Journal ArticleDOI
Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions
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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
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A tale of two elections: information, motivated reasoning, and the economy in the 2011 and 2015 Portuguese elections
TL;DR: This paper explored three hypotheses: (1) the economy became a less salient issue in 2015, (2) responsibility for economic outcomes became more blurred in 2015; and (3) national economic evaluations were more contaminated by partisanship and affected by cognitive resources and personal economic experiences.
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From the Constituent’s Eye Experimental Evidence on the District Selection Preferences of Individuals
Abstract: States have increasingly taken the process of redistricting out of the hands of elected legislators and placed it with the public. The shift is in part driven by a concern that legislators are motivated to partition districts to advantage their own and their political party’s electoral prospects, whereas citizens are not. We know little, however, about the preferences of the public when it comes to redistricting. One party-based argument is that individuals should prefer to share a district with as many like-minded partisans as possible to maximize their legislative representation, whereas other arguments suggest that nonpartisan factors, such as sharing a district with their community, may be more important. Using a novel experimental design, we find that for most participants, the draw to share a district with copartisans is stronger than a preference for preserving a community (county) within the district even when participants are specifically instructed to attend to local jurisdictional boundaries.
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Incumbent Tenure Crowds Out Economic Voting
TL;DR: The authors explored the relationship between tenure and the economic vote using three datasets and found that support for more experienced governments is less dependent on economic growth than voters' perceptions of the economy, and that voters are more likely to hold experienced governments more accountable for economic conditions.
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Obama’s Economy: Conditional Racial Spillover Into Evaluations of the Economy
Philip Chen,Ruchika Mohanty +1 more
TL;DR: Chen et al. as mentioned in this paper found that economic evaluations in 2012 were racialized, but these effects depend on the political predispositions of the voter as well as the composition of the information environment surrounding the issue.
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.