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Same Facts, Different Interpretations: Partisan Motivation and Opinion on Iraq
Abstract
Scholars assume that citizens perform better when they know pertinent facts. Factual beliefs, however, become relevant for political judgments only when people interpret them. Interpretations provide opportunities for partisans to rationalize their existing opinions. Using panel studies, we examine whether and how partisans updated factual beliefs, interpretations of beliefs, and opinions about the handling of the Iraq war as real-world conditions changed. Most respondents held similar, fairly accurate beliefs about facts. But interpretations varied across partisan groups in predictable ways. In turn, interpretations, not beliefs, drove opinions. Perversely, the better informed more effectively used interpretations to buttress their existing partisan views.
... Another, complementary explanation holds that different beliefs can bias the interpretation of the same event (12), such that opposing groups of partisans may, for example, both believe that a single news broadcast was biased against their side (13). Polarization may thus arise as the brain processes incoming information: Individuals who hold opposing political beliefs construe the same information into a polarized perspective at the moment of perception (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18). ...
... There were 60 unique words: 30 political and 30 nonpolitical (see the Supplementary Materials). The nonpolitical words were objects (15) and animals (15). The political words consisted of seven theme words, chosen for their polarizing nature and/or their occurrence in the political videos of the video watching task (see below), which included "abortion," "addiction," "American," "health care," "police," "immigration," and "welfare." ...
... There were 60 unique words: 30 political and 30 nonpolitical (see the Supplementary Materials). The nonpolitical words were objects (15) and animals (15). The political words consisted of seven theme words, chosen for their polarizing nature and/or their occurrence in the political videos of the video watching task (see below), which included "abortion," "addiction," "American," "health care," "police," "immigration," and "welfare." ...
Despite receiving the same sensory input, opposing partisans often interpret political content in disparate ways. Jointly analyzing controlled and naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging data, we uncover the neurobiological mechanisms explaining how these divergent political viewpoints arise. Individuals who share an ideology have more similar neural representations of political words, experience greater neural synchrony during naturalistic political content, and temporally segment real-world information into the same meaningful units. In the striatum and amygdala, increasing intersubject similarity in neural representations of political concepts during a word reading task predicts enhanced synchronization of blood oxygen level-dependent time courses when viewing real-time, inflammatory political videos, revealing that polarization can arise from differences in the brain's affective valuations of political concepts. Together, this research shows that political ideology is shaped by semantic representations of political concepts processed in an environment free of any polarizing agenda and that these representations bias how real-world political information is construed into a polarized perspective.
... For example, even when partisans can agree on economic conditions, they interpret these indicators in different ways, blaming the outparty and crediting the in-party (Bisgaard 2015). This process of "partisan rationalization" means that even when partisans share the same set of factual beliefs about policy outcomes, they may use these beliefs to reinforce rather than change their preexisting attitudes (Gaines et al. 2007). ...
... Information about existing policy may be less subject to partisan-driven motivated reasoning than is information about policy outcomes, for two major reasons. First, because people intuitively seek to attribute responsibility for policy outcomes (Bisgaard 2019), they are more likely to blame (or credit) partisan actors, which in turn colors their interpretations of outcome information (Gaines et al. 2007). In addition, because existing policies (especially ones enacted prior to the current era of political polarization) are usually a product of at least some bipartisan compromise, they may be received more positively across party lines. ...
... However, correcting these misperceptions does not shift attitudes toward refugees. This null result parallels the findings in studies that randomly assign people to receive similar information about immigrants (Grigorieff, Roth, and Ubfal 2020;Hopkins, Sides, and Citrin 2019;Jørgensen and Osmundsen 2019), suggesting that facts about policy outcomes may be particularly subject to partisan interpretation (Bisgaard 2015;Gaines et al. 2007). However, we find that people also hold a range of inaccurate factual beliefs about existing refugee policy, including the legal definition of refugees and how they are admitted to the United States, and providing corrective information about these policies substantially increases support for refugees. ...
This letter explores the prevalence of misperceptions about refugee policy and tests whether correcting these misperceptions changes attitudes toward refugees. Large numbers of people hold misperceptions about both the nature and effects of refugee policy. An experiment directly compares the effects of correcting misperceptions about existing refugee policy (e.g., the refugee admission process) with correcting misperceptions about the outcomes of refugee policy (e.g., the proportion of refugees in the United States and the percentage who receive welfare benefits). Corrective information about existing policy substantially increases support for refugees, but corrective information about policy outcomes has no effect on attitudes. The results suggest that including descriptive information about existing U.S. policy in media coverage of refugees could both correct misperceptions and change attitudes.
... For example, when economic conditions are so bad that citizens converge in acknowledging this, they simply polarise over who to blame for the conditions (Bisgaard, 2015(Bisgaard, , 2019; when partisans converge in their perception of economic indicators such as the stock market, they polarise over whether such indicators measure the true health of the economy in ways that cast their party in a favourable light (Anson, 2017); and when forced to acknowledge bad actions by their party's leaders, they recall putatively worse actions by rival party leaders in ways that present their own leader as the "lesser of two evils" (Groenendyk, 2013). In an especially striking example of this phenomenon, when a sample of Democrat and Republican voters during the Iraq war converged in their assessment of the number of American casualties and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, they polarised both in how they interpreted such numbers (i.e., as "high" or "low") and in their explanation of why such weapons were not found in ways that were favourable to their respective parties (Gaines, et al., 2007). Such strategies, whereby partisans acknowledge the same facts but interpret and contextualise such facts in ways that vindicate their party's superiority over rival parties, are ubiquitous (Krishnarajan, 2022;Malka & Adelman, 2022) Now consider a purely non-motivational theory of partisan cognition. ...
... The most successful press secretaries can present largely accurate information if they are skilled at combining, framing, and filtering that information in ways that support pre-determined conclusions, and the same lesson generalises to partisan cognition: citizens can function as savvy partisan press secretaries-and so can be highly biased and polarised in their interpretations of reality-even if the number of demonstrably inaccurate beliefs that they hold is small, and even if they are highly responsive to evidence. Given this, political scientists should move beyond the focus on misperceptions and misinformation as the sole consequences of partisan motivated cogni-tion and explore the many subtler ways in which party allegiances can bias political thought (see Bisgaard, 2019;Gaines, et al., 2007;Malka and Adelman, 2022). ...
A large body of research in political science claims that the way in which democratic citizens think about politics is motivationally biased by partisanship. Numerous critics argue that the evidence for this claim is better explained by theories in which party allegiances influence political cognition without motivating citizens to embrace biased beliefs. This article has three aims. First, I clarify this criticism, explain why common responses to it are unsuccessful, and argue that to make progress on this debate we need a more developed theory of the connections between group attachments and motivated reasoning. Second, I develop such a theory. Drawing on research on coalitional psychology and the social functions of beliefs, I argue that partisanship unconsciously biases cognition by generating motivations to advocate for party interests, which transform individuals into partisan press secretaries. Finally, I argue that this theory offers a superior explanation of a wide range of relevant findings than purely non-motivational theories of political cognition.
... Partisanship is thought to be one of the cognitive factors that drives belief in fake news (Kahan, Peters, Dawson, & Slovic, 2017;Van Bavel & Pereira, 2018). Studies show people tend to accept and recall concordant factual information more frequently than non-concordant facts (Jerit & Barabas, 2012;Kahan, Peters, Dawson, & Slovic, 2017) and interpret facts in a belief-consistent manner (Bolsen, Druckman, & Cook, 2014;Faragó, Kende, & Krekó, 2019;Gaines, Kuklinski, Quirk, Peyton, & Verkuilen, 2007). Therefore, sources that produce the most partisan content may be judged as the most trustworthy by a reader who agrees with the political position of the source (Pennycook & Rand, 2019a). ...
... Political party rules over all other cues in distinguishing fake and real (Coe, 2018). Studies show that people tend to interpret facts in news in a belief-consistent manner (Bolsen, Druckman, & Cook, 2014;Faragó, Kende, & Krekó, 2019;Gaines, Kuklinski, Quirk, Peyton, & Verkuilen, 2007). Sources that produce the largest amounts of partisan content may be judged as the most trustworthy (Pennycook & Rand, 2019a). ...
This study seeks to uncover the mechanism of partisan-motivated reasoning acting on fake news evaluation and social media sharing through an online experiment. We found that, although political identification influences trustworthiness of news source and perceived levels of satire in fake news, Democrats view news outlets as more trustworthy than Republicans, and Republicans view fake news as more satirical than Democrats. We determined that political congruence or incongruence does not affect subjects’ ratings of veracity of fake news, which showed accuracy-motivated reasoning surpassed directional-motivated reasoning in the veracity evaluation process. This may be because trustworthiness and satire are types of information that are tied more closely to directional-motivated reasoning. For news diffusion, political identification and satire play a more important role in social media sharing. People are more likely to share satire. Moreover, Republicans tend to view fake news as more cynical and share fake news with a larger audience.
... Partisanship can influence opinions 50 , shape policy preferences 51,52 , distort interpretation of political facts 53,54 , alter vision 32,55 and affect memory 56 . ...
Misinformation harms society by affecting citizens' beliefs and behaviour. Recent research has shown that partisanship and cognitive reflection (i.e. engaging in analytical thinking) play key roles in the acceptance of misinformation. However, the relative importance of these factors remains a topic of ongoing debate. In this registered study, we tested four hypotheses on the relationship between each factor and the belief in statements made by Argentine politicians. Participants (N = 1353) classified fact-checked political statements as true or false, completed a cognitive reflection test, and reported their voting preferences. Using Signal Detection Theory and Bayesian modeling, we found a reliable positive association between political concordance and overall belief in a statement (median = 0.663, CI95 = [0.640, 0.685]), a reliable positive association between cognitive reflection and scepticism (median = 0.039, CI95 = [0.006, 0.072]), a positive but unreliable association between cognitive reflection and truth discernment (median = 0.016, CI95 = [− 0.015, 0.046]) and a negative but unreliable association between cognitive reflection and partisan bias (median = − 0.016, CI95 = [− 0.037, 0.006]). Our results highlight the need to further investigate the relationship between cognitive reflection and partisanship in different contexts and formats.
Protocol registration
The stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 22 August 2022. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/EBRGC .
... Instead, they can counterargue, criticize the source, or selectively remember or encode countervailing information, which can provide justifications for their beliefs [22][23][24][25]. Even with similar or identical facts, partisans can come to different interpretations [26] or misattribute responsibility for facts to align beliefs with preferences [27]. Our argument brings institutional context more fully into the literature on motivated reasoning. ...
How does the public assess the Supreme Court and its work? Using data from three surveys conducted over a span of ten years, we show that individuals’ policy preferences drive evaluations of the Court and its willingness to reform the Court. We find strong evidence that the Court’s hybrid legal-political nature enables a unique form of policy-motivated reasoning: respondents who agree with Court outputs view the Court and its work as more “legal” in nature, while those who disagree view both as more “political.” Our findings stand in contrast to longstanding views in the literature that the public views the Court as a fundamentally different sort of institution that stands largely separate from politics. The fact that policy attitudes powerfully inform the public’s assessment of the Court has crucial implications for the ongoing debates over Supreme Court power.
... A key finding in political behavior is that partisans are largely unable or unwilling to accurately perceive the objective conditions of the world and hold elites responsible for their policy failures that contributed to those conditions (e.g., Achen & Bartels, 2017;Bartels, 2002;Converse, 1964;Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1993;Gaines et al., 2007;Jerit et al., 2006;Nyhan & Reifler, 2010;Taber & Lodge, 2006). Instead, they engage in biased processing of objective conditions selecting and integrating new information in line with their partisan predilections (e.g., Kunda, 1990;Lenz, 2013;Taber & Lodge, 2006;Zaller, 1992). ...
Partisans have biased perceptions of objective conditions. At first glance, the COVID-19 pandemic would appear to be an example of this phenomenon. Noting that most citizens have consistently agreed about the pandemic, I argue that we have overlooked pre-political factors that are as influential as partisanship in shaping citizens’ responses to the pandemic. I identify one such construct in perceived vulnerability to infectious disease (PVD). In one cross-sectional study and one panel study, I find that the influence of PVD on citizens’ perceptions of COVID-19 equals that of partisanship. I also find that PVD can moderate the influence of partisanship on perceptions of harmfulness, nearly erasing the impact of being a Republican on perceiving COVID-19 as a threat. When led by PVD as well as partisanship to accurately perceive harm, citizens, including Republicans, attribute more responsibility to former president Donald Trump for his failed handling of the crisis.
... We know from earlier studies that many citizens wish to restrict statements about minority groups, religion, or national symbols (such as the national flag) because such statements inflict harm on particular identities (e.g., Wilhelm et al. (2020), Armstrong and Wronski (2019) and White and Crandall (2017)). As citizens interpret information in accordance with their political priors (Kunda, 1990;Gaines et al., 2007;Lodge and Taber, 2013;Tworzecki and Markowski, 2014;Shapiro and Bloch-Elkon, 2008), this willingness to restrict most likely differs across political values. Nevertheless, we still expect average effects to materialize regardless of the target group for these offensive statements. ...
... Previous empirical research has indeed found that partisans may evaluate the same political arguments and evidence differently, placing considerably more weight on those arguments that reinforce their priors while ignoring or criticizing counter-attitudinal information (Taber et al. 2009). Partisan motivated reasoning can also manifest itself in how individuals interpret or rationalize counter-attitudinal political information; for example, to defend their party in the face of unfavorable information, partisans may selectively attribute responsibility or downplay the importance of the issues or policies in question (Gaines et al. 2007;Tilley and Hobolt 2011;Bisgaard 2019). ...
How do people react to information that challenges their party’s policies? While most of the existing literature focuses on possible changes in issue opinions, we know less about other implicit and explicit ways people may contend with counter-attitudinal information. In an online experiment in India, I present participants with potentially incongruent information about a controversial economic policy and ask them to evaluate the quality of this information. I find that strong party supporters (non-supporters) feel that an article that criticizes (praises) the policy is of very poor quality. Further, people are much more likely to ignore the biased nature of an article if it reinforces their priors—but complain if it does not. Yet, although I observe strong affective reactions against information that is counter-attitudinal, there is no evidence of opinion backlash; instead, there is (weak) evidence of people updating in the direction of incongruent information. These findings reinforce the importance of studying reactions to counter-attitudinal information above and beyond issue-specific opinions.
... In distorted listening, the individual may understand the message's basic point, but the individual goes beyond the original speech to inappropriately contextualize the information in that speech. While Gaines et al. (2007) are not explicitly concerned with distortion in auditory listening, their framework helps illustrate how social identities can affect the interpretative processes to render a meaning for the listener that differs from the meaning given by the speaker. For example, they discuss how interpretation of facts occurs through one's evaluation of and explanations for the information contained in those facts. ...
... Dicho de otro modo, la proximidad al partido o al líder político que gestiona la crisis es un mejor predictor del apoyo a la medida prohibicionista que el posicionamiento ideológico. Esta relevancia de los sesgos partidistas en la conformación de la opinión ha sido ampliamente analizada en trabajos como los de, entre otros, Bartels (2002), Gerber y Huber (2010), Zaller (1992), Gaines et al. (2007), Anderson y Tverdova (2003), Anduiza et al. (2013), Ecker et al. (2016) y Solaz, et al. (2018. Estos sesgos son provocados "por el cerebro humano (evolucionado de un pasado tribal o de manadas) para adaptarse a entornos hostiles" (Elías, 2018, p. 22) como es el contexto de pandemia en el que se realizó la pregunta. ...
Se presenta un estudio sobre los factores sociodemográficos, ideológicos y partidistas que predicen la opinión de la ciudadanía sobre el control gubernamental de la información en contexto de emergencia sanitaria en España. Se utilizaron los datos del estudio del CIS de abril de 2020, que incluyó una controvertida pregunta sobre la prohibición de los bulos durante la pandemia. Se realizaron estudios correlacionales, análisis factorial y regresiones lineales y logísticas. Aunque los sesgos ideológicos son un fuerte predictor de la opinión sobre el control informativo, la afiliación partidista y ciertos factores sociodemográficos como el nivel de estudios y la edad tienen mayor influencia en el posicionamiento sobre la medida prohibicionista. Votar a los partidos que forman el Gobierno aumenta un 40% la probabilidad de apoyar la restricción. Tener estudios superiores prácticamente duplica la probabilidad de manifestar una actitud contraria a la eliminación de las noticias falsas.
... Following the Iraq War, as it became clear that weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) did not exist, partisans interpreted this fact differently. More Republicans than Democrats thought that WMDs existed but simply were not found (Gaines et al., 2007). In short, perceptual biases are well-documented (for recent reviews, see: Achen & Bartels, 2017;Flynn et al., 2017;Mason, 2018), and have grown more pronounced in recent decades (Jones, 2019), particularly in highly-polarized countries like the U.S. ...
Partisanship, polarization, and platforms are foundational to how people perceive contentious issues. Using a probability sample ( n = 825), we examine these factors in tandem across four political claims concerning US presidential elections and the COVID-19 pandemic. We find Democrats and Republicans differ in their belief in true and false claims, with each party believing more in pro-attitudinal claims than in counter-attitudinal claims. These results are especially pronounced for affectively polarized partisans. We also find interactions between partisanship and platform use where Republicans who use Google or Twitter are more likely to believe in false claims about COVID-19 than Republicans who do not use these platforms. Our findings highlight that Americans’ beliefs in political claims are associated with their political identity through both partisanship and polarization, and the use of search and social platforms appears critical to these relationships. These findings have implications for understanding why realities are malleable to voter preferences in liberal democracies.
... Additionally, our findings are consistent with the literature showing the importance of political beliefs in the interpretation of news and response to political and economic events and policy (see, e.g., Refs. [17,31,32]). Our findings underscore the importance of targeted messaging and treatment among belief groups so as to enhance the efficacy of vaccination and related policy measures. ...
We employ unique panel data on the universe of COVID-19 vaccination and infection cases in Israel to examine the role of political belief in COVID-19 vaccine uptake, virus transmission, and closure policy response. The paper identifies political beliefs based on statistical area votes in national elections held in Israel on the eve of the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020. Unlike the U.S. and elsewhere, pandemic policy intervention in Israel was broadly supported by politicians across the belief spectrum. As such, household response to virus risk was not biased by contemporaneous partisan disagreement and debate among political leaders. Findings show, all things equal, that in the wake of emergent and localized virus risk, voters in politically right-of-center and religious areas displayed substantially higher odds of both vaccine resistance and virus transmission as compared to their left-center counterparts. Moreover, political belief is highly salient to aggregate pandemic outcomes. Model simulation shows that had all areas responded to virus risk with the more risk-averse behaviors of left-of-center areas, the number of vaccinations nationwide would have increased by 15 percent. That same scenario results in a full 30 percent reduction in total infection cases. Results also show that coercive policy measures such as economic closure were more effective in reducing virus transmission among less risk-averse right-wing and religious areas. Findings provide new evidence of the role of political belief in household response to health risks. Results further underscore the importance of timely, targeted messaging and intervention among divergent political belief groups to reduce vaccine hesitancy and enhance disease control. Future studies should explore the external validity of findings, including the use of individual voter data, if available, to evaluate political belief effects.
... Studies on political behavior have established that people often interpret and participate in the political world in a way that satisfies their preexisting political orientation (Bartels 2000;Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe 2015;Gaines et al. 2007). Just as these "enduring partisan commitments" shape political attitudes (Campbell et al. 1980, 135), partisan bias encourages people to vote based on partisan loyalty (Bartels 2000), interpret political or economic events differently (Bartels 2002), exhibit differing levels of presidential approval (Lebo and Cassino 2007), and direct individual decisions and behaviors even in nonpolitical issues in different ways (Iyengar and Westwood 2015). ...
What explains the lack of electoral consequences for corrupt politicians? Building on studies of motivated reasoning and asymmetric partisan bias, this article highlights the importance of partisan differences in how voters interpret corruption convictions and make voting decisions. I contend that in post-authoritarian democracies, supporters of authoritarian legacy parties (ALPs) are less likely to punish corrupt copartisan incumbents compared to supporters of other parties faced with equally corrupt copartisan incumbents. While voters of all kinds appear likely to ignore corruption among copartisan incumbents, supporters of authoritarian legacy parties are particularly likely to do so. Using original datasets from South Korea, this study shows empirical evidence of the lack of corruption voting for ALP partisans across three legislative elections. This article further finds partisan discrepancies and a striking lack of corruption voting among authoritarian legacy partisans.
... This US-based finding has had an effect on how researchers explain the psychological mechanism that leads individuals to accept as factual information that is contrary to the best available evidence. Researchers routinely point to individual differences in political ideology (Gaines et al., 2007;Kahan et al., 2017;Nyhan and Reifler, 2010). Our project focuses on two aspects that have received less attention in misperception research so far. ...
In a national sample of 5087 Spaniards, we examine the prevalence of 10 specific misperceptions over five separate science and health domains (climate change, 5G technology, genetically modified foods, vaccines, and homeopathy). We find that misperceptions about genetically modified foods and general health risks of 5G technology are particularly widespread. While we find that partisan affiliation is not strongly associated with any of the misperceptions aside from climate change, we find that two distinct dimensions of an anti-elite worldview-anti-expert and conspiratorial mindsets-are better overall predictors of having science and health misperceptions in the Spanish context. These findings help extend our understanding of polarization around science beyond the most common contexts (e.g. the United States) and support recent work suggesting anti-elite sentiments are among the most important predictors of factual misperceptions.
... Not yet examined is the relationship between citizens' levels of affective polarization and their belief in misinformation about political facts. Work has analyzed the connection between partisan strength and misperceptions (Flynn et al., 2017;Gaines et al., 2007;Jerit & Barabas, 2012;Nyhan & Reifler, 2010), but it has not yet been shown whether affective polarization has an effect above and beyond one's degree of partisan affiliation. On the one hand, Broockman et al. (2020) found that affective polarization has no effect citizens' likelihood of adopting inparty policy positions. ...
While affective polarization has been shown to have serious social consequences, there is little evidence regarding its effects on political attitudes and behavior such as policy preferences, voting, or political information accrual. This paper provides evidence that affective polarization impacts misinformation belief, arguing that citizens with higher levels of affective polarization are more likely to believe in-party-congruent misinformation and less likely to believe out-party-congruent misinformation. The argument is supported by data from the ANES 2020 Social Media Study and the ANES 2020 Time Series Study, which speaks to the generalizability of the relationship. Additionally, a survey experiment provides evidence that the relationship is causal. The results hold among Democrats and Republicans and are independent of the effects of partisan strength and ideological extremity. Furthermore, the relationship between affective polarization and misinformation belief is exacerbated by political sophistication rather than tempered by it, implying that education will not solve the issue. The results speak to the need for work on reducing affective polarization.
... In these cases, it is nearly impossible to evaluate politics evenhandedly. Existing work finds that partisan-motivated reasoning can determine how partisans interpret death statistics in the Iraq War (Gaines et al. 2007), identify policy positions of the parties (Johnston, Steenbergen, and Lavine 2012), attribute guilt in the case of sexual misconduct (Klar and McCoy 2021), evaluate the economy (Lewis-Beck, Nadeau, and Elias 2008), and assess the risk and reality of global warming (Joslyn and Haider-Markel 2014). ...
Democratic accountability relies on voters to punish their representatives for policies they dislike. Yet, a separation-of-powers system can make it hard to know who is to blame, and partisan biases further distort voters’ evaluations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, precautionary policies were put into place sometimes by governors, sometimes by mayors, and sometimes by no one at all, allowing us to identify when voters hold out-party versus in-party politicians responsible for policies. With a survey spanning 48 states, we test our theory that attitudes toward policies and parties intersect to determine when selective attribution takes place. We find that as individuals increasingly oppose a policy, they are more likely to blame whichever level of government is led by the out-party. This is most pronounced among partisans with strong in-party biases. We provide important insight into the mechanisms that drive selective attribution and the conditions under which democratic accountability is at risk.
... Across the countries in our study, the United States has the highest perceived tension between political parties (90%), closely followed by Brazil (83%); Germany ranks substantially lower in this indicator (57%) (Duffy et al., 2021). Furthermore, partisanship and political beliefs can influence how people interpret facts in news stories (e.g., Gaines et al., 2007) and whether they accept or reject corrections of misinformation (Nyhan and Reifler, 2010;Weeks, 2015), which, in turn, may shape news trust perceptions. Given the literature just described, it seems plausible that political beliefs may alter how people process information in a Google Knowledge Panel about whether a news outlet is trustworthy: ...
Using data from a conjoint experiment in three countries (Brazil, n = 2038; Germany, n = 2012, and the United States, n = 2005), this study demonstrates that journalistic transparency can cue trust at the level of the entire news outlet—or domain level—using a Google Knowledge Panel that comes up when people search for a news outlet. In Brazil and the United States, two pieces of information in a Knowledge Panel provided the strongest heuristics that a news outlet was trustworthy: a description of the news outlet and a description of other sites accessed by people who frequent that news outlet’s website. In Germany, information about journalists and the description of the news outlet were the strongest cues. Results offer insights into how people heuristically process online news and are discussed in relation to the heuristic-systematic model of information processing.
... Partisans disagree most about the economy when economic news is mixed, allowing partisans to choose their facts, but partisans tend to converge in their economic assessments when economic reports are uniformly favourable or unfavourable. Similarly, Democrats were predictably quicker than Republicans to accept that weapons of mass destruction did not exist in Iraq, but Republicans eventually succumbed to this conclusion as evidence mounted against their prior belief (Gaines et al., 2007). 5 As Kunda (1990, pp. ...
Rational choice theory explains and evaluates how individuals choose among alternative instruments to achieve their goals and objectives. Although much research on political decision-making highlights psychological biases that appear to interfere with rationality, the contrast between rational choice and the psychology of information processing is often narrowed by individual and contextual conditions that reduce cognitive biases and promote rational decision-making. This argument is developed by analysing research on heuristics (i.e., shortcuts and cues), motivated reasoning, and framing that pose challenges to rational choice. Three themes emerge from this review. First, there is systematic variation across individuals in the extent to which heuristics, biased reasoning, and framing produce unreasonable and suboptimal decisions. Second, there are definable informational and social contexts that provide incentives for people to engage in deliberate and accurate processing of information. Third, normative evaluations of empirical results have been hampered by inconsistent criteria for what constitutes good decision-making.
... First, much of the work connecting CT belief and political factors is tied to motivated reasoning (e.g., Flynn et al., 2017;Kunda, 1990;Lodge & Taber, 2013; see also Chapter 8). People are likely to perceive the world in a manner that aligns with their political world view (e.g., Gaines et al., 2007;Kahan, 2013;Prior et al., 2015). As such, Republicans/conservatives endorse CTs that implicate Democrats/liberals in malevolent plots, and Democrats/liberals endorse CTs that impugn Republicans/conservatives (e.g., Enders & Smallpage, 2019;Miller et al., 2016;Nyhan, 2010;Pasek et al., 2015). ...
Conspiracy theories (CTs) and CT belief stem from uncertain, hard to explain, crisis situations, especially when strongly held social and political identities are threatened making people feel anxious, insecure, or out of control. Connected to alarming developments in world politics, CTs are no longer manifestations of extremists and paranoids. As salience increases, scholars continue to examine their antecedents and consequences. This chapter highlights the interdisciplinary roots of the study of CTs and CT belief. It sets the stage with important definitions and measurement challenges, then reviews scholarship on psychological, social, political, and situational factors behind CTs and CT belief. Consequences are vast, allowing for only brief discussion of the spread, persistence, and prevalence related to negative health, social, political, and environmental effects. As it is unlikely that broad weaponisation of CTs or their blaze online will cease in the near future, the chapter concludes by discussing directions for future research.
... In arriving at the subgroups, moreover, we do not discount the pervasive force of motivated reasoning -here defined as the goal-directed, cognitive strategies that individuals sometimes use for 'accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs' (Kunda, 1990;Taber and Lodge, 2006;Nir, 2011). That is, we should take account of the fact that respondents in the Taiwan survey might be motivated to arrive at a particular conclusion concerning the US commitment to help defend Taiwan, or have a tendency to seek information, because it confirms their prior beliefs (Gaines et al., 2007;Bolsen et al., 2014). In the future, it would be useful to examine whether and how these five classes of respondents change and evolve under intensified US-China competition in the Asia-Pacific. ...
If conflict breaks out between Taiwan and China, would the United States come to the island’s defense? China’s growing assertiveness in the region and aggressive military activities around Taiwan have renewed interest in this decades-old question. This study examines the issue by employing two surveys, one conducted in Taiwan and another in the United States. Results of the Taiwan survey indicate that while a majority of Taiwan citizens do indeed believe the United States would help defend Taiwan if it were attacked by China, five types of respondents—idealists, pragmatists, democracy skeptics, political realists, and pessimists—can be discerned, each with a distinctive pattern of reasoning. Findings from the US survey reveal that while Americans mostly hold positive views of Taiwan, there is little consensus on the preferred US military response in the event of a Chinese attack. These analyses contribute to the existing literature on evolving public opinion in Taiwan and the United States concerning the possibility of armed conflict in the Taiwan Strait.
Hostile interactions permeate political debates on social media, but what is driving the long-term developments in online political hostility? Prior research focuses on individual level factors such the dispositions of users or network-level factors such as echo chambers. Moving beyond these accounts, we develop and test an event-oriented explanation and demonstrate that over the course of the 2020 election year in the US, all major shifts in political hostility on the social media platform Twitter were driven by external offline events. Importantly, these events were magnified for Twitter users within the most politically hostile and most ideologically homogeneous networks. Further contributing to the individual and network-oriented accounts, we show that divisive offline events mobilized individual users not already disposed for hostility and may have helped facilitate the formation of echo chambers. The dynamics of online interactions–including their level of hostility–seem crucially dependent on developments in the offline world.
Recently, epistocrats have challenged the value of democracy by claiming that policy outcomes can be improved if the electorate were narrowed to empower only those with sufficient knowledge to inform competent policy decisions. I argue that by centering on contesting how well regimes employ extant knowledge in decision-making, this conversation has neglected to consider how regimes influence the production of knowledge over time. Science and technology studies scholars have long recognized that political systems impact the productivity of expert research. I argue that in order to evaluate which regime is “smarter,” we must consider not only how well they employ existing knowledge in decision-making, but we must also assess how those regimes influence the ongoing production of policy-relevant knowledge. Thus, I offer an instrumental defense of democracy based on its capacity to encourage a superior pattern and quality of expert research to inform policy decisions over time. Epistocracy may be effective at employing extant knowledge in the short run, but in the long run, democracy is a superior environment for producing knowledge to inform policy decisions.
Nearly, all Americans have received social policy benefits, yet many do not acknowledge “using government social programs.” Why? Work on the submerged state proposes that people who receive social assistance through market mechanisms do not realize that the benefits they get are the result of government policy, and therefore, they do not acknowledge receiving government assistance. Others point to motivated reasoning or social desirability bias to explain the gap between acknowledging and using social programs. We classify the existing literature into three broad explanations—delivery, definition, and desirability—and propose that each may be responsible for people's inability to accurately report using government social programs. We test these mechanisms with original survey experiments. The results of this study provide support for the theory that multiple mechanisms are at work in shaping social policy acknowledgment, but they confirm that a partisan acknowledgement gap exists across a variety of conditions, and it persists despite treatments designed to minimize it. The study has significant implications for the conditions under which partisanship and policy usage coalesce to undermine support for government social expenditures, and it helps to explain the persistence of a “makers vs. takers” logic in American politics.
Conventional models of voting behavior depict individuals who judge governments for how the world unfolds during their time in office. This phenomenon of retrospective voting requires that individuals integrate and appraise streams of performance information over time. Yet past experimental studies short-circuit this 'integration-appraisal' process. In this Element, we develop a new framework for studying retrospective voting and present eleven experiments building on that framework. Notably, when we allow integration and appraisal to unfold freely, we find little support for models of 'blind retrospection.' Although we observe clear recency bias, we find respondents who are quick to appraise and who make reasonable use of information cues. Critically, they regularly employ benchmarking strategies to manage complex, variable, and even confounded streams of performance information. The results highlight the importance of centering the integration-appraisal challenge in both theoretical models and experimental designs and begin to uncover the cognitive foundations of retrospective voting.
Individuals are normatively expected to consume diverse viewpoints to become good citizens capable of deliberation although empirical evidence does not necessarily support this norm. To explain this inconsistency, this study proposes three motivations for disagreement processing – defensive dismissal, defensive deliberation, and balanced deliberation – by drawing from theory of motivated reasoning and the Heuristic-Systematic Model. Analyses of a two-wave survey conducted in the U.S. highlight the importance of motivations behind diverse exposure – rather than mere exposure – in facilitating deliberative practices. Specifically, balanced deliberation motivations can promote cross-cutting discussion through diverse exposure whereas defensive motivations facilitate diverse news sharing on social media.
Political divisions in the lead-up to the 2020 US presidential election were large, leading many to worry that heighted partisan conflict was so stark that partisans were living in different worlds, divided even in their understanding of basic facts. Moreover, the nationalization of American politics is thought to weaken attention to state political concerns. 2020 therefore provides an excellent, if difficult, test case for the claim that individuals understand their state political environment in a meaningful way. Were individuals able to look beyond national rhetoric and the national environment to understand state-level electoral dynamics? We present new data showing that, in the aggregate, despite partisan differences in electoral expectations, Americans are aware of their state's likely political outcome, including whether it will be close. At the same time, because forecasting the overall election outcome is more difficult, Electoral College forecasts are much noisier and display persistent partisan difference in expectations that do not differ much with state of residence.
Information provision experiments allow researchers to test economic theories and answer policy-relevant questions by varying the information set available to respondents. We survey the emerging literature using information provision experiments in economics and discuss applications in macroeconomics, finance, political economy, public economics, labor economics, and health economics. We also discuss design considerations and provide best-practice recommendations on how to (i) measure beliefs; (ii) design the information intervention; (iii) measure belief updating; (iv) deal with potential confounds, such as experimenter demand effects; and (v) recruit respondents using online panels. We finally discuss typical effect sizes and provide sample size recommendations.(JEL C90, D83, D91)
Existing studies demonstrate that threat perceptions matter for immigration attitudes. However, while these perceptions are potentially sensitive to information about immigrants’ impacts, questions remain about whether inserting such information into public debates changes attitudes and policy preferences—especially on polarizing issues like immigration. Moreover, few studies have considered messages featuring the type of nonphotorealistic visual elements that increasingly appear in media. Using a survey experiment fielded in the United Kingdom, we examined whether evidence about European Union immigrants’ modestly positive economic impacts on the United Kingdom—presented either as text, with visualizations, or as an animated film—changed immigration attitudes and policy preferences. Although visual elements did not have an effect over and above text, all the informational treatments moved attitudes and preferences in positive directions, even among Leave voters. Our study brings together research on immigration public opinion and visual media and has implications for policymaking and journalism practice.
The emergence of COVID-19 spurred the fastest development of a vaccine in history. Yet, a large proportion of Americans remain hesitant to receive it. Our paper investigates how the social networks we inhabit might explain persistent vaccine hesitancy. We argue that the COVID-19 vaccination status of respondents’ closest associates inhibits or motivates their decision to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. To test our argument, we conduct an original survey asking respondents a battery of questions about the people with whom individuals most frequently discuss vaccines and COVID-19. Our survey reports that individuals’ discussion networks are polarized by vaccination status. Concurrently, there is a strong association between the social network’s vaccination status and the respondent’s vaccination status. This association is so robust that partisanship does not moderate the association between discussants’ vaccination status and respondents’ vaccination status. Together, our results imply that unvaccinated individuals remain hesitant because they face reinforcing social pressure from their closest associates. The unique timing of our survey, during an unprecedented vaccination campaign against a novel disease, offers a snapshot of how relationships may affect attitudes.
How does policy-relevant information change citizens’ policy attitudes? Though giving numerical information about social conditions has been found, at times, to change policy attitudes, why it works (or doesn’t) is poorly understood. I argue new or corrective information may not translate into policy-attitude change in part because it fails to instill a sense of need for change. Perceived problem seriousness, an affect-laden judgment about the acceptability of the status quo, may therefore be the proposed an important psychological mechanism through which information changes people’s minds. To perceive a problem, conditions must be worse than they ought be. Previous research, however, presents numerical information without a point of reference from which citizens can base their judgments. By contextualizing facts with reference points from the past (time) as well as other countries (space), four survey experiments show that numerical information about a range of social problems can change policy attitudes by first changing their perceived seriousness.
The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to governance, including populism, hate speech, conspiracy beliefs, inequality, climate change and cyberterrorism. Each chapter features cutting-edge research from internationally renowned scholars who offer their unique insights into how people think, feel and act in different political contexts. By taking a distinctively international approach, this handbook highlights the nuances of political behaviour across cultures and geographical regions, as well as the truisms of political psychology that transcend context. Academics, graduate students and practitioners alike, as well as those generally interested in politics and human behaviour, will benefit from this definitive overview of how people shape – and are shaped by – their political environment in a rapidly changing twenty-first century.
The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to governance, including populism, hate speech, conspiracy beliefs, inequality, climate change and cyberterrorism. Each chapter features cutting-edge research from internationally renowned scholars who offer their unique insights into how people think, feel and act in different political contexts. By taking a distinctively international approach, this handbook highlights the nuances of political behaviour across cultures and geographical regions, as well as the truisms of political psychology that transcend context. Academics, graduate students and practitioners alike, as well as those generally interested in politics and human behaviour, will benefit from this definitive overview of how people shape – and are shaped by – their political environment in a rapidly changing twenty-first century.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
• • Party control of Congress is the strongest determinant of presidential success – majority party presidents win more roll call votes than do minority party presidents.
• • Until recently, the effects of party control were similar in both chambers. Rising party polarization in Congress affects presidential success differently in the House and Senate.
• • In the House, party polarization amplifies the effects of party control – as party polarization increases, majority party presidents win more and minority presidents win less.
• • In the Senate, party polarization suppresses success rates – majority presidents still win more on average, but as party voting increases, success rates decline for both majority and minority presidents.
• • The rise in cloture votes and the emergence of the minority party filibuster during the Bush and Obama presidencies is responsible for the changes in how party polarization conditions the effects of party control in the Senate.
• • Since cloture votes are unique to the Senate, excluding cloture votes provides a mix of Senate votes similar to the House – as party polarization increases on non-cloture votes, majority presidents win more and minority presidents win less, though the relationships are weaker than in the House.
• • On cloture votes, polarization magnifies the effects of party control, but the pattern of success is a mirror image of the House – as party polarization increases, minority presidents win more and majority presidents win less.
• • The simple arithmetic of which side of cloture the president is on explains why the relationships flip. Majority presidents usually favor invoking cloture, which requires 60 votes to win. Minority presidents usually oppose invoking cloture, which requires only 41 votes to win.
To achieve his goals, the president must persuade Congress to support his positions. Ite's a hard sell. The American system of “separated institutions sharing powers” (Neustadt 1960: 33) makes it difficult for any president to win support from Congress. Presidential success in Congress varies – some presidents win more than others – but President Obama seems to be having an especially hard time. In 2012, for example, Obama won only 15.5 percent of House roll call votes on which he expressed a position. Thate's pretty low, but not quite a record – President Bush barely holds on to this dubious distinction, winning only 15.4 percent of House roll calls in 2008.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
The idea of America as politically polarized—that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states—has become a cliché. What commentators miss, however, is that increasing polarization in recent decades has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and economic changes—most notably, a parallel rise in income inequality. In Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal examine the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces, characterizing it as a dance of give and take and back and forth causality. Using NOMINATE (a quantitative procedure that, like interest group ratings, scores politicians on the basis of their roll call voting records) to measure polarization in Congress and public opinion, census data and Federal Election Commission finance records to measure polarization among the public, the authors find that polarization and income inequality fell in tandem from 1913 to 1957 and rose together dramatically from 1977 on; they trace a parallel rise in immigration beginning in the 1970s. They show that Republicans have moved right, away from redistributive policies that would reduce income inequality. Immigration, meanwhile, has facilitated the move to the right: non-citizens, a larger share of the population and disproportionately poor, cannot vote; thus there is less political pressure from the bottom for redistribution than there is from the top against it. In "the choreography of American politics" inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality.
I examine the impact of long-term partisan loyalties on perceptions of specific political figures and events. In contrast to the notion of partisanship as a simple “running tally” of political assessments, I show that party identification is a pervasive dynamic force shaping citizens' perceptions of, and reactions to, the political world. My analysis employs panel data to isolate the impact of partisan bias in the context of a Bayesian model of opinion change; I also present more straightforward evidence of contrasts in Democrats' and Republicans' perceptions of “objective” politically relevant events. I conclude that partisan bias in political perceptions plays a crucial role in perpetuating and reinforcing sharp differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans. This conclusion handsomely validates the emphasis placed by the authors of The American Voter on “the role of enduring partisan commitments in shaping attitudes toward political objects.”
Theory: Recent scholarship has emphasized the potential importance of cues, information shortcuts, and statistical aggregation processes in allowing relatively uninformed citizens to act, individually or collectively, ns if they were fully informed. Hypotheses: Uninformed voters successfully use cues and information shortcuts to behave ns if they were fully informed. Failing that, individual deviations from fully informed voting cancel out in a mass electorate, producing the same aggregate election outcome ns if voters were fully informed. Methods: Hypothetical ''fully informed'' vote choices are imputed to individual voters using the observed relationship between political information and vote choices for voters with similar social and demographic characteristics, estimated by probit analysis of data from National Election Study surveys conducted after the six most recent United States presidential elections. Results: Both hypotheses are clearly disconfirmed. At the individual level, the average deviation of actual vote probabilities from hypothetical ''fully informed'' vote probabilities was about ten percentage points. In the electorate as a whole, these deviations were significantly diluted by aggregation, but by no means eliminated: incumbent presidents did almost five percentage points better, and Democratic candidates did almost two percentage points better, than they would have if voters had in fact been ''fully informed.''
Theory: Characterizing voters as rational actors who update their party affiliations based on a Bayesian assimilation of new information, Achen (1992) showed that a revisionist model of party identification generates, among its empirical implications, stable partisanship among adults. The model further implies that susceptibility to partisan change declines with age. The significance of Achen's model for the study of party identification leads us to examine more closely its underlying assumptions and the empirical ramifications of this and other learning models. Method: This essay develops a more general learning model, based upon the Kalman filter, that encompasses the Achen model as a special case. Results: We show that the Achen assumption of a fixed party benefit level leads to implausible implications about how voters learn from the history of party performance. When party benefit levels are allowed to vary over time, models of voter learning no longer imply that partisan attitudes, even among the older segments of the population, remain stable in the wake of new information about the parties. We conclude by discussing the empirical viability of our revised learning model and its implications for the study of partisan attitudes.
In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public’s political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise. I also show that the effect of policy-specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research. Finally, I show that the effect of policy-specific ignorance is greatest for Americans with the highest levels of political knowledge. Rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information, general knowledge (and the cognitive capacities it reflects) appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy-specific information into political judgments.
We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased-information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias. We also find a confirmation bias—the seeking out of confirmatory evidence—when Ps are free to self-select the source of the arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization—the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes—especially among those with the strongest priors and highest levels of political sophistication. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of these findings for rational behavior in a democracy.
How do we make sense of other people and of ourselves? What do we know about the people we encounter in our daily lives and about the situations in which we encounter them, and how do we use this knowledge in our attempt to understand, predict, or recall their behavior? Are our social judgments fully determined by our social knowledge, or are they also influenced by our feelings and desires? Social cognition researchers look at how we make sense of other people and of ourselves. In this book Ziva Kunda provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of research and theory about social cognition at a level appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers in the field. The first part of the book reviews basic processes in social cognition, including the representation of social concepts, rules of inference, memory, "hot" cognition driven by motivation or affect, and automatic processing. The second part reviews three basic topics in social cognition: group stereotypes, knowledge of other individuals, and the self. A final chapter revisits many of these issues from a cross-cultural perspective.
▪ Abstract Do people assimilate new information in an efficient and unbiased manner—that is, do they update prior beliefs in accordance with Bayes' rule? Or are they selective in the way that they gather and absorb new information? Although many classic studies in political science and psychology contend that people resist discordant information, more recent research has tended to call the selective perception hypothesis into question. We synthesize the literatures on biased assimilation and belief polarization using a formal model that encompasses both Bayesian and biased learning. The analysis reveals (a) the conditions under which these phenomena may be consistent with Bayesian learning, (b) the methodological inadequacy of certain research designs that fail to control for preferences or prior information, and (c) the limited support that exists for the more extreme variants of the selective perception hypothesis.
s Abstract The past two decades have brought revolutionary change to the field of political methodology. Steady gains in theoretical sophistication have combined with explosive increases in computing power to produce a profusion of new estimators for applied political researchers. Attendance at the annual Summer Meeting of the Methodology Section has multiplied many times, and section membership is among the largest in APSA. All these are signs of success. Yet there are warning signs, too. This paper attempts to critically summarize current developments in the young field of political methodology. It focuses on recent generalizations of dichotomous-dependent-variable estimators such as logit and probit, arguing that even our best new work needs a firmer connection to credible models of human behavior and deeper foundations in reliable empirical generalizations.
Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, widespread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are far different from those that would exist if people were correctly informed. The misinformation phenomenon has implications for two currently influential scholarly literatures: the study of political heuristics and the study of elite persuasion and issue framing.
Panel data models have become increasingly popular among applied researchers due to their heightened capacity for capturing the complexity of human behavior as compared to cross-sectional or time series data models. As a consequence, richer panel data sets also have become increasingly available. This 2003 second edition is a substantial revision of the highly successful first edition of 1986. Advances in panel data research are presented in a rigorous and accessible manner and are carefully integrated with the older material. The thorough discussion of theory and the judicious use of empirical examples make this book useful to graduate students and advanced researchers in economics, business, sociology, political science, etc. Other specific revisions include the introduction of the notion of strict exogeneity with estimators presented in a generalized method of moments framework, the notion of incidental parameters, more intuitive explanations of pairwise trimming, and discussion of sample selection dynamic panel models.
We address the problem that occurs when inferences about counterfactuals—predictions, “what-if” questions, and causal effects—are
attempted far from the available data. The danger of these extreme counterfactuals is that substantive conclusions drawn from
statistical models that fit the data well turn out to be based largely on speculation hidden in convenient modeling assumptions
that few would be willing to defend. Yet existing statistical strategies provide few reliable means of identifying extreme
counterfactuals. We offer a proof that inferences farther from the data allow more model dependence and then develop easy-to-apply
methods to evaluate how model dependent our answers would be to specified counterfactuals. These methods require neither sensitivity
testing over specified classes of models nor evaluating any specific modeling assumptions. If an analysis fails the simple
tests we offer, then we know that substantive results are sensitive to at least some modeling choices that are not based on
empirical evidence. Free software that accompanies this article implements all the methods developed.
A previous paper showed that a simple prospective model of voting and party identification subsumed much of the social-psychological and retrospective voting literatures, in the sense that it rigorously implied their key findings and added many new ones as well. This paper extends the argument by showing that the same prospective voting model has drastic implications for conventional statistical specifications in voting research. First, linear models should be discarded in favor of a particular nonlinear specification. Second, demographics should be dropped from the list of independent variables. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45484/1/11109_2004_Article_BF00991978.pdf
BeyondtheRunningTally:PartisanBiasin Political Perceptions
- Bartels
- Larrym
Bartels,LarryM.2002.“BeyondtheRunningTally:PartisanBiasin Political Perceptions.” Political Behavior 24 (2): 117–50
Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches Knowing Your Colors: Can Knowledge Correct for Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions
- Mccarty
- Keith T Nolan
- Howard Rosenthal Poole
McCarty, Nolan, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. 2006. Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Cambridge: MIT Press. Shani, Danielle. 2006. " Knowing Your Colors: Can Knowledge Correct for Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions? " Presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.
Warren Miller and the Future of Politi-cal Data Analysis
- Achen
- Christopher
Achen, Christopher. 2000. " Warren Miller and the Future of Politi-cal Data Analysis. " Political Analysis 8 (2): 142–46.
IL 61801. Paul J. Quirk is Phil Lind Chain in U.S Politics and Repre-sentation Buddy Peyton is a graduate student in political science Jay Verkuilen is assistant professor of psychology
- Brian J Gaines
Brian J. Gaines is associate professor of political T. McClure Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801. Paul J. Quirk is Phil Lind Chain in U.S Politics and Repre-sentation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z4. Buddy Peyton is a graduate student in political science, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801. Jay Verkuilen is assistant professor of psychology, City University of New York, New York, NY 10019.
Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD Rational Learning and Partisan Attitudes
- Charles Duelfer
- Gerber
- Donald P Alan
- Green
Duelfer, Charles. 2004. Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD. http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/ duelfer.html (June 12, 2007) Gerber, Alan, and Donald P. Green. 1998. " Rational Learning and Partisan Attitudes. " American Journal of Political Science 42 (3): 794–818.
A Divider Not a Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People
- Jacobson
- Gary
Jacobson, Gary C. 2006. A Divider Not a Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People. New York: Longman.
Knowing Your Colors: Can Knowledge Correct for Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association35) -0.19 (0.26) -0
- Danielle Shani
Shani, Danielle. 2006. " Knowing Your Colors: Can Knowledge Correct for Partisan Bias
in Political Perceptions? " Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest
Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.
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Panel 3
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Panel 4
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-0.74 (0.29)*
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Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD
- Charles Duelfer
Duelfer, Charles. 2004. Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on
Iraq's WMD. http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/duelfer.html
(June 12, 2007)