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
Motivated Reasoning, Accuracy, and Updating in Perceptions of Bush's Legacy*
TL;DR: The authors examined the roles of party identification, political knowledge, education, and media use in citizens' perceptions of changes in the economy, federal deficit, poverty, and crime rates between 2001 and 2008.
Journal ArticleDOI
Supreme Facts: The Prevalence and Justification of Social Facts in Landmark Decisions of the Supreme Court
Morgan Marietta,Tyler Farley +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, an analysis of the landmark decisions from 1900 to 2015 reveals that most include a ruling on a disputed social fact, though the Court rarely offers an explicit justification, illustrating a division in approach to this vital aspect of the Court's work.
Journal ArticleDOI
Public and Partisan Opinions of the Speaker of the House
TL;DR: This article used polling data from 1982 to 2009 to develop a model of public opinion toward the Speaker of the House and found that minority party partisans are more likely to have negative evaluations of the speaker when the speaker has more ideologically extreme views which lead to higher levels of polarization.
Coalition Preferences in Multiparty Systems
TL;DR: The authors investigated the structure and accessibility of party and coalition preferences as well as the extent to which coalition preferences can be explained by party preferences a nd other affective and cognitive factors such as candidates, ideology, and issue positions.
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.