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
Reassessing the Role of Anxiety in Vote Choice
TL;DR: This paper uses cross-sectional and panel survey data to test Affective Intelligence (AI) against two simpler alternatives, finding little support for AI, some evidence that emotions directly influence candidate evaluations, and strong evidence that candidate evaluations directly influence emotions.
OtherDOI
Group Identity and Political Cohesion
TL;DR: The conditions under which group identities become politicized, the psychology underlying this process, and the consequences of political identities for political cohesion and engagement are examined in this article, and the degree to which group leaders can elicit cohesion and conformity and the situational elements that promote such influence is a promising avenue for future research.
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Vote Switching in the 2016 Election: How Racial and Immigration Attitudes, Not Economics, Explain Shifts in White Voting
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Do the facts speak for themselves? partisan disagreement as a challenge to democratic competence
TL;DR: The partisan and ideological polarization of American politics since the 1970s appears to have affected pubic opinion in striking ways as discussed by the authors, which has raised questions about how rational the public is, in the broad sense of the public's responsiveness to objective conditions.
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
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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.