Partisan Disagreement Research Articles

Medicare and Medicaid at 50 Years: Perspectives of Beneficiaries, Health Care Professionals and Institutions, and Policy Makers.

Medicare and Medicaid are the nation's 2 largest public health insurance programs, serving the elderly, those with disabilities, and mostly lower-income populations. The 2 programs are the focus of often deep partisan disagreement. Medicare and Medicaid payment policies influence the health care system and Medicare and Medicaid spending influences federal and state budgets. Debate about Medicare and Medicaid policy sometimes influences elections. To review the roles of Medicare and Medicaid in the health system and the challenges the 2 programs face from the perspectives of the general public and beneficiaries, health care professionals and health care institutions, and policy makers. Analysis of publicly available data and private surveys of the public and beneficiaries. Together, Medicare and Medicaid serve 111 million beneficiaries and account for $1 trillion in total spending, generating 43% of hospital revenue and representing 39% of national health spending. The median income for Medicare beneficiaries is $23,500 and the median income for Medicaid beneficiaries is $15,000. Future issues confronting both programs include whether they will remain open-ended entitlements, the degree to which the programs may be privatized, the scope of their cost-sharing structures for beneficiaries, and the roles the programs will play in payment and delivery reform. As the number of beneficiaries and the amount of spending for both Medicare and Medicaid increase, these programs will remain a focus of national attention and policy debate. Beneficiaries, health care professionals, health care organizations, and policy makers often have different interests in Medicare and Medicaid, complicating efforts to make changes to these large programs.

Questionnaire Design Effects in Climate Change Surveys

Despite strong agreement among scientists, public opinion surveys reveal wide partisan disagreement on climate issues in the United States. We suggest that this divide may be exaggerated by questionnaire design variables. Following a brief literature review, we report on a national survey experiment involving U.S. Democrats and Republicans ( n = 2,041) (fielded August 25–September 5, 2012) that examined the effects of question wording and order on the belief that climate change exists, perceptions of scientific consensus, and support for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Wording a questionnaire in terms of “global warming” (versus “climate change”) reduced Republicans’ (but not Democrats’) existence beliefs and weakened perceptions of the scientific consensus for both groups. Moreover, “global warming” reduced Republicans’ support for limiting greenhouse gases when this question immediately followed personal existence beliefs but not when the scientific consensus question intervened. We highlight the importance of attending to questionnaire design in the analysis of partisan differences.

Tides of Disagreement: How Reality Facilitates (and Inhibits) Partisan Public Opinion

Research on American mass behavior finds that party identifiers discount policy-relevant facts and interpret the same facts differently. Both findings imply enduring differences in the opinions that direct policy change. What this research does not consider, however, is that partisans confront the burden of evidence when they interpret facts about policy conditions. And thus, because policy-relevant evidence is always changing, the information environment could facilitate or inhibit partisan-directed rationalization. Employing national survey data and a Bayesian multilevel model, this study tests whether the distribution of economic facts moderates partisan disagreement about the U.S. economy. The results indicate that, when economic facts move in the positive and negative direction simultaneously, disagreement about the economy grows. When these facts move in one direction, however, disagreement recedes. In general, this study contributes theory and evidence on the tides of disagreement in partisan publi...

Clarity of responsibility and economic evaluations

Convincing scholarly evidence shows the economy directs the mass public's support for parties and leaders. But the extent of economic voting depends on a country's “clarity of responsibility.” According to several scholars, political clarity is important because it determines whether people link national economic performance to the parties in government. This study explores a potential second role, which involves how clarity moderates the strength of partisan-motivated reasoning. Clarity of responsibility makes the economy more or less central to party politics. It could therefore moderate people's motivation to rationalize economic facts in a biased direction. Using cross-national survey data, this study tests this possibility by examining economic disagreement between people who support a party in government and those who support the opposition. Results from a Bayesian multilevel regression show that partisan disagreement varies systematically with clarity of responsibility. This finding raises new questions about cross-national differences in economic voting.

Partisan Discord in the Family and Political Engagement: A Comparative Behavioral Analysis

What happens to a person’s level of political engagement when he is surrounded by partisan disagreement? Previous work offers a mixed picture; in certain circumstances political discord promotes engagement while in others it has the opposite effect. This analysis tests existing theories by looking at the implications of disagreement within the family. We leverage panel data to trace effects over time, and we examine this dynamic across political units. Household data from Britain, Germany, and Switzerland reveal that those whose parents are divided politically tend to become more, not less, engaged in politics. Comparatively, these effects appear stronger in some countries than in others, but the three-country analysis only suggests reasons why. Therefore, we take advantage of Swiss subnational political variation to further investigate the conditioning role of institutions. This step confirms that proportional representation elections moderate the relationship between parental disagreement and interest i...

Conditions for Dyadic Partisan Agreement and Disagreement: An Analysis of Voters' Social Networks at the 2009 German Federal Election

Using a unique dataset (a nationally representative pre-election Rolling Cross-Section survey with post-election panel wave) the paper tests a series of hypotheses about conditions that increase or decrease the amount of agreement resp. disagreement in dyads of voters and discussants at the 2009 German Federal Election: that interpersonal influence is stronger within primary relationships (strong ties) than within functionally defined secondary relationships (weak ties); that political conversion is the medium through which agreement is generated; that perceived political expertise and trustworthiness as well as effective communication are important preconditions of agreement; and that dyadic partisan correspondence is a function of the party preferences prevalent in the overall network (autoregressive effect). While most studies of this kind have so far strictly focused on party correspondence, this study of a West European multi-party system additionally explores agreement and disagreement across parties belonging to the same ideological camps. To varying degrees, when simultaneously tested all hypotheses are supported by our findings.

Conditions for Dyadic Partisan Agreement and Disagreement: An Analysis of Voters' Social Networks at the 2009 German Federal Election

Conditions for Dyadic Partisan Agreement and Disagreement: An Analysis of Voters' Social Networks at the 2009 German Federal Election

Credibility in Context: How Uncivil Online Commentary Affects News Credibility

In the new media environment, hard news stories are no longer found solely in the “A” section of the paper or on the front page of a news Web site. They are now distributed widely, appearing in contexts as disparate as a partisan blog or your own e-mail inbox, forwarded by a friend. In this study, we investigate how the credibility of a news story is affected by the context in which it appears. Results of an experiment show a news story embedded in an uncivil partisan blog post appears more credible in contrast. Specifically, a blogger's incivility highlights the relative credibility of the newspaper article. We also find that incivility and partisan disagreement in an adjacent blog post produce stronger correlations between ratings of news and blog credibility. These findings suggest that news story credibility is affected by context and that these context effects can have surprising benefits for news organizations. Findings are consistent with predictions of social judgment theory.

Research Commentary—Weighing the Benefits and Costs of Flexibility in Making Software: Toward a Contingency Theory of the Determinants of Development Process Design

In recent years, flexibility has emerged as a divisive issue in discussions about the appropriate design of processes for making software. Partisans in both research and practice argue for and against plan-based (allegedly inflexible) and agile (allegedly too flexible) approaches. The stakes in this debate are high; questions raised about plan-based approaches undermine longstanding claims that those approaches, when realized, represent maturity of practice. In this commentary, we call for research programs that will move beyond partisan disagreement to a more nuanced discussion, one that takes into account both benefits and costs of flexibility. Key to such programs will be the development of a robust contingency framework for deciding when (in what conditions) plan-based and agile methods should be used. We develop a basic contingency framework in this paper, one that models the benefit/cost economics described in narratives about the transition from craft to industrial production of physical products. We use this framework to demonstrate the power of even a simple model to help us accomplish three objectives: (1) to refocus discussions about the appropriate design of software development processes, concentrating on when to use particular approaches and how they might be usefully combined; (2) to suggest and guide a trajectory of research that can support and enrich this discussion; and (3) to suggest a technology-based explanation for the emergence of agile development at this point in history. Although we are not the first to argue in favor of a contingency perspective, we show that there remain many opportunities for information systems (IS) research to have a major impact on practice in this area.

Dividers, Not Uniters: Presidential Leadership and Senate Partisanship, 1981-2004

This article argues that presidential leadership tends to exacerbate partisan disagreement in Congress on the issues the president champions. The argument starts from the president's role as highly visible party leader. Because of this role, members of Congress of both parties have a collective political stake in the disposition of presidential initiatives: members of the president's party tend to benefit politically from presidential successes, while members of the opposing party receive few political benefits and may suffer costs. These political incentives are likely to drive the parties in Congress farther apart on presidential initiatives than they would be in the absence of presidential leadership. To test for these effects, this paper controls for variation in issue content and isolates for separate analysis votes involving ideologically divisive issues. Analysis reveals that the parties are systematically farther apart on presidential agenda items, controlling for issue content and other factors a...

Foreign Policy Determinants: Comparing Realist and Domestic-Political Models of Foreign Policy

Systemic realist arguments of foreign policy decision-making suggest that partisan disagreement stops at the water's edge. A domestic-politics model of foreign policy decision-making posits that politics does not stop at the water's edge. Extant research on foreign policy voting in the U.S. Congress is consistent with the systemic realist argument. According to this research, partisan voting is less likely to occur on national security, or high-politics issues, than on low-politics issues. I argue that this research suffers from two flaws. First, it does not measure high-politics in accordance with systemic realist thinking. Second, the goal in addressing the water's-edge question is not to learn if a specific variable, such as high-politics, is significant, but to compare competing models. To this end, it is necessary to engage in a “three-cornered fight” and conduct a nonnested model discrimination test. After creating a new measure of high-politics, I compare a systemic realist model against a domestic-politics model of foreign policy voting in the House of Representatives from 1953—2000. The model discrimination test indicates that the domestic-politics model outperforms the systemic realist model. Institutional dynamics and public opinion are more important for understanding foreign policy voting than are more traditional realist variables.

Stalking Secret Law: What Predicts Publication in the United States Courts of Appeals

Nearly four fifths of federal court of appeals opinions are unpublished. For more than 25 years, judges and scholars have debated the wisdom and fairness of this body of secret law. The debate over unpublished opinions recently intensified when the Eighth Circuit held that the Constitution requires courts to give these opinions precedential value. Despite continued controversy over unpublished opinions, limited empirical evidence exists on the nature of those opinions. Working with an especially complete dataset of labor law opinions and multivariate statistical methods, we were able to identify the factors that predict publication. Some of those factors, such as a decision to reverse the agency, track formal publication rules. Others, such as the number of judges on the panel who graduated from elite law schools or the number with expertise in the disputed subject, are more surprising. In addition, we discovered substantial evidence of partisan disagreement within unpublished opinions, suggesting that those cases are not as routine as publication rules suggest. These empirical findings should guide policy and constitutional decisions about the future of unpublished opinions.

The Nuclear Deterrent and the British Election of 1964

There was little reason to have expected Britain's international policies to be of major concern to most voters in casting their ballots in the 1964 General Election. Party disagreement over entering the European Economic Community was at least temporarily in abeyance after de Gaulle's veto. No great imperial question remained to divide Conservatives from the Labour or Liberal Parties. Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was firmly bipartisan (or tripartisan). Moreover, British power was now so limited, in relation to the rest of the world, as to provide little basis for Englishmen to think that their nation could make important international decisions. At the same time, there were domestic economic problems about which, it was widely thought, a British government could and should do something. In short, every likelihood existed for electoral attention to be fixed almost entirely on domestic affairs. This would hardly have been unusual. Democratic elections ordinarily seem so conducted. Even if it were clearly desirable to have sharp partisan disagreement over a substantive international question, it is doubtful whether genuine alternatives often exist except perhaps for the super-powers.It is surprising, then, to find that a question of international policy was contested in the British General Election of 1964. The question was whether Britain should continue trying to have an independent nuclear deterrent. Labour (and the Liberals) proposed that the effort be abandoned. The governing Conservative Party was committed to its continuation. These divergent party policies did not, it is true, make the deterrent issue overwhelmingly important in the electoral decision.