Partisan Effects Research Articles

Turn to the right, turn away from the green?—A nuanced analysis on how a populist radical right party affects environmental policy making in Sweden

AbstractPopulist radical right parties are on the rise all over Europe. Recent literature investigates their effects on environmental policy, however, often applying an overly broad perspective on the policy area and neglecting causal mechanisms. This article addresses both gaps in an in‐depth case study of partisan effects on Swedish environmental policy in the wake of increasing populist radical right influence. A novel data approach deriving party positions and policy output from the hard figures of budget proposals between 2001 and 2023, allows a nuanced analysis of environmental policy and its subsectors (e.g., nature conservation and climate mitigation). In summary, a traditional partisan effect is confirmed as a major explaining factor for environmental policy change, while the effect unfolds through altered coalition formation strategies leading to the exclusion of “green voices.” This brings to the fore interactive environmental policy effects of the populist radical right and center‐right parties in the context of changing party competition constellations more generally.

Polarization versus professionalism: military and civilian views on the domestic use of the military

Abstract Scholars and policymakers warn that with rising affective polarization, politicians will find support from the public and permission from military professionals to use military force to selectively crack down on political opponents. We test these claims by conducting parallel survey experiments among the US public and mid-career military officers. We ask about two hypothetical scenarios of domestic partisan unrest, randomly assigning the partisan identity of protesters. Surprisingly, we find widespread public support for deploying the military and no significant partisanship effects. Meanwhile, military officers were very resistant to deploying the military, with nearly 75 percent opposed in any scenario. In short, there is little evidence that public polarization threatens to escalate domestic disputes, and strong evidence for military opposition.

The Costs of Voting and Voter Confidence

We revisit the effect of ballot access laws on voter confidence in the outcome of elections. Previous research found weak or no relationship between voter confidence and election laws regulating ballot access. We argue this non-finding is conditioned by partisanship. Democrats and Republicans view election laws through a partisan lens, which is especially triggered when coalitions lose. Republican voters see ballot restrictions as a means of securing the vote against fraud; Democratic voters see ballot restrictions as voter suppression. We maintain that the conditional partisan effect that election laws have on voter confidence is triggered or attenuated when partisans’ candidates lose elections. We find that in states where ballot access is costly, voter confidence among partisans and supporters of the losing Presidential candidate is significantly higher for Republicans and significantly lower for Democrats than their counterparts in states with less costly ballot access laws. These effects are greater for Republican than Democrats. We discuss the implications of our findings on election ecosystems and voter confidence.

Parallel Worlds? The Partisan Effects of COVID-19 on Real Estate

Parallel Worlds? The Partisan Effects of COVID-19 on Real Estate

Partisan differences in perceived levels of democracy across presidential administrations

Democracy in the United States is in decline. The current work examines to what degree U.S. Americans perceive this decline in the U.S., and how partisanship may shape those perceptions over time. Using cross-sectional archival data spanning three U.S. presidential administrations (Study 1), we find that perceived levels of democracy by U.S. Americans on both sides of the political spectrum were not attuned to objective democracy indices but instead followed a partisan gap where election winners perceived higher levels of democracy than election losers. Using a longitudinal quasi-experiment tracking the 2020 presidential election (Study 2), we find that the effect of partisanship on perceived levels of democracy kicked in right after the announcement of the election winner but was the strongest after the official inauguration. Moreover, Trump supporters showed heterogeneous responses to the Capitol attack, which highlights the possibility of bipartisan willingness to defend democracy after salient attacks on democratic principles. We discuss the implications of the effect of partisanship on perceptions of democracy.

From Confidence to Convenience: Changes in Voting Systems, Donald Trump, and Voter Confidence

Abstract A growing body of research indicates that voters’ perceptions of the electoral system change when the means of administering elections change. As some electoral jurisdictions have moved to systems designed to increase voter convenience, little is known about whether convenience is achieved at the expense of confidence. Utah’s rollout of Vote by Mail (VBM) occurred county by county across five federal elections, and the three most populous counties adopted all VBM elections successively in 2014, 2016, and 2018. This meaningful variance in voter experience with VBM allows us to model the relationship between experience with VBM and voter confidence. We find that the switch to a more convenient system of voting came at the expense of diminished confidence in the voting process. However, experience with VBM is positively related to confidence such that the loss in confidence can be recouped over time. To capture this dynamic relative to other factors, we also estimate the effects of partisanship and the messages of political elites. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the effect of partisanship on voter confidence changed compared to just two years earlier. Elite messages appear to be especially negative for Trump voters after 2020. More experience with VBM acts as a bulwark against those negative messages, almost completely attenuating the negative effects of Trump’s fraud claims among his voters with the highest levels of VBM experience.

Political Partisanship and Economic Outcomes: Canada, 1870–2020

Abstract This paper examines the role of partisanship at the provincial and federal levels in relation to the functioning of the Canadian economy. At the provincial level (1976–2019), we find no evidence of a traditional partisan effect but do find evidence weakly consistent with a rational partisan cycle a′ la Alesina. At the federal level (1870–2020), we also find no evidence consistent with a distinctive expansion in output arising when the government is controlled by the left-leaning (Liberal) political party although we again find evidence of a weak rational partisan effect. The former result is reinforced by finding the absence of evidence of partisan changes in federal spending and/or taxation. But while the data do not support a theory of left-right partisan policy over the entire post-Confederation (1867) period of Canada’s history, the data do support distinctive periods of partisan influence on aggregate output. The first is consistent with Sir John A. MacDonald’s post-Confederation conservative government’s adoption of a policy of nation-building based on the railway, immigration, and tariffs. The second is the period between 1885 and 1933 where traditional left-right partisanship is evident and the third is the period following the Great Depression where a distinction between the outcomes arising under left- versus right-leaning parties is no longer apparent.

Legislative Cooperation and Selective Benefits: An Experimental Investigation on the Limits of Credit Claiming

Do legislators get credit for working with the other party? Studies on this have been limited due to a lack of an appropriate counterfactual. This article experimentally estimates the value of credit claiming on a small project that was produced with bipartisanship or with an uncooperative party. I argue that process does indeed matter. Specifically, I hypothesize voters will punish in-party partisans for working with the other side and punish out-party partisans when they do not work with their side. However, in-party partisans do not care whether their party works with the other side. Out-party partisans punish members for uncooperative legislating. Further, I argue and find that these effects are distinguishable from overall partisan effects, demonstrating that members can use distributional projects to gain out-party support in a polarized environment. These findings have important implications for lawmaking and polarization.

Partisan Panel Composition and Reliance on Earlier Opinions in the Circuit Courts

Does the partisan composition of three-judge panels affect how earlier opinions are treated and thus how the law develops? Using a novel data set of Shepard's treatments for all cases decided in the U.S. courts of appeals from 1974 to 2017, we investigate three different versions of this question. First, are panels composed of three Democratic (Republican) appointees more likely to follow opinions decided by panels of three Democratic (Republican) appointees than are panels composed of three Republican (Democratic) appointees? Second, does the presence of a single out-party judge change how a panel relies on earlier decisions compared to what one would expect from a panel with homogeneous partisanship? Finally, does the size of these potential partisan effects change over time in a way that would be consistent with partisan polarization on the courts? We find that partisanship does, in fact, structure whether earlier opinions are followed and that these partisan effects have grown over time—particularly within the subset of cases that we believe are most likely to be ideologically salient. Since legal doctrine is developed by building upon or diminishing past opinions, these results have important implications for our understanding of the development of the law.

Belief in White Replacement

ABSTRACT The “White Replacement” conspiracy theory, that governments and corporations are “replacing” white people, is linked to several mass shootings. Given its recent ubiquity in elite rhetoric, concerns have arisen about the popularity of this conspiracy theory among the United States mass public. Further, political scientists have noted a need to understand why people believe or act upon this conspiracy theory. Using a 2022 US national survey (n = 2001), we find that a third of Americans agree that leaders are replacing white people with people of color. These beliefs are related to anti-social personality traits, various forms of nationalist and authoritarian sentiments, and negative sentiments toward immigrants, minorities, women, and the political establishment. Regression analysis however fails to find significant effects of partisanship and ideology on these beliefs. Further, we observed that these beliefs are related to a desire to engage in both normative (e.g., run for political office) and nonnormative political participation (e.g., commit violence). Given the popularity of White Replacement conspiracy theories in the US and elsewhere, our findings suggest new avenues for research into potentially dangerous beliefs, as well as xenophobia, antisemitism, racism, sexism, extremism, and political violence.

Self-Defense and Political Rage

This Article considers how American political polarization and the substantive issues driving it raise unique challenges for adjudicating self-defense claims in contexts of political protest. We live in an age where roughly a quarter of the population believes it is at least sometimes justifiable to use violence in defense of political positions, making political partisans somewhat more likely to pose a genuine threat of bodily harm to opponents. Furthermore, the psychological literature shows that people are more likely to perceive threats from people with whom they politically disagree and that juries tend to evaluate reasonableness claims according to their own political positions. All three of these phenomena create challenges for the rule of law due to the increased risk that factually similar cases will turn out differently and that the justice system will merely recreate the monomaniacal, us-versus-them polarization of society at large. This Article surveys the relevant political science and psychological literature on partisanship and reasoning and proposes two interrelated solutions: one pragmatic, at the level of individual trials, and the other cultural, at the level of social discourse. It suggests that judges import what we know about the distortive effects of partisanship into the courtroom through the use of court-appointed psychological experts and jury instructions. Both have shown some success—if tailored precisely to the facts of a specific case—in correcting some forms of juror bias and reasoning errors. This Article further argues that incorporating these processes into the adjudication of politicized self-defense claims will have a broader, expressive value for society as a whole. Trials provide a model for truth-finding, which, for better or for worse, impacts how private citizens evaluate culpability in their day-to-day lives. If trials draw even some people’s attention to the ways in which partisan thinking can generate or justify acts of violence, they may be a force for moderation in how people deal with their political disagreements, which will have benefits far beyond the courtroom.

An Empirical Analysis of Race and Political Partisanship Effects on Workplace Mobility Patterns During Lockdown, Reopening, and Endemic COVID-19

The authors investigate how race and political partisanship affected variations in workplace and non-workplace mobility at three COVID-19 phases—lockdown (2020), reopening (2021), and endemic COVID (2022). They theorize that structural racism compelled relatively greater workplace mobility rates in Black communities during lockdown, and reduced Black workplace mobility during reopening and endemic COVID. By contrast, they posit elite-level anti-science skepticism and its amplification resulted in Trump-voting communities experiencing relatively higher workplace and non-workplace mobility rates than non-Trump-voting areas throughout the pandemic. Regressions primarily using county-level Google Mobility Reports data support the hypotheses, conditioning on state-level fixed effects and county-level urbanity, COVID job-type sorting, demographics, and socioeconomics. The county-level results are complemented by outcomes from novel individual-level COVID lockdown survey data, helping connect the proposed individual-level mechanisms to the county-level findings. The authors conclude that work mobility during COVID was racialized and politicized, offering empirical insights into how systematic disadvantages can lead to increased and unequal precarity during periods of acute economic or social crisis.

Skin Tone and the Moderating Effect of Partisanship on Assessments of Elected Officials of Color

Skin Tone and the Moderating Effect of Partisanship on Assessments of Elected Officials of Color

Elections and partisanship: analyzing the results of the 2023 general elections in Turkey

ABSTRACT On the 100th anniversary of the Republic, Turkey experienced another multi-party election. This paper aims to analyse the role partisanship played in determining the outcomes of the 2023 General Elections. The literature provides valuable insights about the effects of partisanship on the vote choice in Turkey, and underscores the influence of political socialization, newly emerging political parties, clientelist ties and voters’ threat perceptions on party identification. To contribute to this literature, this study provides individual level analysis of the data gathered via Turkish Election Studies (TES) and compares the results of 2018 and 2023 elections. This comparison includes comparative examination of partisanship vis-à-vis the effects of such individual variables as social class, political ideology, voters’ perceptions of the recent performance of the macro economy, and cultural identities. The findings show that partisanship and cultural divisions seem to be crucial determinants of vote choices in Turkey.

Partisan Effects of Information Campaigns in Competitive Authoritarian Elections: Evidence from Bangladesh

Abstract To study the effects of non-partisan information and get-out-the-vote campaigns on the partisan composition of the voting population in competitive authoritarian elections, we conducted a large-scale field experiment prior to the 2018 Bangladeshi general election. Our two treatments highlight that high turnout increases the winning party’s legitimacy and that election outcomes matter for policy outcomes. Both treatments increase turnout (measured by ink marks) in government strongholds, but decrease turnout in opposition strongholds. We explain the withdrawal of treated opposition supporters and conclude that non-partisan information and get-out-the-vote campaigns can further tilt the uneven playing field in competitive authoritarian elections.

Campaign contributions, partisan politics, and environmental polarization in the US Congress

Abstract Prior literature has shown strong and increasing polarization on environmental voting in the US Congress, with Democrats tending to support pro-environmental (“green”) legislation and Republicans opposing it. Employing a regression discontinuity design, we provide a causal estimate of the effect of partisanship on the importance of campaign contributions from brown industries received by US legislators. Electing a Republican rather than a Democrat for the House (Senate) leads to an increase of 96% (70%) in the importance of contributions from anti-environmental (“brown”) groups. We also find that greater dependence on brown groups is associated with less pro-environmental voting for legislators from both parties and the greater the importance of brown contributions the more (less) likely that a legislator breaks the party line when its party favors (opposes) pro-environmental legislation. Finally, we provide an analytical narrative of the rise and pattern of environmental polarization consistent with our empirical findings. (JEL D72, Q58)

Party Realignment, Education, and the Turnout Advantage: Revisiting the Partisan Effect of Turnout

Party realignment is occurring along the lines of education in the United States. As college-educated voters increasingly align with the Democratic Party, it is necessary to revisit the partisan effect of turnout. We predict that, since 2016, the Democratic Party no longer benefits from higher turnout. Using validated voter turnout from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), we simulate election results across turnout rates for the 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections. Our findings show that increases in turnout greatly benefit the Democratic Party in the pre-Trump era. However, this pattern has drastically changed. In 2016, 2018, and 2020, the Democratic Party sees a much smaller gain in vote share as simulated turnout increases, but also a large vote share advantage when voter turnout is extremely low. These results indicate that continued party realignment along the lines of education could lead to a persistent reversal in the expected partisan effect of turnout—where Democrats perform better in low-turnout local or primary elections and Republicans perform better in high-turnout general elections.

Issues, Groups, or Idiots? Comparing Theories of Partisan Stereotypes

Abstract When individuals picture the two parties, what do they think of? Given the dominant understanding of partisanship as a social identity, understanding the content of these mental images—individuals’ stereotypes of the two parties—is essential, as stereotypes play an important role in how identity affects attitudes and behaviors, perceptions of others, and inter-group relations. The existing literature offers three answers to this question: one that claims that people picture the two parties in terms of their constituent social groups, a second that claims that people picture the two parties in terms of policy positions, and a third that claims that people view the two parties in terms of individual traits they associate with partisans. While not mutually exclusive, these theories have different implications for the effects of partisanship and the roots of partisan animosity. This paper adjudicates between these theories by employing a new method that measures stereotype content at the collective and individual level using a conjoint experiment. An important advantage of the conjoint measure is that it allows for the direct comparison of the importance of different attributes, and different kinds of attributes, to the stereotype. Using a pre-registered 2,909-person survey, I evaluate the relative importance of issues, groups, and traits to stereotypes of partisans. I find strong evidence that issue positions and ideological labels are the central elements of partisan stereotypes. I also find that individuals who hold issue- or ideology-based stereotypes are more affectively polarized than those whose stereotypes are rooted in groups or traits.

Partisan Biases among the Unemployed

Abstract Unemployed people are relatively rarely studied in political science. Yet, with their economic significance and centrality to many political debates, they can provide insight on many questions, including just how far partisan biases – where opinions and even factual perceptions follow what reflects well on their holder's preferred political party – extend. The economic and emotional costs of joblessness make its evaluation an unlikely seeming case for partisan effects. Surveys in the United States and Great Britain nevertheless show that partisan alignment predicts unemployed individuals' evaluation of their economic situation: unemployed individuals identifying with parties represented in the national executive report more positively on their household finances (and on the national economic situation) than do non-partisans, while those identifying with the opposition report more negatively. These effects are especially substantial among people interested in politics. Even something as personal and affectively intense as unemployment is viewed through a partisan scrim.

Non-News Websites Expose People to More Political Content Than News Websites: Evidence from Browsing Data in Three Countries

ABSTRACT Most scholars focus on the prevalence and democratic effects of (partisan) news exposure. This focus misses large parts of online activities of a majority of politically disinterested citizens. Although political content also appears outside of news outlets and may profoundly shape public opinion, its prevalence and effects are under-studied at scale. This project combines three-wave panel survey data from three countries (total N = 7,266) with online behavioral data from the same participants (over 106M visits). We create a multi-lingual classifier to identify political content both in news and outside (e.g. in shopping or entertainment sites). We find that news consumption is infrequent: just 3.4% of participants’ online browsing comprised visits to news sites. Only between 14% (NL) and 36% (US) of these visits were to news about politics. The overwhelming majority of participants' visits were to non-news sites. Although only 1.6\\% of those visits related to politics, in absolute terms, citizens encounter politics more frequently outside of news than within news. Out of every 10 visits to political content, 3.4 come from news and 6.6 from non-news sites. Furthermore, exposure to political content outside news domains had the same – and in some cases stronger - associations with key democratic attitudes and behaviors as news exposure. These findings offer a comprehensive analysis of the online political (not solely news) ecosystem and demonstrate the importance of assessing the prevalence and effects of political content in non-news sources.