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
Paranoid styles and innumeracy: implications of a conspiracy mindset on Europeans' misperceptions about immigrants
Sergio Martini,Mattia Guidi,Francesco Olmastroni,Linda Basile,Rossella Borri,Pierangelo Isernia +5 more
TL;DR: This article found that those with a higher propensity to hold a conspiracy worldview tend to overestimate the actual share of the immigrant population living in their own country, and this association holds true when accounting for country heterogeneity and other cognitive, affective and socio-demographic factors.
Book ChapterDOI
Who Wins on Policy
TL;DR: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 as mentioned in this paper was one of the biggest tax cuts in the history of American democracy, and it is not as if the American public was not watching or did not care.
Journal ArticleDOI
Trumping Racism: The Interactions of Stereotype Incongruent Clothing, Political Racial Rhetoric, and Prejudice Toward African Americans
TL;DR: This paper used a between-group design with clothing type (stereotype congruent or incongruent) and exposure to racial rhetoric (strong/weak/none) as independent variables.
Journal ArticleDOI
Polarization and American Jews: The Partisan Debate Over Attribution of Blame and Responsibility for Rising Anti-Semitism in the United States
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors considered the relative influence of political ideology and partisan vote choice on perceptions of Democratic versus Republican responsibility for the level of anti-Semitism in the United States and the perceived anti-Semitic threat posed by the extreme political right versus the extreme left.
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.