Partisan Preferences Research Articles

Following the coalition? Testing the impact of coalitions on policy preferences in Germany

Ultimately, electoral democracy is about governments doing what citizens want. However, considerable evidence shows that parties influence citizens’ preferences. Most studies on party influence rely on experimental designs that present participants with parties’ positions. The disadvantage of experiments is that many citizens are already aware of those positions, thus underestimating party influence. Very few studies assess reactions to real changes in party positions, which avoids this limitation. We break new ground by assessing the impact of changes in coalition governments, which lead parties to express different positions for reasons that are partly exogenous to elite and mass preferences, on partisans’ attitudes. Using panel data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we leverage a major coalition change by Angela Merkel in Germany in 2013. We find that this change influenced the preferences of partisans of the coalition parties. Our findings have significant implications for how we think about democratic representation in multi-party contexts.

The Importance of Candidate Sex and Partisan Preference over Time: A Multiday Study of Voter Decision Making

Women often face challenges when running for political office, but precisely when and how candidate sex affects voter decision making is unclear. Using a unique multiday, high-information experiment, we examine how the presence of women candidates in an election influences subjects’ information search, candidate evaluations, and vote decisions. We focus on how the partisan alignment of women candidates (whether they run in the subject’s preferred in-party vs. out-party) matters and at which point in the campaign gender is most influential. We find that subjects who see in-party women candidates are more open to considering the out-party candidate, seeking out more information about the candidates in the race. Out-party women candidates strengthen subjects’ initial partisan preferences, however, leading to less search and higher in-party voting rates. We also find that candidate gender is most influential early in the campaign, and its effects diminish as the campaign progresses.

¿Quiénes cambiaron de partido durante la Gran Recesión? Un estudio de 12 países de Europa occidental

Los niveles de volatilidad electoral tras la Gran Recesión de 2008 fueron récord en la mayoría de los países de Europa occidental. Entre las principales causas de esta inestabilidad electoral destacan el desarrollo negativo de la economía, la crisis de los partidos tradicionales y el cambio de los temas de competición política. A nivel individual, se desconoce qué factores propiciaron que los electores cambiasen de preferencia partidista después de la Gran Recesión. Además, en general, se sabe poco sobre las diferencias entre un elector estable y uno volátil. Este estudio de 12 países de Europa occidental tras la crisis económica concluye que el modelo del votante económico no siempre explicó el cambio de preferencia partidista después de 2008, mientras que los sentimientos de desafección política se encuentran entre las principales razones para entender el cambio de partidos entre elecciones.

Political partisanship influences behavioral responses to governors’ recommendations for COVID-19 prevention in the United States

Voluntary physical distancing is essential for preventing the spread of COVID-19. We assessed the role of political partisanship in individuals' compliance with physical distancing recommendations of political leaders using data on mobility from a sample of mobile phones in 3,100 counties in the United States during March 2020, county-level partisan preferences, information about the political affiliation of state governors, and the timing of their communications about COVID-19 prevention. Regression analyses examined how political preferences influenced the association between governors' COVID-19 communications and residents' mobility patterns. Governors' recommendations for residents to stay at home preceded stay-at-home orders and led to a significant reduction in mobility that was comparable to the effect of the orders themselves. Effects were larger in Democratic- than in Republican-leaning counties, a pattern more pronounced under Republican governors. Democratic-leaning counties also responded more strongly to recommendations from Republican than from Democratic governors. Political partisanship influences citizens' decisions to voluntarily engage in physical distancing in response to communications by their governor.

La antipolítica de género en el gobierno de Bolsonaro y sus dinámicas de violencia

The attacks performed by the Brazilian government against debates on gender and sexualities have been constant since the last presidential elections. This work analyses speeches sustained by Brazilian representatives who deliberately tailor their discourse to perpetuate anti-progressive tendencies. It will also state that such speeches, indicated as important axes of an ideological partisan orientation, have reverberated in governmental practice. Using critical perception fueled by queer theory, this work will have the intent of providing a concise overview, within the international scope, of Brazil’s perception of social demands connected to gender equality and respect for diversity. This study will also address such demands on a domestic scale, sustaining the idea that they are inseparably linked to certain dynamics of violence.

Economic crisis, social networks, and political preferences

Abstract How did the great recession affect policy and partisan preferences in the most afflicted countries? We theorize the role of a previously under-emphasized source of preferences: the size and scope of one’s exposure to other individuals who have been exposed to the crisis. Contact with others who have economically suffered should be an additional channel for the crisis’ effects on policy preferences. We gathered data during the recession from a crisis-hit country, Spain, to measure the size of the respondent’s social networks in different ways and the impact of the crisis upon them. We also measured a battery of policy and political preferences (support for austerity, the euro, supranational institutions and new parties). We find strong associations between support for anti-status quo policies and anti-establishment parties and exposure to economic suffering within one’s social networks in ways that enrich our understanding of the process of preference formation in times of crisis.

The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Partisan Preferences in Modern Democracies: Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Voting for Socially Conservative Parties

While there is growing interest in the relationship between pathogen‐avoidance motivations and partisanship, the extant findings remain contradictory and suffer from a number of methodological limitations related to measurement and internal and external validity. We address these limitations and marshal the most complete test to date of the relationship between the behavioral immune system and partisanship, as indexed by which party people identify with and vote for. Using a unique research design, including multiple well‐powered, nationally representative samples from the United States and Denmark collected in election and nonelection contexts, our study is the first to establish in cross‐national data a consistent, substantial, and replicable connection between deep‐seated pathogen‐avoidance motivations and socially conservative party preferences across multiple validated measures of individual differences in disgust sensitivity and using large representative samples. We explore the relative contribution of the pathogen‐avoidance model and sexual strategies for accounting for this relationship.

Go the distance: left-right orientations, partisanship and the vote

ABSTRACT Do ideological orientations have different effects on citizens without party ties, citizens who identify with a particular party and citizens who identify with other parties? What conditional effects do partisan and ideological orientations have on the vote? Difficulties and controversies over definitions of partisanship and left-right ideology, their reciprocal effects and how these are overshadowed in analyses including both heuristics have discouraged scholars from conducting extensive comparative research on this topic. I test to what extent the effects of left-right orientations on voting differ depending on party attachments and how this relationship is influenced by party polarization. Results using data from 77 harmonized national studies in 17 European countries suggest that the effects of partisanship on vote choice are not additive to those of left-right orientations, while the latter are conditional on party identification. Thus, partisans, non-partisans and partisans of other parties respond differently to left-right distances. These differences are more pronounced when the degree of polarization is considered.

The Curious Case of Black Conservatives: Construct Validity and the 7-point Liberal-Conservative Scale

Scholars have long puzzled over the existence of conservative-identifying black Americans who nonetheless identify with and vote for the Democratic Party. This paper resolves this paradox. Leveraging data from the American National Election Study, I demonstrate that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are unfamiliar to many black Americans, rendering the commonly used 7-point liberal-conservative measure of ideology invalid for this population. Black respondents unfamiliar with these terms misapply them and choose ideological labels that fail to reflect their partisan preferences. Consequently, scholars and political actors make incorrect and imprecise inferences about the contours of black politics in the United States. Moreover, this article raises new concerns about the generalizability of claims that rely on ideological self-identification measures, including popular claims about polarization among the mass public. This work also suggests a need for caution when using concepts that vary in their meaningfulness across social groups.

Drivers of Government Activity in European Countries: Do Partisan Politics Still Divide East and West?

AbstractThis article takes a novel look at the relationship between government activity, partisan preferences and varieties of capitalism. Evidence from panel regressions for 25 EU countries from 1990 to 2014 suggests that there are major divides among European countries in terms of the drivers of government activity, that is, government spending and government regulation. The European divide appears to be even more pronounced between liberal and coordinated economic systems than between the classical geographical divide of east and west, which is typically used in most contributions. While both divides apply to the determinants of government activity in general, a reversal of the classical partisan effect for the east is to be found only in specific cases and, is most likely in government spending in liberal eastern countries.

Decentralizing electoral campaigns? New-old parties, grassroots and digital activism

ABSTRACT Recent studies suggest that new parties display new patterns of digital mobilization. We shed light on this debate: do new party supporters engage in online political activities to a greater extent during electoral campaigns? Do they share political images or quotes on social media, participate in political forums, or exchange political messages with their friends more often than supporters of traditional parties? No. Drawing on a post-electoral survey dataset in Spain, we find that offline extra-institutional political activities are key predictors of the level of online political engagement. Even in the context of a polarized electoral campaign and the emergence of new electoral forces such as Podemos, extra-institutional political participation drives digital activism to the detriment of institutional variables, such as turnout or partisan preferences. Thus, all parties depend on extra-institutional activists to boost their online campaigns. Since grassroots activists increasingly influence the communicative strategy of all political parties, we interpret this process within a long-term digital-based post-material transformation of the political culture, with major implications for partisan organization, mobilization, and polarization in many democracies. We contend that the overrepresentation of grassroots activists in producing and disseminating political content in social media may have favored an increase of the visibility and public support of political outsiders in several countries.

When Religious Voting Becomes Volatile: The Case of Jewish Voters in Britain

AbstractThe political preferences of Britain's Jewish community, as well as the factors which underpin them, have been historically under-researched. This paper addresses this both empirically and conceptually. The study complements emerging evidence by showing that British Jews overwhelmingly support the Conservatives, but also employs longitudinal data for the first time to show that this association has strengthened sharply over recent election cycles. These findings highlight how existing theories of the effects of religious belonging on voting struggle to explain religious groups with volatile partisan preferences, such as British Jews. The paper therefore makes the case that the mechanism of party support should be understood differently in such cases. To this end, the findings presented here are consistent with the notion that security for Jews acts as a group utility heuristic, which leads voters to reward parties on the basis of how they are judged in prioritising security for Jews.

Shaping the (dis)advantage: the impact of partisan and demographic factors on ethnic minority candidates’ success in preferential voting systems. Evidence from the Brussels case

ABSTRACT This article asks whether Turkish and North African origin candidates experience an electoral (dis)advantage in the Brussels preferential voting system. We examine the impact of candidates’ ethnicity on their intraparty share of preference votes, and whether and how the strength of this relationship is influenced by their partisan orientation and the district concentration of their own ethnic group. Our results indicate that Turkish and North African origin candidates receive higher shares of preference votes on average compared to their co-partisans. We find that North African origin candidates’ advantage does not vary according to their ethnic group concentration in the district, but their share of preference votes is higher than their co-partisans when they compete on left and center-left lists. However, Turkish origin candidates get more successful than their co-partisans as their ethnic group concentration increases, especially when they compete on left and center-left lists. Our research overall highlights the importance of candidates’ ethnicity as an information shortcut for voters in the context of intraparty competition. We conclude that strong preferential voting systems do generate more opportunities for the inclusion of ethnic minority groups, but that parties’ strategies and voters’ behavior are more determinant than the rules themselves.

Partisan Intensity in Congress: Evidence from Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court Nomination

Partisan disputes are ubiquitous in Congress. Yet, participation in this bickering varies among legislators. Some eagerly join these fights while others abstain. What explains this variation? Previous research examines this question by studying members’ partisan preferences expressed through votes or bill cosponsorships. However, preference-based studies miss much of the daily congressional bickering and cannot identify which legislators were most involved in the fighting. This paper considers lawmakers’ partisan intensity, the time and effort they devote to partisanship. I argue the same factors that drive other forms of legislative participation—constituent demand, committee service, and a member’s personal characteristics—also predict who joins a partisan dispute. Using Senators’ daily Twitter communications during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, I show legislators’ partisan intensity systematically varied based on these factors. In particular, I find that sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh altered Senators’ partisan behavior in a predictable manner. This study helps explain why legislators choose to create the partisan acrimony that is omnipresent on Capitol Hill and contributes to our understanding of partisanship, messaging politics, and how social identity affects legislative participation.

The Role of Child Perception and Motivation in Political Socialization

AbstractMost of what is known regarding political socialization treats parent–child concordance as evidence of transmission. This direct-transmission approach remains agnostic regarding how socialization occurs, whether traits have a role in a child's ability to identify and understand their parent's values or their motivation to adopt their parents’ values. This article advances a perception-adoption approach to unpack these microprocesses of socialization. The authors test their model using three independent studies in the United States that together comprise 4,852 parent–child dyads. They find that the transmission of partisan orientations from parent to child occurs less than half the time, which is qualitatively different from the generally held view. More importantly, the findings provide a greater understanding of how key predictors facilitate the political socialization process. Specifically, politicization improves child perception, but has no role in the child's motivation to adopt parental values. Closeness and parental value strength influence children to want to be like their parents, but do nothing to improve children's ability to recognize their parents' values. And education, previously thought to have little role in transmission, does not influence a child's ability to understand their parent's affiliation, but appears to make children more likely to reject whatever they believe it to be.

Does Government Partisanship Influence Multinational Corporations’ Tax Payments in the United States?

ObjectiveScholars have made conflicting predictions as to whether partisan politics influences taxes paid by multinational corporations (MNCs). The current study tests this question by examining the relationship between the partisan composition of government and tax rates that MNCs paid to their home country, the United States, using firm‐level data on financial information from the U.S. Fortune 1000 for the period 1986–2010.MethodsI employ a multilevel regression model allowing for varying intercepts across firms and years as a way to model unobserved heterogeneity.ResultsI find no relationship between the partisan orientation of governing parties and the level of corporate taxes MNCs pay. Internationally mobile firms have lower effective tax rates than domestically operating firms.ConclusionThis study suggests that the effect of partisan politics on corporate tax policy does not extend to the taxation of MNCs in the United States.

“Reporting on climate change: A computational analysis of U.S. newspapers and sources of bias, 1997–2017”

News organizations constitute key sites of science communication between experts and lay audiences, giving many individuals their basic worldview of complex topics like climate change. Previous researchers have studied climate change news coverage to assess accuracy in reporting and potential sources of bias. These studies typically rely on manually coding articles from a handful of prestigious outlets, not allowing comparisons with smaller newspapers or providing enough diversity to assess the influence of partisan orientation or localized climate vulnerability on content production. Making these comparisons, this study indicates that partisan orientation, scale of circulation, and vulnerability to climate change correlate with several topics present in U.S. newspaper coverage of climate change. After assembling a corpus of over 78,000 articles covering two decades from 52 U.S. newspapers that are diverse in terms of geography, partisan orientation, scale of circulation, and objectively measured climate risk, a coherent set of latent topics were identified via an automated content analysis of climate change news coverage. Topic model results indicate that while outlet bias does not appear to impact the prevalence of coverage for most topics surrounding climate change, differences were evident for some topics based on partisan orientation, scale, or vulnerability status, particularly those relating to climate change denial, impacts, mitigation, or resource use. Overall, this paper provides a comprehensive study of U.S. newspaper coverage of climate change and identifies specific topics where outlet bias constitutes an important contextual factor.

Do Improving Conditions Harden Partisan Preferences? Lived Experiences, Imagined Communities, and Polarized Evaluations

Abstract Despite growing attention to an increasing partisan divide and populist voting, little attention has been directed at how social contexts might encourage greater or lesser political polarization. We address this gap by studying how county-level conditions—economic resilience, population change, and community health—intersect with individuals’ political orientations and communication patterns to shape partisan evaluations. Our context is Wisconsin around the 2012 election, with our focus on two prominent political figures: Governor Scott Walker and President Barack Obama. Multilevel modeling reveals that partisans living in counties with more affluent, less precarious conditions during 2009–2012 exhibited more polarized partisan attitudes toward Walker and Obama. Our analysis also finds a significant role for interpersonal communication and digital media in shaping polarized attitudes.

Turning out to turn down the EU: the mobilisation of occasional voters and Brexit

ABSTRACT Large amounts of occasional voters participated in the Brexit referendum. Did the increase in turnout affect the referendum outcome? For an answer, we exploit exogenous variation in voting costs, as large amounts of rainfall made voting more inconvenient in some areas. With an instrumental variable approach, we show that citizens whose voting benefits just surpassed costs under normal circumstances predominantly supported Leave. Hence, the turnout increase likely led to a larger Leave vote share. Exploring the reason for this with survey data, we show that Leave support was not generally higher in the population of low-propensity voters. Rather, the mobilisation of Leave-leaning, compared to Remain-leaning occasional voters was lopsided: The former were more likely to turn out. Our research highlights that the issue-specific mobilisation of low-propensity voters helps to explain electoral outcomes. This is particularly so in referendums with weak partisan preferences, and where single issues dominate voter decision making.

Socializing Democrats: Examining Asian American vote choice with evidence from a national survey

Asian Americans are increasingly voting for Democrats in national elections. High levels of Democratic vote choice among Asian Americans are notable because many have high incomes, immigrated from countries with communist histories, or are Evangelical Christians. Why do Asian Americans support Democrats despite these conservative predispositions? I develop a novel theory of “social transmission” to explain Democratic vote choice among Asian Americans. The theory predicts that Asian Americans, who receive limited partisan socialization through the family, develop partisan preferences partly through the diffusion of political views in local contexts. This process leads to Democratic support because Asian Americans tend to settle in liberal metropolitan areas of the United States. I test this theory as an explanation for Asian American vote choice using data from the 2008 National Asian American Survey. In support of the theory, local partisan context emerges as a moderately-sized predictor of vote choice alongside some established predictors, including national origin and religion. Some measures of social integration into local communities heighten the effects of partisan context on vote choice. The results hold across various tests for self-selection and after accounting for several alternative explanations, including socioeconomic status, religion, national origin, group consciousness, and perceived discrimination.