Partisan Reasons Research Articles

COVID-19 anti-vaccine misinformation discourse on Twitter: Influential roles of polarization and the 2020 US presidential election

This study investigated the politicization of COVID-19 vaccination on Twitter in the context of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. I analyzed 2,100 English tweets related to COVID-19 antivaccine misinformation from October 28th, 2020, to November 3rd, 2020 (one week before Election Day). Those tweets clustered into 12 topics.The result indicated that conspiracy theories about population control have raised concerns and become prevalent in perpetuating anti-vaccine beliefs. It also reflects the rise of a new trend in anti-vaccine topics. The study highlights the influence of partisan reasoning on vaccination decision-making in the context of a public health crisis caused by COVID-19, and the difficulty in correcting partisan-driven conspiracy theories and misinformation.

The role of political devotion in sharing partisan misinformation and resistance to fact-checking.

Online misinformation is disproportionality created and spread by people with extreme political attitudes, especially among the far-right. There is a debate in the literature about why people spread misinformation and what should be done about it. According to the purely cognitive account, people largely spread misinformation because they are lazy, not biased. According to a motivational account, people are also motivated to believe and spread misinformation for ideological and partisan reasons. To better understand the psychological and neurocognitive processes that underlie misinformation sharing among the far-right, we conducted a cross-cultural experiment with conservatives and far-right partisans in the Unites States and Spain (N = 1,609) and a neuroimaging study with far-right partisans in Spain (N = 36). Far-right partisans in Spain and U.S. Republicans who highly identify with Trump were more likely to share misinformation than center-right voters and other Republicans, especially when the misinformation was related to sacred values (e.g., immigration). Sacred values predicted misinformation sharing above and beyond familiarity, attitude strength, and salience of the issue. Moreover, far-right partisans were unresponsive to fact-checking and accuracy nudges. At a neural level, this group showed increased activity in brain regions implicated in mentalizing and norm compliance in response to posts with sacred values. These results suggest that the two components of political devotion-identity fusion and sacred values-play a key role in misinformation sharing, highlighting the identity-affirming dimension of misinformation sharing. We discuss the need for motivational and identity-based interventions to help curb misinformation for high-risk partisan groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

When Parties Move to the Middle: The Role of Uncertainty

AbstractPolitical parties face a crucial trade-off between electoral and partisan goals: should they put electoral goals first, pursuing the policies they think will win them the most votes in the next election, or should they put partisan goals first, pursuing the policies their members, activists, and most loyal voters prefer? In this paper we argue that main political parties make different choices depending on the information environment they are in. They have strong incentives to follow the median voter when the median voter's position is well known, but when there is more uncertainty they have strong incentives to adopt policies they prefer for partisan reasons, since uncertainty makes party leaders more willing to bet that the party's preferred policies are also vote winners. We develop an empirical analysis of how the main parties on the left and the right in twenty democracies have changed their platforms from election to election since the 1960s.

Do Administrative Procedures Fix Cognitive Biases?

Abstract This article uses survey experiments to assess whether administrative procedures fix cognitive bias. We focus on two procedural requirements: qualitative reason-giving and quantitative cost-benefit analysis (CBA). Both requirements are now firmly entrenched in the U.S. federal regulation-making. Multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, OECD, and EU have encouraged their broad diffusion across many national contexts. Yet CBA, in particular, remains controversial. Supporters of CBA claim it leads to more rational regulation, with Sunstein (2000) asserting that CBA can reduce cognitive biases. By contrast, we argue that procedures should be conceptualized as imperfect substitutes subject to diminishing marginal benefits. To test and illustrate this argument, we examine how each procedure individually and cumulatively modulates gain–loss framing, partisan-motivated reasoning, and scope insensitivity in a nationally representative sample. We find that one or both procedures decreased cognitive bias. CBA was the most helpful against partisan reasoning whereas reason-giving did little. Both procedures seem comparably effective against the other biases, although in each case only one of the two procedures produced reductions distinguishable from zero. We only find substantial synergies between the two procedures with respect to gain–loss framing. For the other biases, the combination of both procedures did not generate significant reductions over and above that achieved by the more effective procedure alone. We hypothesize that procedures will only fix cognitive biases if they disrupt bias-inducing mental processes, and we reconcile this proposition with our findings. We conclude by relating our framework to debates about the design of administrative procedures and describe a research agenda based upon rationality-improving procedures.

The Green Elephants in the Room: Perceived Environmental Harm and Support for Regulation Among Republicans

Previous research identifies a “great paradox” in attitudes toward environmental regulation: some people close to environmental risk nevertheless oppose environmental regulation for partisan reasons. Does this pattern hold in large survey samples? Unexpectedly, we do not find evidence for it. Instead, we find that Republicans who report higher levels of personal environmental harm also report stronger support for environmental regulation. This pattern holds across varied measurement specifications, and it is weaker for Democrats, suggesting that exposure to environmental harm might directly challenge and change partisan opposition to environmental reform. We present a theory and research agenda that accounts for these “green elephants in the room.” Our work, as we will demonstrate, crosses at least three disciplinary boundaries: social psychology, cultural sociology, and political science. A conceptual replication of results is provided in the Appendices S1 and S2.

Polarized imagination: partisanship influences the direction and consequences of counterfactual thinking.

Four studies examine how political partisanship qualifies previously documented regularities in people's counterfactual thinking (n = 1186 Democrats and Republicans). First, whereas prior work finds that people generally prefer to think about how things could have been better instead of worse (i.e. entertain counterfactuals in an upward versus downward direction), studies 1a-2 find that partisans are more likely to generate and endorse counterfactuals in whichever direction best aligns with their political views. Second, previous research finds that the closer someone comes to causing a negative event, the more blame that person receives; study 3 finds that this effect is more pronounced among partisans who oppose (versus support) a leader who 'almost' caused a negative event. Thus, partisan reasoning may influence which alternatives to reality people will find most plausible, will be most likely to imagine spontaneously, and will view as sufficient grounds for blame. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

Presidential Influence and Public Opinion During Crises: The Case of COVID-19 in Brazil

Abstract Can presidential messages influence public opinion? The scholarship shows that common features in developed democracies such as fragmented audiences and partisan reasoning tend to limit the persuasive effects of the bully pulpit. In this article, we argue that the effectiveness of the presidential rhetoric is context dependent. Presidents will be the most likely to persuade public opinion when they seek to break consensus by using messages that activate defection among their supporters. To examine this framework, we focus on the setting of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, where the outbreak was initially a valence issue, but quickly it became a divisive matter among the public. We use a survey experiment conducted days before the President Bolsonaro’s national televised address to show that cueing subjects with one of his earlier denialist remarks about the outbreak polarized opinions. We then use Bayesian change-point models to demonstrate how his major televised speeches affected daily trends in online searches related to the pandemic during the first and the most crucial weeks of the outbreak. The findings shed light on the circumstances in which presidential influence can not only be most powerful, but also most harmful.

Partisan reasoning in a high stakes environment: Assessing partisan informational gaps on COVID-19

Using a survey conducted in July 2020, we establish a divide in the news sources partisans prefer for information about the COVID-19 pandemic and observe partisan disagreements in beliefs about the virus. These divides persist when respondents face financial costs for incorrectly answering questions. This supports a view in which the informational divisions revealed in surveys on COVID-19 are genuine differences of opinion, not artifacts of insincere cheerleading. The implication is that efforts to correct misinformation about the virus should focus on changing sincere beliefs while also accounting for information search preferences that impede exposure to correctives among those holding misinformed views.

COVID-19 through a cultural lens

COVID-19 through a cultural lens

Does Policy Influence Hollow Out Public Managers’ Political Neutrality?

Consequences of public officials’ policy influence have been at the center of debates on political–administrative relations. Based on a survey of public managers in Swedish local government ( N = 1,430), this study examines whether policy politics hollows out political neutrality. The analysis shows that although managers are highly involved in policy politics, attitudinal support for the neutrality principle is strong. The enquiry into behavioral intentions shows more variation. In relation to a set of dilemmas, most managers would defend neutral competence, but significant minorities would also act for more partisan reasons. However, we find no empirical evidence that policy influence undermines political neutrality.

Authors’ Response

Authors’ Response

Does partisanship promote anti-democratic impulses? Evidence from a survey experiment

ABSTRACT Emerging research argues that liberal democracy, including American democracy, is showing evidence of erosion and is in retreat around the world. Our research provides a counterbalance to concerns for American democratic decline by exploring the willingness of Americans to grant the president more authority for partisan reasons. We draw from a survey experiment administered to 1000 Americans embedded within the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Elections Survey (CCES). This experiment evaluates the influence of co-partisanship on support for undemocratic actions to empower presidents. We find that on average, respondents oppose a series of intensifying actions, across all partisan groupings and treatment conditions. We also find that co-partisanship with the president affects Democratic responses, but not those of Republicans. Democrats are less opposed to empowering President Obama relative to President Trump. But, overall, Republicans are less opposed to undemocratic acts than Democrats across all conditions. We interpret these results as relatively good news for American democracy. Partisan polarization may drive relative differences in support for expanding presidential power, but overall support for democracy, separation of powers, and institutional checks and balances remain high.

A Republic, If the Courts Can Keep It?

This contribution to a conference celebrating Andrew Coan’s Rationing the Constitution: How Judicial Capacity Shapes Supreme Court Decision-Making (Harvard Univ. Press, 2019) makes three primary points. First, I explain why the Supreme Court’s flawed reasoning in INS v. Chadha supports Coan’s judicial capacity theory of Supreme Court decision making. Second, I show why judicial capacity concerns do not support the Supreme Court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause to treat the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering as a nonjusticiable political question. The Court could and should have announced a bright line rule against any partisan calculation in districting decision making, and let lower courts adjudicate the pure question of fact that such a rule would raise. Recent scholarship is converging in this direction. The weakness in Justice Kagan’s dissent lay in conceding any place for partisan calculation in districting. Predominant purpose tests, pulled across from racial affirmative action cases, do not fit partisan gerrymandering. Even the Court’s staunchest opponents of racial affirmative action concede that the goals of that action may be laudable; those opponents just contend that weightier moral reasons call for race neutrality in almost all circumstances. No one on the Court uses “laudable” to describe the goals of partisan gerrymandering. Partisan reasons are not redeemed by being low impact. Partisan reasons should have no impact on governing actions. Third, I argue that the Court should have identified a nonjusticiable political question not in Rucho, but, as other recent scholarship has suggested, in Shelby County v. Holder. Congress’s provision for preclearance in the Voting Rights Act serves not only to uphold the promises of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, but also to fulfill the national government’s constitutional duty to guarantee every state in the Union a republican form of government. The Court has long held that it will not second guess the judgment of the elected branches about what republican form requires.

Contestations of Stakeholder Participation in University Governance: A Case of a Historically Black University

Institutional structures of governance across universities are under strain on how to respond to the competing demands of higher education. As a result, the leadership and governance of universities is becoming more complex than never before. This is emerging out of the popular discourses of inclusion and exclusion of certain categories of student and staff in critical key committees of the university governing council. In the post 1994 South African higher education dispensation, university governing councils continue to struggle to include university students and certain categories of university staff for instance unionized staff in key governance structures of the universities. Several partisan reasons have been given for their deliberate exclusion. This continues to cause a lot of stockholder animosity and institutional climates of retribution between university leadership and these categories of university staff. This paper argues that effective governance practice in such institutional environments is linked to sufficient formulas of representation in the university governing councils. The paper makes use of the concept of culture within a micro-political framework to generate modes of good governance within such stakeholder institutional environments. The conceptual paper ends with implications for effective governance in stakeholder governed university environments.

Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability

Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability

Supreme Court Reform: Desirable -- And Constitutionally Required

As decisions by — and appointments to — the Supreme Court have become increasingly divisive, many observers have renewed calls for reform. For example, we could replace lifetime tenure with non-renewable terms of 18 years, such that one term ends every two years. That way, less would be at stake with each nomination, justices could not time their retirements for partisan reasons, and appointments would be divided more evenly between Democratic and Republican presidents. Or we could establish a non-partisan, judicial nominating commission. With the legitimacy of the Court at stake, reform to depoliticize the Court seems essential. And whichever reform is promoted, it is generally assumed that implementation would require a constitutional amendment, legislation, or a change in Senate rules. But the conventional wisdom is wrong. There is a sound argument to be made that Supreme Court reform is constitutionally required. In particular, principles of due process and the framers’ original intent provide good reason to think that neither a conservative nor liberal Court majority should be able to impose its views on the country.

Are Corporations People? Book Review of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights

This is a review of UCLA Law Professor Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. Among its virtues, the book explains the influence of colonial charters on American constitutional development, turns on its head the conventional wisdom about how “corporate personhood” relates to the granting of constitutional rights to corporations, and explains why the most important expansion of corporate rights was a product of liberal, not conservative, supreme court justices. The review criticizes the book, on the other hand, for neglecting early religious freedom cases involving corporations, conflating free market arguments with pro-corporation ones, neglecting the importance of the incorporation doctrine in establishing corporate rights, wildly overstating the importance of the Powell memo, failing to reckon with the partisan reasons Democrats and liberals support campaign finance reform, and more generally accepting dubious progressive shibboleths such as the “race to the bottom” as valid.

Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability. By Kevin Arceneaux and Ryan J. Vander Wielen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 260p. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability. By Kevin Arceneaux and Ryan J. Vander Wielen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 260p. 34.99 paper. - Volume 17 Issue 1

Response to Justin Buchler’s review of Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability

Response to Justin Buchler’s review of <i>Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability</i>

The Partisan and Policy Motivations of Political Donors Seeking Surrogate Representation in House Elections

Non-constituent donors constitute an increasingly important fundraising base for members of the U.S. House. These donors are theorized to be seeking “surrogate representation” by buying additional representation rather than relying solely upon representation provided by their own House members. However, precisely why they contribute in this way remains unclear. Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES) 2008–2014 in a series of logistic models, I investigate whether self-reported donors make contributions to House races outside of their home states for policy or partisan reasons. I uncover evidence that surrogate seekers make their out-of-state contributions to recover partisan representation and to gain additional partisan and policy representation. Further, conservative issue stances significantly increase the likelihood of out-of-state giving more so than liberal stances suggesting conservative donors have less difficulty identifying surrogate representatives. Taken together, the results suggest surrogate seekers are strategic and politically sophisticated with respect to their giving choices and motivations.