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
Party Affiliation, Partisanship, and Political Beliefs: A Field Experiment
TL;DR: This article found that those reminded of the need to register with a political party were more likely to identify with a party and showed stronger partisanship, while the treatment group also demonstrated greater concordance than the control group between their pretreatment latent partisanship and their posttreatment reported voting behavior and intentions and evaluations of partisan figures.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Dynamics of Health Care Opinion, 2008–2010: Partisanship, Self-Interest, and Racial Resentment
TL;DR: It is found that health care policy preferences, already tinged with racial attitudes in 2008, became increasingly so by 2010, with Republicans growing more opposed to universal health insurance and those personally worried about medical expenses less likely to abandon support.
Book
Partisan Priorities: How Issue Ownership Drives and Distorts American Politics
TL;DR: Egan as discussed by the authors investigated the origins of issue ownership, showing that in fact the parties deliver neither superior performance nor popular policies on the issues they own, rather, Republicans and Democrats simply prioritize their owned issues with lawmaking and government spending when they are in power.
Book ChapterDOI
Putting Polarization in Perspective
TL;DR: In 2003, Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, attempted to rush a ninety-page pension reform bill through his committee with only one Democrat, Representative Pete Stark (D-Calif), still in the room.
Journal ArticleDOI
Shifting Liberal and Conservative Attitudes Using Moral Foundations Theory
TL;DR: This work examines whether five moral foundations—harm, fairness, ingroup, authority, and purity—can influence political attitudes of liberals and conservatives across a variety of issues.
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.