This article found that polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements on opinions, decreases impact of substantive information and stimulates greater confidence in those less substantively grounded opinions, and that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions.
Abstract:
Competition is a defining element of democracy. 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: The parties have become increasingly polarized. Scholars and pundits actively debate how these elite patterns influence polarization among the public (e.g., have citizens also become more ideologically polarized?). Yet, few have addressed what we see as perhaps more fundamental questions: Has elite polarization altered the way citizens arrive at their policy opinions in the first place and, if so, in what ways? We address these questions with a theory and two survey experiments (on the issues of drilling and immigration). We find stark evidence that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions. Specifically, polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements on opinions, decreases the impact of substantive information and, perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those—less substantively grounded—opinions. We discuss the implications for public opinion formation and the nature of democratic competition.
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Q1. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "How elite partisan polarization affects public opinion formation" ?
The authors discuss the implications for public opinion formation and the nature of democratic competition.
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.