Journal ArticleDOI
Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions
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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
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.
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When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions
Brendan Nyhan,Jason Reifler +1 more
TL;DR: The authors conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from a politician, or misleading claim and a correction, and found that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group.
Book
Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy
TL;DR: In this article, hearing the other side examines this theme in the context of the contemporary United States and suggests that it is doubtful that an extremely activist political culture can also be a heavily deliberative one.
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Public Attitudes Toward Immigration
TL;DR: The authors found that immigration attitudes are shaped by sociotropic concerns about its cultural impacts and to a lesser extent its economic impacts on the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, and this pattern of results has held up as scholars have increasingly turned to experimental tests.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States
TL;DR: While previously polarization was primarily seen only in issue-based terms, a new type of division has emerged in the mass public in recent years: Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distru...
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Mass Response to the Lewinsky Scandal: Motivated Reasoning or BayesianUpdating?
TL;DR: This article found that the influence of various considerations (like the credibility and importance of the allegations) on reactions to the scandal was conditional upon prior affect for the president, thus constraining citizens' reactions.
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The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952–1988 Martin P. Wattenberg 3rd ed.; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990, pp. xviii, 203The Loyalties of Voters: A Lifetime Learning Model Richard Rose and Ian McAllister London: Sage, 1990, pp. xiv, 219
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The decline of American political parties, 1952-1994
TL;DR: In this article, the travails of political parties in the United States, by analyzing a congressional election, are discussed, and the return of divided government via the Republicans' takeover of Congress in 1994 is discussed.
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Party Loyalty and the Likelihood of Deviating Elections
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the problem of predicting the behavior of the American electorate in any given election if the vote were to express only the influence of these basic dispositions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Dynamic models of the voter's decision calculus: Incorporating retrospective considerations into rational-choice models of individual voting behavior
TL;DR: In this article, a growing body of literature indicates that US national elections can be viewed as referenda on the performance of incumbent administrations Retrospective considerations have not been explicitly incorporated into a spatial model of party competition.