Partisan Dynamics Research Articles

280 Characters of Contention: Analyzing Partisan Behavior on Twitter During Supreme Court Confirmation Processes

Abstract We analyze a cache of tweets from partisan users concerning the confirmation hearings of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Using these original data, we investigate how Twitter users with partisan leanings interact with judicial nominations and confirmations. We find that these users tend to exhibit behavior consistent with offline partisan dynamics. Our analysis reveals that Democrats and Republicans express distinct emotional responses based on the alignment of nominees with their respective parties. Additionally, our study highlights the active participation of partisans in promoting politically charged topics throughout the confirmation process, starting from the vacancy stage.

Far-right parties and the politics of education in Europe

ABSTRACT Formal education shapes the distribution of opportunities and cultural profile of European societies. Political parties, in turn, play a key role in shaping formal education. Focusing largely on the traditional contenders for government in Europe, research on the politics of education shows that parties prioritise redistributive issues and politicise them in line with their electorates’ material interests. It remains unclear to what extent these findings apply to a more recent, but highly successful party family: the far right. This review article and introduction to a special issue integrates existing scholarship from education and political science with findings from six new case studies from across Europe. It argues that far-right parties in Eastern and Western Europe frame education primarily as a means of disseminating (conservative and nativist) culture and values, rather than as a means of redistributing opportunities. In revaluing the cultural dimension of education for far-right partisan politics, the article and the special issue therefore not only provide insight into the educational strategies of an increasingly powerful actor in European politics, but also shed light on the mechanisms and determinants underlying the partisan dynamics that will contribute to shaping the future of European education and societies more generally.

“How Do We Put the Country Back Together?” Mitigating Affective Polarization Through Mediated Intergroup Contact

ABSTRACT Affective polarization presents an ongoing threat to the political and social functioning of democracies as partisans increasingly dislike and distrust opposing partisans. Because engagement with political media is one way by which citizens understand partisan dynamics, we hypothesize that exposure to positive mediated intergroup contact via an entertainment narrative may be able to attenuate feelings of affective polarization—especially through identification with a character that expresses differing political views—but also that negative intergroup contact via a political debate could exacerbate partisan tensions. This premise is tested in an experiment (N = 544) that juxtaposed real-world examples of political media using excerpts from the U.S. television comedy The Conners and the 2020 U.S. presidential debates. Two common indicators of affective polarization, a feeling thermometer and social distance, were used to measure the affective gap between Democrats and Republicans. For the purposes of our analyses, a brief implicit association test (BIAT) was also conducted to measure participants’ implicit bias toward members of the political outgroup. We find evidence that exposure to positive intergroup contact can attenuate partisan tensions, especially through identification with the character belonging to the opposing political party, but that identification with the co-partisan character can further exacerbate negative affect.

Exploring The Complexities of “Alien Suffrage” in American Political History

Abstract Although historians and political scientists have long acknowledged the significant place of immigrants in American political history, the role of “alien suffrage” has not been well appreciated, and gaps remain in the scholarship about the nature of its practice. How extensively was “alien voting” practiced and what were its effects? This study addresses these questions by examining eleven of the forty states that allowed non-citizens to vote before obtaining citizenship. These states, located in the Midwest, South and West, were selected because immigrants comprised a significant proportion of their total population and allowed alien suffrage for an extended period of time (1848–1920). We develop estimates of non-citizen voters and examine ethnic voting patterns in these states to gauge their impacts on partisan dynamics in gubernatorial elections. Our findings show non-citizens voted and factored into election outcomes, furthering the incorporation of European immigrants. We also shed light on the unsavory side of alien suffrage, which contributed to a form of settler colonialism and functioned to block or delay the enfranchisement of African Americans and women. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for our understanding of immigrant political incorporation in American political history, as well as for contemporary debates about the revival of the legal practice of non-citizen voting in the United States.

Following Orders or Following the Oath? Assessing Democratic Norm Endorsement Among Service Academy Cadets

How strongly embraced within the officer corps is the commitment to supporting and defending the Constitution and to the ethic of nonpartisanship? This article answers that question through a 2019/2020 survey of 1,470 service academy students, including with a list experiment. The results show that cadets engage in what we term “selective endorsement” of norms, whereby they endorse norms as long as they are not in tension with their partisan identities. In particular, the list experiment reveals that when provided an opportunity to obscure their preferences, many cadets supported following civilian orders, even those at odds with democratic traditions—and that partisan dynamics may play a role in determining how they respond. The article has important implications for scholarly research on norm robustness and socialization, as well as practical consequences for civil-military relations in light of ongoing challenges to democracy in the United States today.

Timing Their Positions: Cosponsorship in the State Legislature

AbstractLegislators must decide when, if ever, to cosponsor legislation. Scholars have shown legislators strategically time their positions on salient issues of national importance, but we know little about the timing of position-taking for routine bills or what this activity looks like in state legislatures. We argue that legislators’ cosponsorship decision-making depends on the type of legislation and the partisan dynamics among the current cosponsors. Members treat everyday legislation as generalized position-taking motivated by reelection, yet for key legislation, legislators are policy-oriented. With a new dataset of over 73,000 bills introduced in both chambers of the Texas state legislature in the 75th to 86th regular sessions (1997–2020), we use pooled Cox proportional hazard models to evaluate the dynamics of when legislators legislate, comparing all bills introduced with a subset of key bills. The results show that legislators time their cosponsorship activity in response to electoral vulnerability, partisanship, and the dynamics of the chamber in which they serve.

Mayoral elections and partisan dynamics in Africa’s local governments

ABSTRACT Enforcing party loyalty is particularly difficult in settings where parties are not strongly differentiated by policy or ideological platforms, as is the case in many African countries. Instead, the system of party nominations serves an important role in maintaining loyalty and discipline. Yet, direct mayoral elections at the subnational level affect these dynamics by expanding the range of positions that politicians can occupy, thereby creating opportunities for them to forge greater visibility within their party or enabling them to defect and create an independent political identity. Drawing on the case of Zambia, which shifted in 2016 from indirect to direct mayoral elections for its district councils, this article discusses how the change in electoral rules contributed to more independent mayoral candidates and growing intra-party frictions, especially among mayors governing large urban areas. Additional case studies from Senegal, which shifted to direct elections in 2022, and Mozambique, which reverted to indirect elections in 2018, further underscore the external validity of the analysis while refining its scope conditions. The article emphasizes that while political decentralization is often viewed as a mechanism for enhancing downwards accountability to citizens, it can also exert considerable impacts on party loyalty.

Decamping the Partisans: US Hegemony and South Korea's Divisive Discourse on North Korean Human Rights

Abstract: The question of what to do about North Korean human rights (NKHR) has never been more divisive. Some have explained the division in terms of prioritizing certain rights or movement strategies over others. In this paper, I demonstrate that neither of these explanations is consistent with the last three decades of South Korean public discourse on NKHR. Applying a novel combination of semantic network and discourse analysis on 28,795 South Korean newspaper articles between 1990 and 2016, I arrive at the following argument. The division between NKHR partisans in South Korea is not based on particular stances towards human rights but rather support or opposition to US hegemony and intervention on the Korean peninsula. South Korean partisanship is worth studying as a specific aspect of the NKHR Movement, and because it reflects more generally on NKHR partisanship in the West. We in the NHKR community will be far more effective at improving the actual state of North Korean human rights if we first acknowledge and address our fundamental disagreements over US hegemony and intervention on the Korean peninsula. Lastly, this paper makes a methodological contribution to digital humanities. I use semantic network analysis to visualize partisan dynamics within a corpus of media articles spanning a quarter century. I then sample the most representative articles comprising key network features and use these to conduct a qualitative discourse analysis. It is my hope that future research in Korean Studies will benefit from this complementary application of digital and qualitative methods.

A Social Cognitive Theory Approach to Understanding Parental Attitudes and Intentions to Vaccinate Children during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine represents a path towards global health after a worldwide pandemic. Yet, the U.S. response to the vaccination rollout has been politically polarized. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the contextual factors that influence parents' attitudes towards health officials and their intention to vaccinate children, focusing on communication behaviors, personal factors, and geographic locations. We use Bandura's triadic reciprocal determinism (TRD) model which posits reciprocal influence between personal factors, environmental factors, and behaviors. We found that personal factors (having younger children and identifying as Republican partisans), and the behavioral factor of conservative news use were significantly related to more negative attitudes towards health officials and lower vaccination intentions. Conversely, Democrats and liberal news use were significantly related to warmer attitudes and greater vaccination intentions. The environmental factor of geographic location across four states with different partisan dynamics was not significantly related to attitudes and behavioral intentions. Results from a post-hoc analysis show that news media use and partisanship were the strongest correlates of parents' attitudes towards health officials. This evidence points to the politicization of the COVID-19 vaccine being a key consideration regarding vaccine uptake.

Lindsey Graham and Southern Politics in State and Nation

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham is one of the most powerful actors in American politics and has been for over a quarter-century. Unquestionably, Graham fits the bill of a strategic and progressively ambitious politician. Interestingly however, in a time of increasing partisan and ideological polarization in the U.S. Congress, Graham has moderated his representation. In this article, we situate the political career of Lindsey Graham within the broader milieu of the changing partisan dynamics of Congress, his state, and southern politics. With a bevy of data, we show that the sorting of the American electorate and nationalized voting behavior have undermined Graham’s political support across the partisan aisle. Nevertheless, this development has not placed Graham in electoral jeopardy because of the impressive Republican advantage in South Carolina, which should persist for years to come despite evidence of a gradually growing Democratic opposition.

The Politics of Bicameral Agreement: Why and When Do State Lawmakers Go to Conference?

AbstractThe power of conference committees is well documented and studied by scholars of the US Congress. But little is known about politics of bicameral agreement within state legislatures. Leveraging variation across states, I explore the conditions under which legislative leaders prefer formal bicameral conference negotiations to informal talks to reach final legislative agreements. Deploying an original dataset of state legislative decisions between 2005 and 2018, I find that ideologically cohesive majority parties favor the use of conferences, disproportionately relying on them to reconcile bicameral differences on salient measures. Majority parties, however, refrain from going to conference in those assemblies that empower the minority party to select its preferred conferees. The interaction of chamber rules and partisan dynamics thus shapes the contours of legislative agreements in systematic ways across the states.

The Politicized Enforcement of Laws Criminalizing Executive Branch Conflicts of Interest

AbstractThere exist a host of separate federal statutes governing conflicts of interest for employees in the federal executive branch. These are supplemented by additional administrative rules promulgated by the Office of Government Ethics. Most provisions regulate financial self‐dealing via the imposition of criminal sanctions. In this article, I analyze the enforcement of public ethics law in the executive branch in three ways: first, by examining the textual substance of the statutory and administrative provisions regulating financial conflicts; second, through the presentation of descriptive statistics on enforcement of federal prohibitions on self‐dealing; and third, through exploratory analyses to investigate whether enforcement of federal public ethics law is driven by partisan dynamics or ideological preferences. My results indicate that the Department of Justice is at least somewhat more likely to successfully prosecute employees of agencies whose ideological preferences are misaligned with the incumbent president.

Determinants of support for directly-elected mayors in Ireland

ABSTRACT In May 2019, three Irish local authorities ran plebiscites alongside their local elections: Cork City Council, Limerick City and County Council, and Waterford City and County Council. The plebiscites were run to judge support for Government proposals to introduce a reformed, directly-elected mayoral office. The results were, in some ways, the worst possible from a Government perspective: a mix. While voters in Limerick backed the plan by a slight majority, it was marginally rejected in both Cork and Waterford. Faced with disappointing a large group of voters no matter the course of action taken, the Government shelved the plans for Cork and Waterford indefinitely, though the plan for Limerick may proceed. Despite the 2019 rejections, the 2020 UCD Online Election Poll (INES 1) found indications of high levels of support for these reforms: four-in-five respondents agreed that mayors should be directly elected, which is a significantly higher proportion than the Yes vote in any of the three plebiscite areas. This research uses further data from the online poll to establish correlates of support for these reforms, and tentatively suggests that partisan dynamics in turnout are why this support wasn’t reflected in the plebiscite results.

Authors’ Response

Authors’ Response

The triumph of partisanship: political scientists in the public debate about Catalonia’s independence crisis (2010–2018)

Participation in the public debate constitutes one of the most evident avenues for political scientists to demonstrate the social relevance of the discipline. This article focuses on two questions: the types of roles political scientists adopt in their public interventions and the potential tensions between their public engagement and the epistemic norms regulating academic and research activities. We investigate these questions in the context of very salient political debates, involving a high degree of political confrontation, where basic political beliefs, values, identities, and interests are at stake. Focusing on the case of the public debate surrounding the Catalan independence crisis (2010–2018), we demonstrate that in this type of context, (1) political scientists mostly adopt a partisan stance in their public interventions, yet it is also frequent that this is combined with the presence of academic elements in their discourse; (2) demand side factors (media outlets’ editorial lines) reinforce these partisan dynamics. These findings show that opportunities for increasing the social relevance of political scientists in these highly contentious contexts might come at the price of creating tensions that could erode the legitimacy of political science knowledge before the public.

Understanding the Gender and Partisan Dynamics of Abortion Voting in the House of Representatives

AbstractAnalyzing votes on abortion-related legislation from the 103rd (1993–94) to the 115th (2017–18) Congresses, we find that both gender and party influence members’ voting behavior. Among Republicans, women are more likely than men to oppose pro-life initiatives, although the impact of gender attenuates over time. Among Democrats, apparent gender differences in voting behavior are explained by the nature of the districts they represent. We also find that the type of abortion issue impacts the influence of gender. Republican women are more likely than Republican men to defect on policies that highlight women's autonomy, such as on bills related to contraception, while Democratic men are more likely than Democratic women to support legislation related to abortion bans. These gender differences reflect a complex dynamic of members’ responsiveness to public opinion on specific issues and party efforts to influence that opinion in ways that favor perceptions of party issue expertise.

The Politicized Enforcement of Laws Criminalizing Executive Branch Conflicts of Interest

There exist a host of separate federal statutes governing conflicts of interest for employees in the federal executive branch. These are supplemented by additional administrative rules promulgated by the Office of Government Ethics. Most provisions regulate financial self-dealing via the imposition of criminal sanctions. In this article, I analyze the enforcement of public ethics law in the executive branch in three ways: first, by examining the textual substance of the statutory and administrative provisions regulating financial conflicts; second, through the presentation of descriptive statistics on enforcement of federal prohibitions on self-dealing; and third, through exploratory analyses to investigate whether enforcement of federal public ethics law is driven by partisan dynamics or ideological preferences. My results indicate that the Department of Justice is at least somewhat more likely to successfully prosecute employees of agencies whose ideological preferences are misaligned with the incumbent President.

Polarization or Symmetry: The Court's Current Choice

This short book review considers the arguments advanced in NEAL DEVINS & LAWRENCE BAUM, THE COMPANY THEY KEEP: HOW PARTISAN DIVISIONS CAME TO THE SUPREME COURT (2019) in light of the Supreme Court's decisions in its 2019-2020 term. Devins and Baum argue that the justices on the Supreme Court have become polarized along political lines to an unprecedented degree. They correctly suggest that this polarization risks politicizing both the Court itself and the constitutional law it crafts. The Court's decisions in its last term, however, suggest that it may be finding its way instead towards an approach this review's author has previously called symmetric constitutionalism: the Court may be deliberately pushing back against the polarizing forces Devins and Baum identify and instead self-consciously crafting a constitutional law that distributes wins and losses across major partisan and ideological divides, in hopes of tempering partisan passions and telegraphing its commitment to neutral principles of civil liberty and law-bound governance. To help forestall the dangers presented by the partisan dynamics Devins and Baum document, the Court should pursue symmetry more deliberately, so that observers understand the Court is crafting legal principles with bipartisan benefits in the long run, as opposed to dispensing wins and losses in an ad hoc and result-driven way.

Examining the appointment of women to ministerial positions across Europe: 1970–2015

Under which circumstances are women appointed to ministerial positions? In this article, I provide a theoretical framework for the role of gender in ministerial selection by considering the policy, office, and vote-seeking motivations of party leaders. I present an original data set which details, at the party level, the appointment of female cabinet ministers in 30 European countries between 1970 and 2015. Using negative binomial regression models, I find that left-wing party leaders appoint more women than leaders of right-wing parties. Female party leaders appoint more women ministers than their male counterparts. Women are better represented in governments in gender-progressive countries, and survey data analysis shows that party leaders appoint more women when their supporters have more progressive gender attitudes. This analysis provides an original insight into how gender has shaped the partisan dynamics of ministerial selection across Europe over 45 years.

Partisan Patriotism in the American Presidency: American Exceptionalism, Issue Ownership, and the Age of Trump

This study employs issue ownership theory to examine the partisan dynamics surrounding the idea of American exceptionalism in presidential discourse. We conducted a content analysis of invocations of American exceptionalism in all major U.S. presidential addresses—domestic and foreign—from the end of World War II through Trump’s 1st year in office. We find that even though Republicans have traditionally claimed ownership of American exceptionalism, patterns in presidential discourse tell a very different story. Specifically, our results show (a) in domestic contexts, Republican and Democratic presidents were very similar in their invocations of American exceptionalism during the Cold War but that Democrats have held a substantial advantage over Republicans throughout the post–Cold War era, including on issue areas that Republicans are perceived to “own” (e.g. national security); (b) in foreign contexts, Democrats have been much more outspoken in their embrace of American exceptionalism throughout both the Cold War and post–Cold War; and (c) President Trump has diverged significantly, both in substance and frequency, from his Democratic and Republican predecessors in his invocation of American exceptionalism. We reflect on the implications of these findings on our broader understanding of issue—and trait—ownership, presidential discourse, and American exceptionalism in American politics.