Partisan Divisions Research Articles

In science we trust? Public trust in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections and accepting anthropogenic climate change.

One barrier to action on climate change is public trust in climate science, and projections made by climate scientists. However, climate science projections are rarely measured in public surveys. We designed survey questions based on two Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections regarding global warming and coral reef decline. We gauge Australians' trust in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections, and explore how trust in climate science is associated with accepting anthropogenic climate change. A slim majority of Australian adults trust Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections, with trust correlated positively with accepting anthropogenic climate change. While partisan divisions are extant in accepting anthropogenic climate change, partisan influences are attenuated substantially after controlling for trust in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections, as trust in climate science mediates the influence of partisanship on the acceptance of anthropogenic climate change. A minority of those who accept anthropogenic climate change have low trust in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections, viewing scientists' computer models as unreliable, or believing climate scientists benefit from overstating the impact of climate change.

Camps, not just parties. The dynamic foundations of affective polarization in multi-party systems

Concerns over affective polarization in Western democracies are growing. But which broader political distinctions are also affective demarcations? As inter-party cooperation is the rule in multi-party democracies, explaining affective polarization beyond partisan divisions is crucial. I argue that demarcations between political camps deepen affective polarization, and country-level factors influence the relevance of these affective divides. Based on survey data from 23 Western democracies (1996–2019), I demonstrate that affect is most polarized between Left and Right camps, and between the Radical Right and other camps. Further, these divides are dynamic and depend on different country-level outcomes. The Left/Right divide disappears when Left and Right parties govern together, while the Radical Right divide is fortified with Radical Right electoral success. These findings highlight that affective polarization’s group foundations extend beyond partisanship, and that affective polarization could even act as a defence mechanism against radical challengers.

Introducing Sham Journalism: A Case-Study Analysis of Newsmax’ Discourse on Special Counsel John Durham in 2022

ABSTRACT In entering the emerging literature on partisan rightwing news, this study introduces the concept of “sham journalism” to characterize activity that appropriates the trappings of reporting but practices a form of weaponized political discourse. Sham journalism tactics include polarizing blue lies, truth-indifferent bullshit and the reputational vandalism of flak that are pursued with an unswerving degree of partisan one-sidedness at the expense of even attempting ethical reporting toward public enlightenment. In sham journalism as practiced in the U.S., these tactics serve ideological ends that delegitimize political opposition and are compatible with one-party rightwing authority. I analyze Newsmax’ website as a case-study, specifically its coverage of William Barr/Donald Trump-appointed special counsel John Durham’s failed prosecution of Michael Sussmann. Newsmax’ exhibits strikingly one-sided discourse, politicized flak, and ethical lapses while, by the numbers, it relies almost exclusively on Republican Party sources including Trump-allied felons. Following Sussmann’s acquittal, Newsmax continued to refuse to educate readers toward understanding and instead inflamed unreality that exacerbates partisan division.

Which civil religion? Partisanship, Christian nationalism, and the dimensions of civil religion in the United States

AbstractCivil religion has been described as the “common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share”. In an age of partisan division, there have been calls for a revitalized civil religion, but the idea that civil religion can be unifying has been debated. In this paper, we investigate whether civil religion can be unifying, or is it fractured by partisanship? To address this, we use two strategies. First, we created a civil religion battery and deployed it on two different cross-sectional surveys. The results indicate that there are two dimensions to civil religion. These dimensions are distinct from Christian nationalism and structured along partisan lines. Second, we developed two survey experiments to understand the dimensions of civil religion and improve on the causal mechanisms that link civil religion to political behavior. Results indicate that, rather than promoting unity, civil religion is interpreted through partisan lenses.

Non-transformative climate policy options decrease conservative support for renewable energy in the US

Motivated by ongoing partisan division in support of climate change policy, this paper investigates whether, among self-identifying liberals and conservatives, the mere presence of a non-transformative climate policy such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), lowers support for a renewable energy (RE) policy. To interrogate this question, we use a survey experiment asking 2374 respondents about their support for a RE policy when presented with the RE policy alone, and when presented alongside a CCS policy whose funding and implementation leverage independent funding sources. We find that among conservatives, the presence of a CCS policy lowers support for RE. Furthermore, despite the lack of apparent political party cues, when presented with the policy-pair, conservatives tend to view the RE policy in more partisan terms, specifically, less supported by Republicans. Additional experimental conditions with explicit party cues reinforce this interpretation. These findings suggest that the triggering of partisan perceptions even without explicit partisan cues—what we call political anchoring—might be a key impediment to bipartisan support of climate solutions in the U.S. context.

Polarizing Political Polls: How Visualization Design Choices Can Shape Public Opinion and Increase Political Polarization.

While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g. learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For example, could design or framing choices interact with viewers' social cognitive biases in ways that promote political polarization? When reporting on U.S. attitudes toward public policies, it is popular to highlight the gap between Democrats and Republicans (e.g. with blue vs red connected dot plots). But these charts may encourage social-normative conformity, influencing viewers' attitudes to match the divided opinions shown in the visualization. We conducted three experiments examining visualization framing in the context of social conformity and polarization. Crowdworkers viewed charts showing simulated polling results for public policy proposals. We varied framing (aggregating data as non-partisan "All US Adults," or partisan "Democrat" / "Republican") and the visualized groups' support levels. Participants then reported their own support for each policy. We found that participants' attitudes biased significantly toward the group attitudes shown in the stimuli and this can increase inter-party attitude divergence. These results demonstrate that data visualizations can induce social conformity and accelerate political polarization. Choosing to visualize partisan divisions can divide us further.

Institutional Capacities, Partisan Divisions, and Federal Tensions in U.S. Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic struck during a period of extreme polarization in American politics. Unsurprisingly, responses to it quickly became politicized despite increasingly clear findings from scientific and public health communities about the most effective approaches for limiting its spread. We ask how the politicization affected pandemic response at the state level. We document and explain several kinds of state-level actions, beginning with 2020 variations in collecting and publishing COVID-related data and early mitigation strategies. We find that state capacity explains the former and partisanship the latter. We show that divisions within the Republican Party also meaningfully affected state responses. Inter- and intraparty divisions—rather than geography or severity of COVID—in fact continue to influence state policy following the inauguration of President Joe Biden, the availability of vaccines, and the rise of the Delta variant. These findings document that U.S. federalism often created obstacles to effective governmental responses.

Pandemic Messaging: Congressional Communication and the Mechanisms of Polarizing Rhetoric

U.S. senators are increasingly turning to Twitter to stoke partisan divisions, and it’s not just what they say, but rather how they say it. Senators spent the Spring of 2020 responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the tone and framing used to engage a digital constituency was largely dependent on partisan alignment with President Trump. We use senators’ Twitter activity during the outbreak to offer new insight into the mechanisms of lawmakers’ party polarizing trends in congressional communication. We show that divisions stemmed from senators’ sentiment and framing—with Republicans more likely to incorporate positivity into forward-looking steps for economic recovery and Democrats preferring a negative tone to address government failings and inadequate response by President Trump. This article extends the literature on polarizing rhetoric in the Senate by using the pandemic response to illustrate how the dynamics of senators’ digital rhetoric, even during a moment of shared crisis, continue to fuel partisanship and polarizing narratives.

Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876 by Adam Fairclough

Readers are to be forgiven if they dread reading this story of self-interested political hacks, secretive politicians, election meddling, resurgent white supremacist governing structures, and general backlash by white conservatives against democratic reforms and the rights of Black people. The book, however, serves as an important reminder that the United States made it through a dark period in American politics eerily similar to that surrounding the election of 2020—the election of 1876. Furthermore, the 2020 election had at least one advantage over its predecessor: Its supervisors (as far as we know) held their ground, defended their honest work, did not skip town, and did not try to benefit financially from their position.Fairclough knits together the story of the “Stolen Elections of 1876,” a campaign that ended in the betrayal of Blacks in the South, the return to Democratic “home rule,” and a continuation of the violent repression of Black citizens. The Compromise of 1876—broadly understood as the political deal that brought an end to post–Civil War Reconstruction in the South—allowed Republicans to retain the presidency while promising Democrats that President-elect Rutherford B. Hayes would no longer use federal power to protect Black people’s right to vote or to end the violent intimidation by southern whites. The story centers on Louisiana, the state with arguably the worst reputation for political corruption and violence of any in the late nineteenth century. Not coincidentally, Louisiana was the vortex of the scandals surrounding the election of 1876 and the southern state with the most electors still in question after votes had been tallied.Louisiana after the Civil War was not the fictional South of filmmaker David Wark Griffith and subsequent historians who accused majority Black legislatures of rampant corruption. The Louisiana Legislature in 1868, under the leadership of formerly enslaved Lt. Governor Oscar J. Dunn, passed the most progressive state constitution in the South—a critical fact that Fairclough omits. By 1876, however, White Leagues across the state had “bulldozed” rural parishes well in advance of the presidential election, torturing and murdering Black residents and forcing others to enter the rolls of the Democrats. The corruption on both the Democratic and Republican side was largely at the hands of unscrupulous white men jockeying to keep Black men out of politics and Black workers under their collective thumbs. The portraits and cartoons at the book’s center indicate key players in the corrupt ending of Reconstruction (122–142). The period was rife with partisan division. As John Sherman (the brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman) observed from ground zero at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans, “There is but little intimacy between men of the opposite parties” (40). The Cincinnati Enquirer observed in 1878, “Nobody flinched on either side because at such times partisanship and patriotism are interchangeable terms” (7).Fairclough’s methodology is archival. He devotes most of his attention to the investigations that followed the Election of 1876—committee hearings that generated 3,000 pages of testimony describing the election in Louisiana. The work of the 1878 Potter Committee unearthed some of the unsavory characters at the local level who played both sides in their effort to secure lucrative appointments for themselves (they also recorded some choice nineteenth-century colloquialisms describing scoundrels and heavy drinkers). The committee also afforded one last dramatic performance by Benjamin Butler, a former Union general who served on the committee and offered no quarter to those Democrats or Republicans that he viewed as betraying the democratic aims of Reconstruction.This narrative of political corruption—tying local elections and election officials to the counting of electors for the presidency—functions as a case study for political scientists seeking to understand the past and (regrettably) possibly the future of American democracy in the modern era. It is nothing if not a cautionary tale.

Belief in the Utility of Cross-Partisan Empathy Reduces Partisan Animosity and Facilitates Political Persuasion

In polarized political environments, partisans tend to deploy empathy parochially, furthering division. We propose that belief in the usefulness of cross-partisan empathy—striving to understand other people with whom one disagrees politically—promotes out-group empathy and has powerful ramifications for both intra- and interpersonal processes. Across four studies (total N = 4,748), we examined these predictions in online and college samples using surveys, social-network analysis, preregistered experiments, and natural-language processing. Believing that cross-partisan empathy is useful is associated with less partisan division and politically diverse friendship networks (Studies 1 and 2). When prompted to believe that empathy is a political resource—versus a political weakness—people become less affectively polarized (Study 3) and communicate in ways that decrease out-partisans’ animosity and attitudinal polarization (Study 4). These findings demonstrate that belief in cross-partisan empathy impacts not only individuals’ own attitudes and behaviors but also the attitudes of those they communicate with.

Partisanship and Polarization in State Court Vacancies

Backlogs and long delays in the confirmation of federal judicial nominees have become a common occurrence in Washington, leaving many federal benches understaffed and overworked. While this phenomenon has been well studied at the federal level examining political and institutional factors at play beyond senatorial courtesy, little is known if delay occurs in court systems of the individual American states, or how extensive the obstruction and the delay should it occur. We examine judicial appointments in states having the selection system of gubernatorial nomination and legislative confirmation. We focus on the duration of the judicial vacancies on state intermediate appellate courts and courts of last resort from 2000 to 2016 and explain the variation over time in the length of this process. We show that partisan division and increases in the polarization of state political parties work together to influence timely staffing of these critical institutions in the American states. Ultimately, these findings offer insight into the issues caused by political gridlock over judicial selection and offer practical institutional remedies to this problem.

The Man of the People: Political Dissent and the Making of the American Presidency

In this fascinating study of early American politics, Nathaniel C. Green uses the presidency as a lens through which to see the development of American national identity, the struggle to establish the authority of the American constitutional system, and the tensions between the emergence of partisan divisions and the desire for national unity. Green eschews the familiar stories about the early American presidency. He does not look at the office of the presidency from the perspective of its occupant. He avoids the momentous early constitutional debates over the scope of the powers of the presidency and the humdrum of presidential administration and policy making. The presidency being “made” in these pages is the presidency of the public imagination. How did people talk about the presidency, and those who aspired to exercise the powers of the presidency, in the early years of the republic? Through a wide-ranging but close examination of...

From critical to hypocritical: Counterfactual thinking increases partisan disagreement about media hypocrisy

Partisans on both sides of the political aisle complain that the mainstream media is hypocritical, but they disagree about whom that hypocrisy benefits. In the present research, we examine how counterfactual thinking contributes to this partisan disagreement about media hypocrisy. In three studies (two pre-registered, N = 1342) of people's reactions to media criticism of politicians, we find that people judged the media's criticism of politicians they support as more hypocritical when they imagined whether the media would have criticized a politician from a different party for the same behavior if given the chance. Because this effect only emerged when people judged the media's criticism of politicians they supported, and not politicians they opposed, counterfactual thinking increased partisan division in perceptions of media hypocrisy. We discuss implications for how counterfactual thinking facilitates motivated moral reasoning, contributes to bias in social judgment, and amplifies political polarization.

Social Trust in Polarized Times: How Perceptions of Political Polarization Affect Americans' Trust in Each Other.

Most Americans think that the country is politically divided and polarization will only get worse, not better. Such perceptions of polarization are widespread, but we do not know enough about their effects, especially those unrelated to political variables. This study examines the consequences of perceived polarization for levels of social trust in the United States. Trust in fellow citizens is the backbone of a well-functioning democracy, given its role in promoting social cohesion and facilitating collective action. Using nationally representative panel data, as well as an original survey experiment, I find that perceived polarization directly undermines Americans’ trust in each other. A belief that members of society share common values fosters social trust, but perceptions of partisan divisions and polarization make people less trusting of their fellow citizens. Due to perceived polarization, people are less likely to believe that others can be trusted to do the right thing, which in turn decreases their willingness to cooperate for good causes. I discuss the implications of these findings for society’s ability to work together toward common goals.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-022-09787-1.

Getting the Message: Opinion Polarization over Election Law

This article demonstrates with survey data a pronounced shift in opinion movement on a restrictive voting provision: requiring a driver's license number to vote absentee by mail as per Georgia Republican legislators' passage of Senate Bill (SB) 202 in March 2021. The dynamic we uncover is asymmetric, with no significant movement in the opinions of Republican voters. The substantial shift in views is confined to Democratic and Independent voters, who strongly turned against this restrictive requirement in the second survey conducted after enactment of SB 202. The rapid and pronounced movement of certain opinions on a restrictive voting measure shows how easily the mass electorate can alter their views to reflect polarization in a policy domain during a time of historic partisan divisions.

Framing vaccine mandates: messenger and message effects

In September 2021, President Biden announced that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would require large employers to ensure workers are vaccinated against Covid-19 or tested weekly. Although widely characterized as ‘Biden’s vaccine mandate’, the policy could be described with equal accuracy as ‘OSHA’s testing mandate’. Some commentators speculated that reframing the policy as a testing mandate would boost support. This study investigates how framing effects shape attitudes toward vaccination policies. Before the Supreme Court struck down the vaccinate-or-test rule, we presented 1500 US adults with different descriptions of the same requirement. Reframing ‘Biden’s vaccine mandate’ as ‘OSHA’s testing mandate’ significantly increased support, boosting net approval by 13 percentage points. The effect was driven by changing the ‘messenger frame’ (replacing ‘Biden’ with ‘OSHA’) rather than changing the ‘message frame’ (replacing ‘vaccine mandate’ with ‘testing mandate’). Our results suggest that messenger framing can meaningfully affect public opinion even after a policy is widely known. Our study also reveals a potential cost of presidential administration when partisan divisions are deep. Framing a regulatory policy as an extension of the president can elicit strong—here, negative—reactions that may be avoidable if the policy is framed as the work of a bureaucratic agency.

Polarization and tipping points

Research has documented increasing partisan division and extremist positions that are more pronounced among political elites than among voters. Attention has now begun to focus on how polarization might be attenuated. We use a general model of opinion change to see if the self-reinforcing dynamics of influence and homophily may be characterized by tipping points that make reversibility problematic. The model applies to a legislative body or other small, densely connected organization, but does not assume country-specific institutional arrangements that would obscure the identification of fundamental regularities in the phase transitions. Agents in the model have initially random locations in a multidimensional issue space consisting of membership in one of two equal-sized parties and positions on 10 issues. Agents then update their issue positions by moving closer to nearby neighbors and farther from those with whom they disagree, depending on the agents' tolerance of disagreement and strength of party identification compared to their ideological commitment to the issues. We conducted computational experiments in which we manipulated agents' tolerance for disagreement and strength of party identification. Importantly, we also introduced exogenous shocks corresponding to events that create a shared interest against a common threat (e.g., a global pandemic). Phase diagrams of political polarization reveal difficult-to-predict transitions that can be irreversible due to asymmetric hysteresis trajectories. We conclude that future empirical research needs to pay much closer attention to the identification of tipping points and the effectiveness of possible countermeasures.

Sources of Government Approval During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Threat or Electoral Predispositions?

Rally-round-the-flag events are short-term boosts of government approval during crises, and the COVID-19 pandemic produced such an effect in many countries. But why did some people join the rally while others didn’t? Using public opinion data from Costa Rica, this paper tests two hypotheses: first, that threat increases government approval at the outbreak of the pandemic; second, that electoral predispositions shape approval. Results indicate that COVID-19 contagions, as a measure of the threat, are not associated with approval, while past voting patterns are. Positive assessments of the economy and the relief measures also predict higher support for the government. In brief, Costa Rica's rally-round-the-flag event did not overcome the partisan divisions or the ordinary drivers of approval.

Reflections on the Past and Present of Research on Partisan Identity

AbstractScholarship on partisanship has been transformed by political scientists’ embrace of social and cognitive psychology in the past few decades. This interdisciplinary union has drastically changed the way political scientists examine the origins and effects of partisanship. In this essay, I provide a brief history of scholarship on partisanship, its transformation into a partisanidentityas well as its role in the study of polarization. I then demonstrate how this identity framework has propelled research on negative partisan identity in the U.S. two-party system and European multi-party systems. I conclude with a few avenues for future research that could enrich our understanding of partisanship.Scholarship on partisanship has been transformed by political scientists’ embrace of social and cognitive psychology in the past few decades. Since then, the concept of partisan identity has become widely known beyond the narrow subfield of political psychology. Indeed, the sheer volume of research on the origins, measurement, and effect of partisan identity on political behavior is indicative of its centrality in the general discipline of political science. In this essay, I provide a brief (and therefore necessarily incomplete) history of scholarship on partisanship as well as its transformation into a partisanidentity. I then review contemporary research on positive and negative partisan identity in the U.S. and beyond, focusing on their differential effects on political attitudes and behavior. Last, I sketch out a few thoughts on the complexities and caveats of current scholarship, including a plea for more research on the interaction of partisanship with other identities, the necessity of studying partisanship in more externally valid contexts, as well as the promise of common identities in bridging partisan divisions.

A "Surprise" Health Policy Legislative Victory.

It was a happy surprise when, overcoming partisan divisions and interest-group lobbying, Congress enacted the No Surprises Act, which bans unfair out-of-network "balance billing." Although this is only a modest legislative victory, key efforts by the health policy community made a real difference in a time of legislative gridlock.