Partisan Identification Research Articles

Missouri Citizen Perceptions: Giving Second Amendment Preservation Legislation a Second Look.

In June 2021, Missouri passed the "Second Amendment Preservation Act" (SAPA). Though SAPA passed easily and had gubernatorial support, many Missouri law enforcement agencies, including the Missouri Sheriff's Association, oppose it. Missing from this policy conversation, and deserving of analysis, is the voice of Missouri citizens. Using qualitative interview data and survey data, we explored what if anything Missouri gun owners knew about SAPA and what they perceived its effects would be on gun-related murders, suicides, gun thefts, and mass shootings. Most Missouri gun owners had not heard about SAPA and were ambivalent about its potential effect on gun safety outcomes. Our findings also indicate that respondents' attitudes toward SAPA and the impact of such policy on safety is driven by gun ownership (i.e., primary versus living in a household with firearms), partisan identification, and attitudes toward government firearm regulation.

Multidimensional partisanship shapes climate policy support and behaviours

Partisanship is one of the largest and most studied social barriers to climate change mitigation in the United States. Here we expand conceptualizations of ‘left-right’ or ‘Democrat-Republican’ towards understanding partisanship as a multidimensional social identity with both negative and positive elements. Partisan support or opposition for climate action can be driven by identification with the partisan in-group (positive or ‘expressive’ partisanship), as well as perceived threats from the ‘out-group’ (negative partisanship). Using original survey data, we show that when negative and expressive partisanship is low, climate policy support is similar for Republicans and Democrats. However, differences in policy support increase when partisan identification amplifies. Yet, for climate behaviours, we find more limited partisan effects. The proposed multidimensional partisanship framework revisits the role of partisan polarization in shaping climate change action and points to alternative ways to transcend partisan barriers.

Basking in Their Glory? Expressive Partisanship among People of Color Before and After the 2020 US Election

AbstractAs the number of people of color (PoC) grows in the United States, a key question is how partisanship will develop among this important electoral group. Yet many open questions remain about PoC partisanship, due to limited availability of panel data, a lack of sensitive instrumentation, and small samples of PoC in most public opinion surveys. This brief report leverages a unique panel of African American (N = 650) and Latino (N = 650) eligible voters, before and after the 2020 Presidential Election between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump. Using measures that tap expressive partisan, racial, and national identity attachments, we find that Biden’s electoral victory significantly intensified partisan identity among his Democratic PoC supporters, relative to PoC who were not Democrats and supported Trump. We do not find significant changes in racial or national identities. Our results advance research on PoC’s partisanship.

Migration and partisan identification as British Unionists or Irish Nationalists in Northern Ireland

The notion that mobility weakens collective norms and increases tolerance has a long pedigree in sociology. In this article, we examine the association of migration with partisan identification as British Unionists or Irish Nationalists in Northern Ireland, a region where the overlap of opposing religious and national identities is reflected in the residential segregation of its population. In representative samples of the population, we find that Irish Nationalist identification among Catholics and British Unionist identification among Protestants was lower among people not born in Northern Ireland and return migrants from beyond the British Isles. Having lived in the Republic was associated with more Nationalist identification among Catholics but less Unionist identification among Protestants and others. Moreover, having lapsed from the family religion is associated with decreased partisan identification. While international migration has in many countries led to increased tensions, conflict and the ascendance of exclusionary national populist movements, our results thus suggest that mobility beyond the British Isles has contributed to less nation–state conflict in Northern Ireland.

Paradoxical Politics? Partisan Politics, Ethnoracial Ideologies, and the Assimilated Consciousnesses of Latinx Republicans

Because of the Republican Party’s racist rhetoric, Latinx Republicans are considered paradoxes as their partisanship contradict perceptions of Latinxs’ sociopolitical interests. Methodologically departing from prior Latinx politics research, this study employs qualitative methods to understand how Latinx Republicans interpretively link ethnoracial and partisan identities. Drawing on original interviews with Latinx Republicans, I argue that respondents are not paradoxes but strategic actors engaging in politics that align with respondents’ interpretations of their social identities. Specifically, I develop the concept of “assimilated consciousness”—how Latinx Republicans politicize ethnoracial identity by disaggregating Latinx groupness and positioning themselves in opposition to other racialized people. I show how most respondents reject seeing racism as systemic, perceive themselves as assimilated, and subsequently use interpretive tools to distance themselves from other Latinxs and Black Americans; minimize racist Republican rhetoric; and maximize problematic Democratic rhetoric. In doing so, respondents reconcile the relationship between their ethnoracial and partisan identifications. I further employ the concept of assimilated consciousness to show how a minority of respondents rejected the Republican Party due to Trump’s and Trump supporters’ racist rhetoric. Overall, I contend my findings provide a better understanding of how racialized immigration processes shape ethnoracial and political identities.

Did COVID-19 change the political communication of polarizing leaders? The case of Salvini's campaigning before and after the pandemic.

In recent years, political polarization saw a significant rise in many political systems. This revamped a scientific debate sparked decades ago, with different schools of thought debating on dynamics, factors, and causes of polarization itself. By looking at political elites' polarizing strategy-one of the factors on which various theories seem to converge-this article tackles the question concerning the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of political communication. More specifically, we look at the case of a highly polarizing leader in Italy-Matteo Salvini, leader of Lega-in two campaigns held in 2020 before and after the first wave of the pandemic. By analyzing his messages on Facebook and Twitter, we build on the literature on the causes of affective polarization to study Salvini's use of partisan identity and divisive issues, also considering other crucial elements, such as the attacks against others, and followers' engagement. The results highlight some changes between the two phases, but also a strong continuity in the polarizing strategy of Salvini's political communication.

Organizational Strength and Authoritarian Durability in Cambodia

This article draws from multiple sources of data including longitudinal field research such as interviews with diverse stakeholders—party apparatchik, leaders of civil society organizations, and representatives of international institutions operating in Cambodia. Analyzing these data using the literature on the durability of single-party authoritarianism, we argue that authoritarian durability in Cambodia is associated with the ruling party’s strength, which has its roots in the party’s evolution from a liberation movement and counterinsurgency struggle from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. This movement and struggle fostered a shared sense of hardship, and a common identity among the party’s leadership, which in turn generated enduring partisan identities, rigid interparty boundaries, and strong party organizational structure. Additionally, we postulate that distribution of patronage largesse made possible through rents associated with extraction of natural resources, foreign aid, and foreign investment further strengthened the ruling party, allowing it to project infrastructural power in surveilling and mobilizing voters and in exercising coercion against its challengers.

Ideological polarization during a pandemic: Tracking the alignment of attitudes toward COVID containment policies and left-right self-identification.

Research on opinion polarization has focused on growing divides in positions toward political issues between the more politically and ideologically engaged parts of the population. However, it is fundamentally difficult to track the alignment process between ideological group identity and issue positions because classically controversial political issues are already strongly associated with ideological or partisan identity. This study uses the COVID pandemic as an unique opportunity to investigate polarizing trends in the population. Pandemic management policies were not a politicized issue before COVID, but became strongly contested after governments all across the world initiated policies to contain the pandemic. We use data from the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP) to track trajectories in attitudes toward current COVID measures over the course of more than a year of the pandemic. We differentiate individuals by their ideological self-identity as measured by left-right self-placement. Results suggest that all ideological groups viewed the containment measures as similarly appropriate in the very beginning. However, already in the first weeks, individuals who identify as right-wing increasingly viewed the policies as too extreme, whereas centrists and left-wing identifiers viewed them as appropriate. Opinion differences between left-wing and right-wing identifiers solidified over the course of the pandemic, while centrists fluctuated between left and right self-identifiers. However, at the end of our observation period, there are signs of convergence between all groups. We discuss these findings from the perspective of theoretical models of opinion polarization and suggest that polarization dynamics are likely to stop when the political context (salience of certain issues and concrete material threats) changes.

Religious Zionism as a Dealigned partisan sub-system – Israel’s 2019–21 elections

ABSTRACT During the second decade of the twenty-first century, Israel’s Religious Zionist camp has undergone a process of accelerated Dealignment of its partisan system, resulting in the transformation of the political parties comprising it into a Dealigned Partisan Subsystem. An example of this process can be found in the transformations that took place in the ‘Jewish Home’ Religious-Zionist political party led by Naftali Bennett. Within 9 years and seven election campaigns, the party succeeded in trying out the Open Camp Party model, experiencing a division led by Bennett himself, and finally reaching the verge of disappearing and once again initiating renewed revival attempts. The Dealignment of partisan systems includes a high level of voters’ mobility; a decline in the support of existing mainstream parties; a decline in voting rates; and a decline in the strength of partisan identification, while voting patterns become more personal. The partisan system itself changes during this stage, with old parties disappearing and others rising in their place, often only to disappear from the political map as quickly as they appeared. This article illustrates the extent to which the Religious-Zionist partisan subsystem in Israeli politics during the second decade of the twenty-first century until the 2022 elections campaign corresponds with most characteristics of a Dealigned system.

Partisanship on the Playground: Expressive Party Politics Among Children

The beliefs and behaviors of U.S. adults are increasingly sorted and polarized along partisan lines. We draw on studies of partisanship and social identity formation to argue that children develop partisanship as a social identity during the political socialization process. For a group of children, their partisan social identity produces an affective (and largely negative) evaluation of the political world. Analyzing survey data collected from 1500+ children ages 6–12 in 2017 and 2018, we show that some children develop a partisan identity as they learn about politics that operates similarly to other social identities like gender and race. Children’s partisanship is associated with negative affective evaluations of politics, particularly leaders of the other political party. Using an innovative measurement tool, we show affective, negative reactions in children’s open-ended responses, including when they are asked to draw a political leader. Other children simply learn about politics without developing partisan identities and thus hold more positive affective evaluations of the political system.

Electoral Violence, Partisan Identity, and Perceptions of Election Quality: A Survey Experiment in West Bengal, India

What are the consequences of election violence for citizens' political attitudes? We argue that in polarized contexts, citizens' interpretation of electoral violence depends on their partisan affiliations. When presented with information alleging co-partisans' involvement in violence, people with strong partisan identities become more likely to assert that elections were free and fair. We test this expectation with a vignette experiment in West Bengal after India's 2019 elections, presenting respondents with information about violence while varying the partisan identity of the perpetrator. Consistent with expectations, supporters of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) increased their evaluations of election quality when hearing about co-partisan violence. We find no evidence of disconfirmation bias for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters; their recent shift to the party plausibly explains this finding.

Issue Importance and the Correction of Misinformation

ABSTRACT The study of misinformation – and its correction – has proliferated in recent years. Yet the empirical record includes instances where corrective messages do and do not work, even on similar issues. Despite intense scholarly attention to this topic, it remains unclear when people will revise false beliefs. Our study examines a factor with a long history in the study of public opinion: the importance a person attaches to an issue. The subjective state of issue importance has complex effects. It can increase an individual’s motivation to engage in effortful information processing while also leading them to defend existing beliefs and opinions. In a series of experiments administered in national surveys, we examine whether issue importance is implicated in the failure to correct false beliefs. The analyses show that on the topic of GM foods, the effects of a corrective message are smallest among misinformed people who rated the issue as personally important. By contrast, framing GM foods in terms of partisan identity engendered little resistance to a corrective message. Our findings illustrate the value of adopting a broader perspective on misinformation because people may resist corrections for reasons that are unrelated to their partisanship.

Aging and the politics of monetary policy in Japan

AbstractThis paper explores how Japan's aging population impacts the politics of monetary policy. Previous research suggests that the elderly have a variety of distinct policy preferences. Given that elderly voters also have higher voting rates, the rapid greying of the population could have significant effects on distributive struggles over economic policy across much of the developed world. In Japan, aging is advancing rapidly, and the central bank has engaged in massive monetary stimulus to induce inflation, which existing work suggests the elderly should oppose. Analyzing results from three surveys, this paper has three central findings: (1) the elderly tend to have higher inflation aversion, (2) the elderly display some opposition to quantitative easing (QE), and (3) despite such policy preferences, the concentration of elderly in electoral districts has no significant effect on the preferences either of legislative incumbents or candidates. The third finding is attributable to the fact that elderly opposition to QE is moderated by their partisan identification. Elderly Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) voters have systematically lower opposition to QE, likely reflecting that these voters have aligned their preferences with the LDP's policies.

Who gets persuaded? The heterogeneity of campaign effects in the Brexit referendum

Political contexts affect the degree to which traditional campaign methods like door knocking and leafleting affect referendum outcomes. Campaign methods are most effective when issues are of low salience and political parties provide unified cues to their supporters. In this paper, I draw on Zaller’s model of opinion formation to derive some theoretical expectations about the effectiveness of campaign contact in referendum campaigns when the issue is highly salient but the political parties provide mixed cues, arguing that prior voting intention, rather than partisan identity, should affect receptiveness to campaign messages. I test these expectations with regression analysis of British Election Study panel data, using propensity score matching to mitigate selection bias. My results suggest that the effects of campaigning during the Brexit referendum were mostly small, but differed significantly according to an individual’s political attention and, contrary to the theoretical expectations, their partisan identity.

Priming Self-Reported Partisanship

Abstract Can features of surveys, such as question ordering and informational stimuli, affect respondent self-reported partisanship? We report the results of two studies to examine how the survey environment affects the probability that a respondent identifies with a particular party and presidential approval conditional on self-reported partisanship. In an original experiment, we find that, under some circumstances, a question-ordering treatment increases Republican partisanship. The estimated effects are statistically different from zero in unweighted specifications where leaners are excluded from the definition of Republicans and also among respondents who identified as Republicans in previous survey waves. In our second study, we show that an informational intervention reduces the probability that a respondent identifies as an Independent and that including post-treatment partisanship in a regression changes the estimated treatment effect of informational interventions on presidential approval. Our analysis shows that seemingly minor features of survey design can affect self-reported partisanship, average outcomes for different partisans, and treatment effect estimates. We discuss the implications of our findings for survey design and theories of partisan identification and presidential approval.

Polarization and Persuasion: Engaging Sociology in the Moral Universe of a Divided Democracy

Our divided democracy—characterized by partisan polarization and moralized opposition—presents significant challenges to sociologists who would use our discipline to create a more just society. I focus here on the strategic role of, and need for, deeper engagement across the political divide. I review current research on polarization—increasingly focused on attitudinal consolidation and partisan identity—to emphasize challenges to and opportunities for persuasion. I call for increased engagement in three strategic subfields of sociology: (1) social movements, to integrate persuasion more centrally into theories and research on collective social action; (2) social psychology, to engage the interdisciplinary field of moral cognition to develop effective strategies for persuasion; and (3) rural sociology, to understand more deeply the perspectives and moral frameworks essential to engagement across the divide.

The impact of university attendance on partisanship

AbstractSurvey research shows that those with university degrees are more left-liberal along a number of dimensions than their peers without higher education. There is even some evidence to suggest a growing social and political cleavage centered on educational attainment. Yet, claims about the liberalizing effect of universities on political ideology and partisan identification rest on observational evidence where many assumptions are required to reach causal inference. This may account for conflicting findings in published research.Here, we employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design situated in Romania, where students who pass a national baccalaureate exam are uniquely qualified to enter university. We find that university attendance causes more liberal party preferences along the cultural dimension of party politics—though not along the economic or left-right dimensions of party conflict.

Individual–Community Misalignment in Partisan Identity Predicts Distancing From Norms During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study investigated whether misalignment between an individual and their community in partisan identity predicted psychological and behavioral distancing from local COVID-19 norms. A nationally representative sample of Republicans and Democrats provided longitudinal data in April (N = 3,492) and June 2020 (N = 2,649). Democrats in Republican communities reported especially heightened better-than-average estimates, perceiving themselves as more adherent to and approving of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI; e.g., mask wearing) than their community. Democrats’better-than-average estimates reflected high approval and behavior in Republican communities and substantial norm underestimation. Republicans in Democratic communities did not evidence worse-than-average estimates. In longitudinal models, injunctive norms only predicted NPI behavior when individual and community partisan identity were aligned. The strong personal approval-behavior association did not depend on misalignment; there were no effects of descriptive norms. Normative messages may have limited efficacy for a sizable subpopulation in politically polarized contexts, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

End of consensus? Ideology, partisan identity, and affective polarization in Finland 2003–2019

AbstractFinland is traditionally associated with a consensus‐like political culture and low partisan hostility. Despite this, concerns about political polarization have become widespread. A possible explanation is that affective polarization, a phenomenon characterized by increasing emotional distances between political groups, is increasing. This article examines trends and individual‐level predictors of affective polarization in the Finnish electorate between 2003 and 2019, using survey data from five national election studies. Additionally, it contributes to the theoretical understanding of affective polarization in multiparty settings by introducing a measure based on the absence of neutrality towards parties. This measure focuses on individual‐level polarization, thus allowing comparisons between groups of voters. The results show a general increase in affective polarization over the period. Ideological extremity is identified as the main predictor of the phenomenon. Left‐right extremity was the strongest predictor at the beginning of the period, whereas GAL‐TAN extremity became increasingly important over time. After 2011, the effects of ideological extremity became asymmetrical: extreme left and TAN positions predicted higher levels than their ideological opposites. Feeling close to a party had a mostly consistent effect on affective polarization, albeit not as large as ideological extremity. Increasing affective polarization might undermine the prevailing consensus culture in Finnish politics. However, it might also have positive effects as a corrective to voter apathy, leading to increased participation. This makes Finland an interesting case for further studies of the causes, effects, and dynamics of affective polarization.

Like parent, like child: The impact of parental socialisation on class identity and partisanship

The theoretical foundation of electoral behaviour research is the Michigan model which emphasizes socialisation and the development of partisan identities. In Britain, this was embellished to include class identity. Across Western societies, class voting, working class jobs and strength of party identities have been in decline, but identification as working class has remained high and relatively stable in Britain. This paper develops theoretical models of parental socialisation to identify effects on class and party identities. The empirical analysis reinforces previous findings about the intergenerational transmission of class identity and partisanship, but further shows that there are some moderating effects of occupation on this transmission. Most importantly, the paper finds that parental partisanship has a substantial effect on the formation of class identity. Therefore, it shows that class identity in contemporary Britain is a strong political identity in its origins as well as its effects.