How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation
Summary (4 min read)
C
- One of the most noteworthy events over the last quarter-century in U.S. politics is the change in the nature of elite party competition:.
- Yet, few have addressed what the authors see as perhaps more fundamental questions:.
- The authors address these questions with a theory and two survey experiments (on the issues of drilling and immigration).
- The authors discuss the implications for public opinion formation and the nature of democratic competition.
E.
- E. Schattschneider (1960, 138) concluded his classic book, The Semisovereign People, by defining democracy as "a competitive political system in which competing leaders and organizations define the alternatives of public policy in such a way that the public can participate in the decision-making process" (italics in original).
- His concluding conception of democracy has received relatively scant attention.
- Therefore, following previous work, the authors define elite polarization as high levels of ideological distance between parties and high levels of homogeneity within parties.
- Fiorina and Abrams 2008, 582; Hetherington 2009, 429) , the authors nonetheless turn to the more fundamental question of how elite polarization affects the nature of citizen decision making.
FRAMING AND PARTY COMPETITION
- The authors goal is to assess the impact of elite polarization on citizen decision making.
- The authors compare the decisions citizens reach in the presence of competing arguments made in a polarized environment against those made in less polarized environments (see Mansbridge 1983, 25) .
- The authors specifically compare the role of perhaps the two most widely used types of information on which citizens base political decisions: substantive arguments (of varying types or "strengths") in the form of distinct issue frames and partisan cues.
Framing
- Few topics have been studied as How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation February 2013 extensively in the field of political communication (e.g., Chong and Druckman 2011; n.d.) .
- Concerning a hate group rally, for instance, these frames or arguments could involve considerations of free speech, public safety, public litter, traffic problems, the community's reputation, or racism.
- Different frames on each side might be relatively strong or weak when compared to one another.
- A growing research literature shows that strong frames, when used in isolation, move opinions.
- Druckman (2010) pre-tested frame strength on the issue of a publically funded casino and found that strong frames included the economic implications and social costs of building the casino.
Party Competition
- Even though most frames enter political discourse via political actors (e.g., parties, interest groups), most framing studies have provided study respondents with either unattributed frames or frames attributed to a news organization.
- These studies, however, do not explore competitive framing environments or vary frame strength (or the substance of distinct arguments more generally), and they do not directly account for different partisan environments (e.g., polarized or not).
- When individuals are highly motivated to form accurate opinions, they tend to focus on substance regardless of their partisanship and/or prior opinions (e.g., Kunda 1990, 485 ; also see Nir 2011; Prior 2007) .
- Partisans will view their opinions as increasingly important when receiving a frame with their partisan sponsor (versus a frame without their partisan sponsor) and, even more so, when this occurs in polarized conditions, also known as Hypothesis 6.
EXPERIMENTAL TESTS OF PARTISAN POLARIZATION AND FRAMING
- The authors conducted two experiments to test their hypotheses via the internet, with a sample drawn to be representative of the U.S. population, during the spring of 2011.
- The authors focused their analyses on partisans; that is, individuals identifying with or leaning toward either party (N = 646).
- The authors recognize that importance, like their aforementioned ambivalence construct, is a dimension of attitude strength.
- It is for this reason that the authors looked at different dimensions and did not attempt to envelope them under a general rubric of strength.
- The sample was drawn from a panel of respondents who had opted in to complete online surveys.
Policy Issues
- One experiment focused on an energy policy proposal: drilling for oil and gas.
- In March of that year, President Obama announced that the United States would allow drilling for oil and gas off the Atlantic Coast and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
- Similarly, the DREAM Act, a legislative proposal first introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2001, has been regularly debated in the U.S. Congress and several state legislatures over the last decade.
- Like elites, the public is split on drilling and is not overly driven by partisan predications (Bolsen and Cook 2008) .
Issue Frames
- The authors next task was to select the frames on each issue.
- The authors selected seven prominent frames for each issue.
- As with prior work, the authors asked respondents to evaluate the direction and strength of frames on each policy issue (on 7-point scales ranging from definitely opposed to definitely supportive, and from definitely not effective to definitely effective).
- For drilling, their strongpro frame emphasized the "economic benefits" of the practice, including how drilling will increase the oil supply, leading to lower gas prices and the creation of employment opportunities.
- Act issue, as displayed in Table 1b , their strong-pro frame emphasized how the young "beneficiaries" would be offered many opportunities (e.g., to go on to become doctors, teachers, and the like), whereas the weak-pro frame focused on "public support" for the act (e.g., many segments of the public support the DREAM Act).
Partisan Cues and Polarization
- The authors hypotheses offer distinct predictions about the impact of strong and weak frames depending on the presence of party cues and the degree of polarization.
- Republicans in Congress tend to favor drilling and Democrats in Congress tend to oppose drilling.
- Second, such ecological validity was important in their case because the authors suspect such information prompts a distinct processing approach.
- The main argument for those in favor of drilling is that drilling increases their oil supply, which leads to lower gas prices.
- To see how polarization and frame strength varied between conditions, compare this with Condition 7 (nonpolarized party endorsements, strong pro frame, weak con frame) on the same issue, which reads,.
Measures
- In what follows, the authors do not report results with these other variables, because they do not affect their main results; suffice it to say that those results echo prior work on energy and immigration.
- 21 The authors main dependent variables involved support for drilling and support for the DREAM Act, and the authors used question wordings from prior national surveys on these issues.
- Act treatments, which followed the drilling treatments and measures.
- Testing Hypotheses 2 and 4 required a measure asking respondents to assess the effectiveness of the frames to which they were exposed.
RESULTS
- The authors first present the results regarding overall support for drilling and the DREAM Act (i.e., Hypotheses 1, 3, 5) by charting the percentage change in opinion, by condition, relative to the control group (which answered the two issue support questions without encountering other information).
- Finally, because their results on both issues are very similar to one another, the authors present them in tandem-that is, they go through each hypothesis on both issues rather than sequentially presenting results on the issues.
- On drilling, for example, Republican participants encountering the strong-pro economic frame endorsed by Republicans, as well as the strongcon frame worker and maritime life frame from Democrats (Condition 6), followed the Republican endorsement and became more than 10% more supportive.
- In a polarized partisan environment, partisan motivated reasoning overwhelms substance.
- These results largely confirm Hypothesis 5; however, they do not fully support it, because the hypothesis predicted greater partisan effects in the polarized than in the non-polarized conditions and the authors found that partisan effects are sometimes similar across these conditions when the arguments are of equal quality.
• Under conditions of low polarization:
- ᭺ when presented with opposing frames of different strength (e.g., one strong and one weak), endorsed by different parties, partisans' opinions move only in the direction of the strong frame regardless of the party endorsements.
- Party endorsements drive opinions, in the face of arguments that do not differ in strength.
- Under conditions of high polarization, when presented with opposing frames, regardless of strength, partisans' opinions move only in the direction of the frame endorsed by their party.
- In sum, partisan endorsements matter in lowpolarization conditions when both parties present arguments of equivalent strength; substance wins out otherwise.
Evaluations of Frame Strength
- The authors next test Hypotheses 2 and 4, which posit that partisan endorsements should affect the evaluations of the frames themselves.
- Another key statistic, the difference between evaluations of the pro and con frames, is also listed in each table.
- Thus, polarization seems to spark motivated reasoning, and people clearly evaluate frames differently in the presence of polarization.
- Partisan polarization altered the argument evaluation process, however, with strong frames rated as ineffective in polarized conditions if they did not receive an endorsement from the individual's own party.
- Act issue, the authors found the expected differences significant for Democrats, except between Conditions 6 and 10 where the difference in assessments of frames was in the expected direction but was not large enough to reach statistical significance.
Opinion Importance
- The authors final hypothesis (6) posits that opinion importance should grow as a partisan sponsor is added and, particularly, when the parties are polarized.
- To test this hypothesis, the authors used the control group as a baseline and expected that adding partisan sponsors, particularly under conditions of polarization, should result in an increase in attitude importance.
- Thus, Hypothesis 6 is supported because the polarized conditions have a significantly greater impact on attitude importance than the nonpolarized conditions in nearly every case (although the authors did expect more changes in the non-polarized conditions than were observed).
- In short, not only does a polarized environment increase partisan motived reasoning-and decrease reliance on substance-but it also causes people to view their opinions as more important.
CONCLUSION
- The authors find that, in the absence of party endorsements, the strength of the arguments/frames in play drives opinions (e.g., Chong and Druckman 2007) .
- Following this line of thought, their Vol. 107, No. 1 findings of increased motivated reasoning in polarized environments indicate lower quality opinions in these conditions.
- This divergence has far more than pedantic implications-if political scientists hope to play a role in promoting civic competence and coherent voting behavior, there needs to be greater discussion on what it means to be competent.
- Druckman et al. (2012) show that the 30 We view their work as setting an agenda for more research into how elite polarization affects not only whether citizens themselves polarize but also how polarization affects how they arrive at their policy opinions.the authors.the authors.
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Frequently Asked Questions (9)
Q2. What are the future works in "How elite partisan polarization affects public opinion formation" ?
Clearly, the timing, nature, and intensity of competition affect preference formation, and future work that fails to incorporate these political realities will also fail to come to grips with the dynamics of opinion formation.
Q3. How many people correctly recalled the pro and con positions of the parties?
On the drilling issue, on average 89% of participants correctly recalled the pro and con positions of the parties (ranging from 85% to 94% across the eight conditions with party cues), and on the immigration issue 87% correctly recalled party positions.
Q4. How did the economic argument affect the support for drilling?
In other words, the strong economic argument, when pitted against the weak regulation frame, increased support for drilling by nearly 19% among Democrats and 14% among Republicans.
Q5. What is the effect of polarized parties on people's attitudes?
In the long term, overconfidence may speak to the stability of political parties in general (Johnson and Fowler 2011), which may be of concern: Polarized parties lead to more confidence in opinions; that is, people consider29
Q6. What does the author think about the effect of competition on the way people form opinions?
because politics takes place over time and hence so does competition, one should not presume that competition works perfectly in how it shapes opinions.
Q7. What is the key to the dynamic uncovered by Iyengar, Sood,?
This is the type of dynamic uncovered by Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes (2012) who find that negative campaigning between parties, which stems from increased polarization, is “an especially important contextual factor that heightens the salience of partisan identity.”
Q8. What did the researchers find when they encountered a mix of strong and weak frames?
When another group of respondents encountered a mix of these frames, only the strong frames affected their opinion (e.g., a single exposure to the strong economic frame moved opinion by 41%), even in the face of multiple negative moral value frames (also see Aarøe 2011).
Q9. what is the role of political parties in a democracy?
In addition to discussions of opinion quality, their results also have implications for research on the role of political parties in a democracy.