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
Beyond Polls: Using Science and Student Data to Stimulate Learning
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors advocate the use of student-generated data as a powerful teaching tool that can be used in a variety of ways to support learning in political science classrooms.
Journal ArticleDOI
Trumped by Trump? Public Support for Mail Voting in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used surveys of registered voters conducted in April and found that support for vote by mail (VBM) was impacted by partisan considerations and personal considerations related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Journal ArticleDOI
Who Cares? Explaining Perceptions of Compassion in Candidates for Office
TL;DR: The authors argue that voters view politicians as more caring when there is a commonality to link them, which demonstrates an empathetic connection, or the ability to understand another's feelings.
Book ChapterDOI
Second-order elections
TL;DR: In this article, contextual and individual factors help to raise or lower the voters' awareness of their regional government, affecting the scale of considerations (national or regional) they use to cast their votes at regional elections, finding that voters' decisions are more autonomous from national politics among the more politically sophisticated voters, among those who have stronger feelings of attachment to their region, and in those contexts in which the regional incumbent party is different from the national one.
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.