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
Addressing the Endogeneity of Economic Evaluations in Models of Political Choice
Mark Pickup,Geoffrey Evans +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, an analysis of three-wave panel surveys produces estimates of the effect of economic perceptions on party evaluation that are not biased upward by the presence of endogeneity and that help address the discrepancy between competing subjective models of economic effects on government approval.
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Costs, benefits, and the malleability of public support for “Fracking”
TL;DR: The authors found that individuals whose partisan attachments and preexisting beliefs about global climate change conflict are particularly responsive to arguments about the benefits and costs of fracking, and mixed evidence of partisan motivated reasoning in how this information is processed.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Computational Model of the Citizen as Motivated Reasoner: Modeling the Dynamics of the 2000 Presidential Election
TL;DR: The authors developed a computational model of political attitudes and beliefs that incorporates contemporary theories of social and cognitive psychology with well-documented findings from electoral behavior, and compared it to a Bayesian learning model via computer simulations of empirically observed changes in candidate evaluations over the course of the 2000 presidential election.
A populist Zeitgeist? The impact of populism on parties, media and the public in Western Europe
TL;DR: The authors showed that despite the large impact of populist parties on Western European societies, populism is not pervasive to the extent that we can speak of an all-encompassing populist Zeitgeist.
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Are Voter Decision Rules Endogenous to Parties’ Policy Strategies? A Model with Applications to Elite Depolarization in Post-Thatcher Britain
TL;DR: The authors argue that British citizens predominantly update their partisanship to match their policy beliefs, and that voters' policy beliefs exert diminishing effects on their party evaluations as parties depolarize on a focal policy dimension.
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.