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
ReportDOI
Partisan Professionals: Evidence from Credit Rating Analysts
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that analysts who are not affiliated with the U.S. president's party downward-adjust corporate credit ratings more frequently than those affiliated with his party.
Journal ArticleDOI
Identifying Active Hot-Issue Communicators and Subgroup Identifiers: Examining the Situational Theory of Problem Solving
TL;DR: The authors used the situational theory of problem solving (STOPS) to investigate communication behaviors of publics formed around an intensively publicized policy issue and found that party identity serves as a better identifier of the hot-issue public's subgroups than trust in the government.
Journal ArticleDOI
Economic Behavior and the Partisan Perceptual Screen
TL;DR: In this article, the authors re-analyze Gerber and Huber's original data and collect new data from two additional U.S. presidential elections since the original study similarly shows no evidence of an effect.
Journal ArticleDOI
Electoral Cycle Fluctuations in Partisanship: Global Evidence from Eighty-Six Countries
TL;DR: In this article, the authors expect citizen attachments to political parties to wax during election season and predict that voter attachment to political candidates will increase during the election season, given that elections evoke mass mobilization.
Journal ArticleDOI
Do Abortion Attitudes Lead to Party Switching
Mitchell Killian,Clyde Wilcox +1 more
Abstract: The notion that issues and ideology can move partisanship remains controversial. The authors explore the stronger claim that issues can lead people to switch political parties and whether the effect of abortion attitudes is asymmetrical (i.e., abortion attitudes may influence party switching in only one direction). They show that in several short-term National Election Studies panels, pro-life Democrats were significantly more likely than other Democrats to become Republicans, but pro-choice Republicans were not likely to become Democrats. However, using panel data over a long time frame, 1982 to 1997, the authors also demonstrate that the cumulative effect of abortion attitudes led pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans to switch parties.
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.