Journal ArticleDOI
Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions
Reads0
Chats0
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
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Who Fits the Left-Right Divide? Partisan Polarization in the American Electorate
TL;DR: The authors explored the partisan consequences of the discrepancy between the one-dimensional structure of elite policy preferences and the two-dimensional structures of citizens' policy preferences, and found that those citizens with preferences that are consistently liberal or consistently conservative across both economic and social issues have responded to elite partisan polarization with mass polarization.
Journal ArticleDOI
What does “Political” Mean to You?
TL;DR: For instance, this article found that there is a great deal of inter-personal variation in terms of how many and what kinds of topics people perceive as the stuff of politics and this variation comes in predictable patterns: the findings reveal correlations between socio-political attributes (such as gender, nationality and ideology) and the boundaries people draw around the political domain.
Journal ArticleDOI
Citizen Perceptions of Government Service Quality: Evidence from Public Schools
TL;DR: The authors found that the relationship between perceived and actual school quality is two to three times stronger for parents of school-age children, who have the most contact with schools and arguably the strongest incentive to be informed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Public opinion, party messages, and responsibility for the financial crisis in Britain
Timothy Hellwig,Eva Coffey +1 more
TL;DR: This article found that while most assign responsibility for the crisis to market actors, the likelihood of blaming governments, as opposed to blaming banks and investors, is greater among low sophisticates and Conservative Party identifiers.
Journal ArticleDOI
Fact-Checking Polarized Politics: Does The Fact-Check Industry Provide Consistent Guidance on Disputed Realities?
TL;DR: This paper examined the comparative epistemology of the three major fact-check sites: do they examine the same questions and reach the same conclusions, and found substantial differences in the questions asked and the answers offered, limiting the usefulness of fact-checking for citizens trying to decide which version of disputed reality to believe.
References
More filters
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.