Partisan Preferences Research Articles

Migration as an opportunity to register changing partisan loyalty in the United States

AbstractWe explore the connection between residential migration choices and political party identification by movers who change their political party registration. We find that an impressive number of migrants choose neighbourhoods that favor their new party of registration. The association between the party change of the migrant and the balance of local partisanship in their new neighborhood cannot be accounted for by a process of neighbourhood socialisation because the move is too recent for socialisation pressures to have operated. It is more likely that the migrant's political transition occurred well before the relocation and shaped the destination search. Relocation offered an opportunity to mark a previously transformed partisan preference on the voter rolls. In this sense, partisan identification is stable, but observing any large subset of migrants may make it appear unhinged, as this group collectively takes its opportunity to officially disclose their change in political party loyalty when they have a chance to relocate and must reregister.

The European refugee crisis, party competition, and voters’ responses in Germany

Studies show that globalisation creates political potentials that can transform electoral competition in Western societies. The specific process of how these potentials become effective is not completely understood. It is argued in the article that attention-grabbing events can trigger the transformation of electoral competition as they force actors to take clear positions and thereby allow citizens to align their partisan preferences and policy attitudes. The article analyses the case of German parties’ reaction to the arrival of large numbers of refugees at Europe’s borders in 2015/16. Using panel data that bracket this event, it is shown how German citizens responded to party behaviour by changing partisan preferences on the basis of prior immigration attitudes. The so-called refugee crisis may thus have been a critical juncture transforming party competition in Germany. As such, the crisis represents a striking example of how events may focus attention on a new policy dimension and catalyse the evolution of new cleavages.

Does residential sorting explain geographic polarization?

AbstractPolitical preferences in the United States are highly correlated with population density, at national, state, and metropolitan-area scales. Using new data from voter registration records, we assess the extent to which this pattern can be explained by geographic mobility. We find that the revealed preferences of voters who move from one residence to another correlate with partisan affiliation, though voters appear to be sorting on non-political neighborhood attributes that covary with partisan preferences rather than explicitly seeking politically congruent neighbors. But, critically, we demonstrate through a simulation study that the estimated partisan bias in moving choices is on the order of five times too small to sustain the current geographic polarization of preferences. We conclude that location must have some influence on political preference, rather than the other way around, and provide evidence in support of this theory.

The politics of labour reforms in Portugal: Politicization and Europeanization before and after the bailout

Abstract The article focuses on the politicization of Portuguese Labour Code reforms since the early 2000s. More specifically, it looks at the link between mechanisms of politicization and Europeanization from a variety of perspectives, including decision-making processes and agenda setting, political divides and reform coalitions. By adopting a longitudinal approach, the article shows how the economic crisis and troika bailout have affected connections between politicization and Europeanization. Portuguese labour market policies have followed a continuous process of increased flexibility in recent years irrespective of governments’ partisan orientations and without any significant variations. It remains that the economic crisis – and the memorandum agreed with the troika and implemented against the backdrop of a sovereign debt crisis – have had a considerable effect on political debate and social protest while deepening the polarization that divides Portuguese trade unions and governing parties. The processes of Europeanization and politicization are addressed from a qualitative perspective that is crucial in the understanding of the politics of labour reforms in Portugal as it sheds light on the political conditions of reforms coalitions and their constraints.

How Internal Constraints Shape Interest Group Activities: Evidence from Access-Seeking PACs

Interest groups contribute much less to campaigns than legally allowed. Consequently, prevailing theories infer these contributions must yield minimal returns. I argue constraints on PAC fundraising may also explain why interest groups give little. I illuminate one such constraint: access-seeking PACs rely on voluntary donations from affiliated individuals (e.g., employees), and these PACs alienate donors with partisan preferences when giving to the opposite party. First, difference-in-differences analysis of real giving shows donors withhold donations to access-seeking PACs when PACs contribute to out-partisan politicians. Next, an original survey of corporate PAC donors demonstrates they know how their PACs allocate contributions across parties, and replicates the observational study in an experiment. Donors’ partisanship thus limits access-seeking PACs’ fundraising and influence. This provides a new perspective on why there is little interest group money in elections, and has broad implications for how partisan preferences and other internal constraints shape interest group strategy.

Editorial Note

Editorial Note

The Dynamics of Message Selection in Online Political Discussion Forums: Self-Segregation or Diverse Exposure?

While the online sphere is believed to expose individuals to a wider array of viewpoints, a worry about self-reinforcing political echo chambers also persists. We join this scholarly debate by focusing on individual motives for political discussion and dyadic- and structural-level mechanisms that can drive one’s message-selection decision in online discussion settings. Using unobtrusively logged behavioral data matched with panel survey responses, our temporal exponential random graph model (TERGM) analysis indicates that message selection in online discussion settings is largely driven by the similarity of one’s candidate evaluative criteria and various endogenous structural factors, whereas the impact of overt partisan preference in shaping message selection is much more limited than is often assumed.

Social media and political partisanship – A subaltern public sphere’s role in democracy

Social media, as a subaltern public sphere (Fraser, 1990), have a democratic function in providing an alternative platform for minorities and marginalized to defy mainstream discourses in the public sphere. However, social media have been found to have an echo chamber effect, which may be detrimental to democracy. They may help to accelerate the ascendancy of a “post-truth” era in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. A study on political polarization, however, showed that selective exposure and avoidance in social media are weak indicators of polarization (Johnson et al., 2017). This study examines the role of social media in democracy and partisan politics. The authors considered that despite the echo chamber effect, social media have a limited part to play in the formation of polarized stances compared with other factors, such as demographics, political orientation, and mass media use. The study tested two main hypotheses: H1: Social media use is associated with political stance that is marginalized in the mainstream media; H2: Political orientation has a stronger relationship than social media use with the stance toward political values and social issues.The results supported both hypotheses. Social media are associated with political stance that is marginalized in the mainstream media. However, when compared with other factors, the relationship between social media and stance becomes less obvious. Although the echo chamber effect may reinforce the original stance, social media do not exhibit a strong relationship with the stance toward political values and social issues. Partisan orientation and use of partisan mass media are found to have stronger links with variations in stance. Social media, however, provide a subaltern public sphere for those excluded from the dominant public sphere, thus extending the public sphere to accommodate multiple opinions and perspectives.

Pentecostal Identity and Citizen Engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa: New Evidence from Zambia

AbstractSince the 1980s, Pentecostal and other born again Christian movements have become increasingly prominent in the public spheres of many sub-Saharan African states. A dearth of reliable survey data has constrained investigation of the potential influence of these religious movements on political attitudes and participation. This article analyzes original survey data from Zambia, a majority-Christian nation. These data, from a stratified random sample of 1,500 Zambians, indicate that Pentecostals do in fact share partisan preferences and report higher levels of political interest and participation than other Christians. They are less likely, however, to contact elected officials—a finding that accords with ethnographic accounts of Pentecostal pastors as political interlocutors for their politically mobilized congregations. We further contextualize and explore the external validity of our findings using cross-national survey data collected by the Pew Forum (2010,N = 9,500). We conclude by underscoring the value of further survey research on religion and politics in the region.

Low-Information Voting: Evidence From Instant-Runoff Elections

How do voters make decisions in low-information contests? Although some research has looked at low-information voter decision making, scant research has focused on data from actual ballots cast in low-information elections. We focus on three 2008 Pierce County (Washington) Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) elections. Using individual-level ballot image data, we evaluate the structure of individual rankings for specific contests to determine whether partisan cues underlying partisan rankings are correlated with choices made in nonpartisan races. This is the first time that individual-level data from real elections have been used to evaluate the role of partisan cues in nonpartisan races. We find that, in partisan contests, voters make avid use of partisan cues in constructing their preference rankings, rank-ordering candidates based on the correspondence between voters’ own partisan preferences and candidates’ reported partisan affiliation. However, in nonpartisan contests where candidates have no explicit partisan affiliation, voters rely on cues other than partisanship to develop complete candidate rankings.

Influence in the political Twitter sphere: Authority and retransmission in the 2015 and 2016 Spanish General Elections

Candidates, parties, media and citizens have the same ability to post tweets. For this reason, mapping the dynamics of interaction among users is essential to evaluate the processes of influence in an electoral campaign. However, characterising these aspects requires methodologies that consider the interconnections generated by users globally. The discipline of social network analysis provides the concepts of centrality and modularity, both very suitable for the context of network communication. This article analyses the political conversation on Twitter during the 2015 and 2016 General Elections in Spain, in which four candidates with significant popularity in the electorate participated. Two corpora of 8.9 million and 9.7 million tweets were collected from each campaign, respectively, to analyse the networks of mentions and retweets. The network of mentions appears more blurred than that of retweets, allowing us to better estimate users’ partisan preference. The graphs of the network of retweets show a strong internal activity within clusters, and the proximity between them reflects the ideological axis of each party.

Polarized preferences versus polarizing policies

Much of contemporary political debate in the United States focuses on the issue of polarization: specifically, its causal antecedents and its consequences for policymaking and political conflict. In this article, we argue that partisan preference polarization—conventionally defined as the difference in the favored policy positions of legislators from the two major parties—is not a sufficient statistic for potential political conflict in national politics . Rather, a well-defined measure of potential conflict must take into account (1) the locations of status quo policies and proposed alternatives; and (2) the shape of underlying utility functions. We propose measures of the likely contentiousness of a given status quo policy and of a proposal to move that policy. We then demonstrate the usefulness of these measures using estimates of utility function and final passage vote parameters on enacted legislation from the 111th US Senate (2009–2011).

Unreflective Partisans? Policy Information and Evaluation in the Development of Partisanship

What factors enable and motivate citizens to form partisan identities? Popular accounts, as well as several major theoretical approaches, attribute a central role for policy and ideological concerns in shaping the partisan orientations of voters. Information about the policy aims of parties should therefore, on average, make it easier for an individual to find a party that best fits her views, especially if she had previously been less familiar with the parties. The evidence for this is mixed, however. Plenty of studies find a robust correlation between policy views and partisanship. Yet there is mounting evidence that citizens look to parties to decide where to stand on policy issues, suggesting that partisan identification precedes policy preferences. We bring new evidence to bear by investigating directly the impact of substantive policy information on the partisan identities of ordinary citizens. To do this, we carry out a pair of original experiments across six countries, five of which are relatively young or unstable party systems. One experiment informs citizens about the policy goals of the major parties; we find little to no evidence that such information affects levels of partisanship. The other experiment tests the impact of inviting citizens to evaluate and compare their own position to the positions of the major parties, a more direct test of the sort of reasoning posited in some theoretical accounts. We find that this reflective task in fact depresses levels of partisanship, perhaps especially among those who knew less about politics and parties from the outset. This suggests that thinking about policy differences and proximities pushes citizens away from partisan attachments they form in the ordinary course of life, perhaps because such thinking generates fresh doubts or focuses attention on facets of partisan choice that matter less in typical processes of preference formation.

Low-Information Voting: Evidence from Instant-Runoff Elections

How do voters make decisions in low-information contests? Although some research has looked at low-information voter decision-making, scant research has focused on data from actual ballots cast in low-information elections. We focus on three 2008 Pierce County (Washington) Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) elections. Using individual-level ballot image data, we evaluate the structure of individual rankings for specific contests to determine whether partisan cues underlying partisan rankings are correlated with choices made in nonpartisan races. This is the first time that individual-level data from real elections has been used to evaluate the role of partisan cues in nonpartisan races. We find that, in partisan contests, voters make avid use of partisan cues in constructing their preference rankings, rank-ordering candidates based on the correspondence between voters’ own partisan preferences and candidates’ reported partisan affiliation. However, in nonpartisan contests where candidates have no explicit partisan affiliation, voters rely on cues other than partisanship to develop complete candidate rankings.

Do they matter in education politics? The influence of political parties and teacher unions on school governance reforms in Spain

This article focusses on the evolution of the school governance model in Spain since the 1980s. In Spain and elsewhere in Europe, the state’s monopoly over education has softened and new forms of educational governance have emerged. This has resulted in the decentralization of decision-making authority to individual schools, municipalities, and regions and a significant increase in school autonomy. We explore from a political science perspective how partisan preferences and teachers unions have decisively shaped the reform trajectory. We show that leftist and center-right governments and different teachers’ unions have promoted different versions of school autonomy in line with their ideological rationales, resulting in a reconfiguration of the school governance model with each change in government.

How Internal Constraints Shape Interest Group Activities: Evidence from Access-Seeking PACs

Interest groups contribute much less to campaigns than legally allowed. Consequently, prevailing theories infer these contributions must yield minimal returns. I argue constraints on PAC fundraising may also explain why interest groups give little. I illuminate one such constraint: access-seeking PACs rely on voluntary donations from affiliated individuals (e.g., employees), and these PACs alienate donors with partisan preferences when giving to the opposite party. First, difference-in-differences analysis of real giving shows donors withhold donations to access-seeking PACs when PACs contribute to out-partisan politicians. Next, an original survey of corporate PAC donors demonstrates they know how their PACs allocate contributions across parties, and replicates the observational study in an experiment. Donors' partisanship thus limits access-seeking PACs' fundraising and influence. This provides a new perspective on why there is little interest group money in elections, and has broad implications for how partisan preferences and other internal constraints shape interest group strategy.

Predicting the ideological orientation during the Spanish 24M elections in Twitter using machine learning

Through the application of machine learning techniques, this paper aims to estimate the importance of messages with ideological load during the elections held in Spain on May 24th, 2015 posted by Twitter’s users, as well as other variables associated with the publication of these types of messages. Our study collected and analysed 24,900 tweets associated to two of the main trending topics’ hashtags (#24M and #Elections2015) used in the election day and build a predictive model to infer the ideological orientation for the messages which made use of these hashtags during Election Day. This approach allows us to classify the ideological orientation of all collected tweets, instead of only tweets that explicitly express their ideological or partisan preferences in the messages. Using the ideological orientation for all tweets predicted by our model, it was possible to identify how messages with a defined ideological load were pushed forward by users with leftist tendencies. We also observed a relationship between these messages and the partisan orientation of those who published them.

Do Brokers Know Their Voters? A Test of Guessability in India

Theories of clientelism broadly depend on the untested assumption that brokers possess fine-grained information on voters’ political preferences prior to elections, and often can monitor their votes. As the first direct test of this assumption in a competitive democracy, I develop a measure, guessability, which measures the ability of local brokers to identify the partisan preferences of voters from their local area. I apply this method to elected village politicians in rural India who often perform brokerage functions. I find that these local leaders perform well at identifying the partisan preferences of co-partisans, but perform no better than a low-information benchmark that captures the level of guessability that outsiders can plausibly achieve with respect to non-core voters. This suggests that an electoral strategy rooted in quid-pro-quo exchange is extremely inefficient in rural India where the clientelism is believed to be feasible, with implications for prominent theories applied to other settings.

POLINKIS BALSUOTI UŽ PARTIJĄ KAIP NAUJAS ELGESIO PER RINKIMUS ANALIZĖS BŪDAS: GALIMYBĖS IR METODOLOGINĖS PROBLEMOS

Šiame straipsnyje analizuojamos iki šiol Lietuvoje nenaudoto pre­ferencijų per rinkimus matavimo įrankio – polinkio balsuoti už partiją (PBP) – atveriamos galimybės ir jį naudojant kylančios metodologinės problemos. Straipsnyje pristatoma rinkėjų pasirinkimo 2016 m. Seimo rin­kimuose veiksnių analizė, tiriant rinkėjų polinkį balsuoti už septynias didžią­sias Lietuvos partijas, išbandomos ir įvertinamos metodologinės galimybės analizuoti „bendrinės“ partijos paramos veiksnius.

Incumbency Effects and the Strength of Party Preferences: Evidence from Multiparty Elections in the United Kingdom

Previous researchers have speculated that incumbency effects are larger when voters have weaker partisan preferences, but evidence for this relationship is surprisingly weak. We offer a fresh look at the question by examining the United Kingdom’s multiparty system. In general, the electoral value of incumbency should depend on the proportion of voters who are nearly indifferent between the parties competing for incumbency; in a multiparty system, that proportion may differ across constituencies depending on which parties are locally competitive. After first showing that UK voters in recent decades have stronger preferences between Conservatives and Labour than between Conservatives and Liberals, we show that incumbency effects are larger in close contests between Conservatives and Liberals than in close contests between Conservatives and Labour. By documenting how partisanship influences incumbency effects, our analysis shows that the comparative study of incumbency effects offers broader insights into el...