Journal ArticleDOI
Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions
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TLDR
This paper examined the impact of long-term partisan loyalties on perceptions of specific political figures and events and concluded that partisan bias in political perceptions plays a crucial role in perpetuating and reinforcing sharp differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans.Abstract:
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.”read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Party Brands and Partisanship: Theory with Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Argentina
TL;DR: The authors developed a model of partisanship in which voters learn about party brands by observing party behavior over time and base their psychological attachment to a party on these brands, which suggests that convergence by rival parties, making their brands less distinguishable, should weaken party attachments.
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The Aggregated Consequences of Motivated Reasoning and the Dynamics of Partisan Presidential Approval
Matthew J. Lebo,Dan Cassino +1 more
TL;DR: This article found that partisan groups generally do reward and punish presidents for economic performance, but only those presidents of the opposite party, but not necessarily those presidents from the same party as themselves.
Journal ArticleDOI
Rational Irrationality: Modeling Climate Change Belief Polarization Using Bayesian Networks
TL;DR: Fitting a Bayes net model to the data indicated that under a Bayesian framework, free-market support is a significant driver of beliefs about climate change and trust in climate scientists and active distrust of climate scientists among a small number of U.S. conservatives drives contrary updating in response to consensus information.
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Direct and indirect effects in a logit model
TL;DR: This article discusses a method by Erikson et al. for decomposing a total effect in a logit model into direct and indirect effects and shows how to include control variables in this decomposition, which was not allowed in the original method.
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PARTY IDENTIFICATION: Unmoved Mover or Sum of Preferences?
TL;DR: The claim that party identification moves other features on the political landscape is remarkably robust as discussed by the authors, and the track record for other systems is spotty, and each question occasioned repeated controversy in the decades since the 1960s.
References
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Book
An Economic Theory of Democracy
TL;DR: Downs presents a rational calculus of voting that has inspired much of the later work on voting and turnout as discussed by the authors, particularly significant was his conclusion that a rational voter should almost never bother to vote.
Book
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
TL;DR: Zaller as discussed by the authors developed a comprehensive theory to explain how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences, and applied this theory to the dynamics of public opinion on a broad range of subjects, including domestic and foreign policy, trust in government, racial equality, and presidential approval, as well as voting behaviour in U.S. House, Senate and presidential elections.
Journal ArticleDOI
The American Voter
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The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.
TL;DR: The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992) as discussed by the authors is a model of mass opinion formation that offers readers an introduction to the prevailing theory of opinion formation.