How partisan social identity shapes evaluations of candidate brand elements on campaign websites

Abstract

ABSTRACT Political parties operate as partisan social groups and partisanship biases the way individuals process political information, form political opinions, and evaluate candidates. Partisans demonstrate favoritism when evaluating fellow party members but discriminate against those in the opposing party. However, the bounds of this partisan intergroup bias are undetermined. Using a constructed political website, an experiment tested the extent of the reach of partisan social identity in biasing evaluations on candidate brand attributes. That limit was not ascertained as partisans evaluated an out-party candidate lower than an in-party candidate on every brand element measured, including personal and nonpolitical attributes. Through a tragic frame, partisans expressed great negative affect toward a candidate from the opposing party and transfer it to his political stances, experience, wife, grandson, and even dog. The results reveal that partisan social identities create divides among social and personal issues and exacerbate affective polarization.