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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Loss, Change, Adaptation: how people change when their lives do
TL;DR: Hobbs et al. as discussed by the authors argue that persistence in behavior, identity, and social interaction is often maintained by social networks, rather than individuals, and that consistency in individuals is a property of stable social structures, and individuals can change very quickly when social networks around them allow or encourage it.
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Want a Better Forecast? Measure the Campaign Not Just the Economy
TL;DR: The real unemployment rate is over 15% as discussed by the authors, and it has not been below 8% since 2009, when a newly elected President Obama told America that if Congress approved his plan to borrow nearly a trillion dollars, he would hold unemployment below 8%.
The Determinants of Americans' Attitudes of Representation
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a method to solve the problem of the problem: this article.x.x.q.x.q.q.,q.e.
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The Quality of Political Information
TL;DR: In this paper, the quality of political information is conceptualized and three aspects of quality (intelligibility, relevance, and relevance) are distinguished: relevance, relevance and usefulness.
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.