Negative partisanship among Independents in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections

Abstract

Negative partisanship has been on the rise in American politics: While many Americans feel lukewarm about their own party, disdain toward the opposing party is steadily intensifying. Prior scholarship has examined to what extent negative partisanship can arise without any prior attachments to a particular party. Yet, most preceding work focuses on self-declared supporters of a political party who – by definition – have a positive party identification, thereby making it challenging to disentangle positive and negative partisanship. In this paper, I address this conceptual difficulty by surveying self-identified Independents shortly before the 2020 U.S. presidential elections. I show that negative partisanship among Independents predicts turnout, political engagement, strong emotional responses to the election outcome, as well as opposition to bipartisanship. These results confirm the notion that negative partisanship can influence political behavior independently of positive partisanship.