 1980-2022, and state legislatures, 1996-2022, to assess whether donors punish extremist nominees in general elections. I find that the "coin-flip" primary nomination of an extremist over a more moderate opponent decreases their party's share of general-election contributions by 7 percentage points in the median contest and 18-19 percentage points when the ideological contrast between candidates is largest. This financial penalty is larger among corporate PACs than individual donors and is driven symmetrically by donors withdrawing support from extremist nominees and rallying behind their opponents. Applying a complementary panel-based identification strategy, I replicate these core findings and further document that the financial penalty to extremist nominees has fallen by nearly half since 2000. Overall, these results show how general-election donors act as a marked, yet waning, moderating force in American politics when parties run extremist candidates.