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
Racial Attitudes Through a Partisan Lens
TL;DR: This paper applied cross-lagged models to panel data from the 1990s and 2000s to demonstrate that whites align their racial attitudes with their party loyalties and found that partisanship has a more pronounced influence in the latter time period, consistent with a view that changes in the political context can make partisanship a more likely causal force on other attitudes.
Stability and Change in Voting Behaviour. Macro and Micro Determinants of Electoral Volatility.
TL;DR: Dassonneville et al. as discussed by the authors found that there is an association between economic indicators and levels of volatility in the West European countries in the period 1950-2013, and that this effect furthermore grows stronger over time.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Incumbent Electoral Defeat in the 2011 Spanish National Elections: The Effect of the Economic Crisis in an Ideological Polarized Party System
TL;DR: The authors examined the effect of economic crisis on voting preferences in the 2011 Spanish national election and found that voters' reactions to the economic crisis were not uniform and that their evaluations of the economic situation and final electoral decisions were conditioned by prior ideological preferences.
Journal ArticleDOI
Economic Performance, Individual Evaluations, and the Vote: Investigating the Causal Mechanism
TL;DR: This article found that the effect of economic performance on the incumbent vote is largely accounted for by voters' retrospective evaluations of the national economy, and the effect is stronger in contexts where policymaking power is concentrated rather than dispersed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Attitude Responsiveness and Partisan Bias: Direct Experience with the Affordable Care Act
TL;DR: This article found that individuals who experienced a positive change in their insurance situation are found to express more positive views toward the health reform law, while individuals who lost their insurance or experienced an otherwise negative personal impact on their insurance situations express more negative views.
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.