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
Partisan Appraisals of Party Defectors: Looking Back at the Reagan Democrats
TL;DR: The authors compared the policy and partisan views of three sets of voters: (1) "loyal" Democrats who voted for their party's presidential candidates; (2) "defecting" Democrats that voted for Ronald Reagan or George Bush; (3) loyal Republicans.
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How Do Campaigns Matter? Independents, Political Information, and the Enlightening Role of Campaigns in Mexico
TL;DR: The authors found that voters who report low levels of campaign information are more likely to update their vote intention as election day gets closer, and that most voters support the candidate best aligned with their underlying political predispositions.
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Bully Partisan or Partisan Bully?: Partisanship, Elite Polarization, and U.S. Presidential Communication*
TL;DR: The authors found that when primed to think about strong partisan disagreements, partisan identity overwhelms respondents, and makes them focus most on their partisan identity, regardless of content; without such a prime, respondents are more likely to consider the content of presidential communication.
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Partisan Pocketbooks: The Politics of Personal Financial Evaluations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors apply the concept of partisan biases to personal financial evaluations and find that partisan biases do exist in personal financial evaluation, but the weight assigned to partisanship when it comes to personal evaluations is dependent on the level of party polarization at the time of the survey.
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Election Outcome and Tax Compliance: The Role of Political Party Affiliation, Affect Balance, and Trust in Government
TL;DR: This article investigated the role of political party affiliation on the relationship between identification with the winning party and affect balance and tax compliance intentions, and found that voters experience greater overall positive affect balance when their party wins the election compared to Republicans.
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
Journal ArticleDOI
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.