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
Do Citizens Link Attitudes with Preferences? Economic Inequality and Government Spending in the “New Gilded Age”
TL;DR: The relationship between attitudes about wealth inequality and spending preferences is positive, but not strong as mentioned in this paper, and there is no evidence that the least well-off are more attuned to linking attitudes about inequality with spending preferences than the upper or middle classes.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Balanced News Diet, Not Selective Exposure: Evidence From A Direct Measure of Media Exposure
TL;DR: The authors found that the vast majority of US adults consume predominately centrist information, while frequently encountering ideological programming challenging their views, regardless of partisanship, and that the best predictor of how much conservative news you read is how much liberal news you watch.
Journal ArticleDOI
Government Partisanship and Property Rights: Cross-Country Firm-Level Evidence
TL;DR: The authors found that the political partisanship of the government in power strongly affects individual perceptions of property rights: firm owners are more likely to perceive that their property rights are secure under right-leaning governments.
The Dynamics of Vote Buying in Developing Democracies: Party Attachment and Party Competition in Southeast Asia
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a theory for how changes in competition occur in emerging democracies, arguing that linkages between voting blocs and parties erode and cleavages shift, allowing for new voter blocs or even new parties.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Negativity Bias in Reframing Shapes Political Preferences Even in Partisan Contexts
TL;DR: The political domain offers a unique opportunity to study the simultaneous influence of valence and group membership when learning about their environment as discussed by the authors, which is the case in many aspects of human behavior.
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.