Party Labels Research Articles

Partisans Hear, but They Don’t Listen: Testing the Limits of Partisanship in Risky Decision Making

Political partisanship stems from the fundamental process of categorizing one’s social world and influences important behavioral outcomes, such information processing. The present study examines the role of political partisanship in risky decision making as assessed with the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a common ecologically valid behavioral task. Participants ( N = 881) were randomly assigned to modified IGT conditions: one in which the advantageous card decks were labeled with the same political affiliation as the participant and one in which the advantageous card decks were labeled with the opposite political affiliation. We demonstrate that partisan heuristics can enhance or inhibit good decision making. We found partisan heuristics enhanced decision making if a partisans’ identity was congruent with clearly advantageous options. However, when the options are more ambiguous, partisan bias interferes with partisans’ ability to make advantageous decisions. Partisan bias has limits though, as partisans reject unambiguously bad options, even if those options carry their party label.

Parties in Russia: party system nationalisation in dominant party systems

ABSTRACT Party system nationalisation is regarded as a process that signifies democratic and party system development. This article extends understanding on the topic by studying the phenomenon in dominant party systems. Insofar as electoral autocracies have become the most common type of authoritarian regimes, the evolution of party system nationalisation in electoral autocracies is an important and promising field worthy of empirical study. Contrary to existing research, party system nationalisation in dominant party systems is not necessarily positively correlated with democratisation. Examining the interaction between the crystallisation of a dominant party and party system nationalisation, this article demonstrates that the former can increase the latter at the beginning of the dominant party's growth. Indeed, the dominant party can elevate the importance and operation of party labels, but not always coinciding with democratisation.

Technology Threats to Employment, Issues, and Candidate and Party Preferences in the United States

Research indicates that susceptibility to having one’s job replaced by technology is associated with candidate and party preferences in affluent democracies, but there is little understanding of why. We investigate whether workers exposed to technology are more supportive of candidates and parties that prioritize the economy, unemployment, and welfare state programs, currently or with historical reputations for doing so. In the United States which we examine here, however, technology threatening jobs has not been politically salient and partisan attachments are strong, which could limit issue-based conversions in candidate preferences. To examine these possibilities, we use survey experiments randomizing exposure to information about the individual-level threat of losing one’s job to technology and hypothetical candidate issue priorities in experiments with and without party labels. We find that there are some differences in “issue premiums” among high-exposure individuals in the party labels experiment, but whether individuals are made aware of their exposure does not explain any issue-based variation in candidate preferences. We also find that when made aware of their exposure to technology, high- and low-exposure Republicans and low-exposure independents become slightly more supportive of Republican candidates.

Do nonpartisan ballots racialize candidate evaluations? Evidence from “Who Said What?” experiments

At last count, U.S. voters were responsible for directly electing more than 510,000 public officials. Few of these contests feature lively campaigns or attract substantial media attention, often leaving the average voter to make decisions with limited information. We argue that the cognitive strategies voters use to make decisions in these low-information contests depend in part on the informational cues printed on their ballot—in particular, the presence or absence of partisan labels. Using two “Who Said What?” experiments, we show that voters engage in social categorization—and do so on the basis of race and ethnicity when candidates differ in their demographic background. We also find, however, that the availability of party labels shapes the degree to which voters categorize candidates based on their race and ethnicity. A central implication of our results is that efforts to increase minority representation should look beyond electoral institutions—such as district versus at-large elections—to the information printed on the ballot itself.

With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War by Nathan P. Kalmoe

Reviewed by: With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War by Nathan P. Kalmoe Adam I. P. Smith (bio) With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War. By Nathan P. Kalmoe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 260. Cloth, 99.99; paper, $29.99.) For a few decades, in the middle of the twentieth century, the United States had both strong two-party competition and a widespread acceptance by both parties of the legitimacy of the other. Before and after that brief interlude, the country has been an outlier among long-standing democracies in lacking public tolerance of partisan competition as valid. It was at the high point of party legitimacy, post–World War II, that Richard Hofstadter wrote The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (1969), which presents the early republic as one in which Americans threw off the immature fear of faction and embraced the healthy interchange between party rivals, without violence or (much) resentment. The indisputable premise of With Ballots and Bullets, in contrast, is that partisan competition can be violently consequential. As Nathan P. Kalmoe, a political scientist, writes, when a party loses power, especially in a fraught, highly polarized nation, "the losing party's leaders determine a country's fate." Such leaders "decide whether a democracy and its citizens will live or die based on what they say about the legitimacy of the outcome and how their followers should respond" (xxiii). If that is painfully true today, it was perhaps even more so after Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election. Kalmoe's core claim is that what followed was "ultimately a partisan civil war" (xxiv). He argues that "Democratic partisanship guided the rebellion and reduced willingness to defend the nation, even as Republican partisanship fueled democratic resolve to fight in battlefields and at the ballot box" (9). Kalmoe raises important questions about what partisanship really is. As he rightly argues, partisanship often hides its face; indeed, the strategic use of "antiparty" rhetoric by partisans was especially characteristic of this period precisely because the legitimacy of a party system had not been properly established (contrary to Hofstadter's argument). A republican ideal of nonpartisanship retained enormous ideological power, which was why the Confederacy saw its apparent lack of a party system as a strength. [End Page 576] Kalmoe is surely right that partisanship framed and drove sectional conflict—or at least that sectional interests were channeled through parties. No one would dispute that the Civil War left a powerful legacy of partisan division in the North. Although his data showing the correlation between the Republican vote in the Gilded Age and the number of Grand Army of the Republic posts will not surprise most historians, it is valuable to see the evidence laid out so clearly. The heart of Kalmoe's argument concerns the wartime North, which he sees as bifurcated between a Republican Party that supported the war and a Democratic Party that—like its southern wing—did not. Using statistical studies of election results and content analysis of a sample of newspapers, he traces the dynamic but resilient partisanship during the war years, showing how Democrats moved toward an ever more hard-line opposition to the war, driven by fanatical hatred of conscription, the suspension of habeas corpus, and, of course, emancipation. Kalmoe does not dwell on the multiplicity of party labels and the frequency with which intraparty factional candidates competed in wartime elections, but in broad outline the notion that the war consolidated the Democratic and the anti-Democratic vote is convincing. That does not indicate a complete lack of fluidity in the electorate; in my view, the lengths that Republicans had to go to remake and rebrand their party (Lincoln ran in 1864 as a candidate of the "National Union" Party) tell us something important about how they viewed politics in wartime. But Kalmoe's argument that the Republican coalition of 1860 essentially held together, with some additions, in 1864, is surely right. Nonetheless, I think he overstates the extent to which the northern Democratic electorate was en masse opposed to the war. "The...

Beyond Partisanship: Outperforming the Party Label with Local Roots in Congressional Elections

While factors like partisanship are increasingly decisive in congressional elections, they do not fully explain variation in constituency support between similarly situated incumbents. I argue that legislators’ reelection success is also influenced by the depth of their local, pre-Congress roots in the district they represent. I theorize that this local connection offers practical advantages to incumbents, such as built-in grassroots political infrastructure in their districts. Shared local identity also allows legislators to relate to their voters on a dimension that is uniquely suited to cross-cut partisanship and qualify them to represent their particular constituents. Therefore, I argue that local roots outperform their district’s partisan expectations – and more specifically, their party’s presidential nominees. Using an original dataset of nearly 3,000 House incumbents from 2002 to 2018 and novel measures of their preexisting local roots in their districts, I find that deeply rooted incumbents outperform their party’s presidential nominees in their districts by an average of about five additional points, even after controlling for partisanship and other crucial factors. I also find that this impact grows as the depth of local roots among a district’s voters increases. These results indicate that even in an era of congressional politics largely defined by partisanship and presidential loyalty, dyadic district connections like local ties can break through and affect legislators’ standing among their constituents.

A theory on party discipline and vote switching by legislators

We develop a new theory of vote switching by legislators that defect from party line voting. In our model, ideological candidates select their party label and, once elected, vote in parliament. Political parties select their policy platform as to maximize votes while preserving their candidates’ loyalty. We find that legislators that defect from party line voting arise within the majority party. Besides, the more legislators care about their ideology and the less about their own reputation, the more they defect from party line voting. Interestingly, when a party has larger electoral advantage and its candidates sufficiently care about their reputation, such a party can propose a more polarized policy to avoid party defectors. Our model suggests that polarization incentivizes loyalty. Finally, we discuss the robustness of our results in multi-party systems and multi-constituency systems.

After Citizens United: How outside spending shapes American democracy

We study the political consequences of lifting restrictions on the funding of groups engaging in outside spending (e.g., independent political advertising) in elections. Theoretically, we assume that outside spending changes the salience of candidate-specific attributes relative to their party labels. Empirically, we employ a difference-in-differences design that exploits the removal of state-level restrictions on the funding of outside spending mandated by the federal-level rulings in both Citizens United and SpeechNow.org v. FEC. We find strong evidence that these regulatory changes increase the electoral success of Republican candidates, thereby leading to more ideologically conservative legislatures. We find no effect on polarization. Consistent with our theory, the size of our estimated effects depends on the power of labor unions and the alignment of business interests with the Republican party.

Ambitious Women: Gender and Voter Perceptions of Candidate Ambition

Are ambitious women punished in politics? Building on literature from negotiation, we argue that women candidates who are perceived to be ambitious are more likely to face social backlash. We first explore what the term ‘ambitious’ means to voters, developing and testing a new multidimensional concept of perceived ambition, from desire to run for higher office to scope of agenda. We then test the link between these ‘ambitious’ traits and voter support for candidates using five conjoint experiments in two countries, the U.S. and the U.K. Our results show that while ambitious women are not penalized overall, the aggregate results hide differences in taste for ambitious women across parties. We find that in the U.S. left-wing voters are more likely to support women with progressive ambition than right-wing voters (difference of 7% points), while in the U.K. parties are not as divided. Our results suggest that ambitious women candidates in the U.S. face bias particularly in the context of non-partisan races (like primaries and local elections), when voters cannot rely on party labels to make decisions.

Two faces of party system stability: Programmatic change and party replacement

Despite extensive research on party system stability, the concept is often reduced to the survival of existing parties. This article argues for introducing programmatic stability as a separate dimension and shows how the combination of party replacement and programmatic instability shapes patterns of party competition. Based on their interaction, the article distinguishes four ideal types: stable systems, systems with empty party labels, systems with ephemeral parties, and general instability. The empirical analysis relies on media data and proposes a new measure of programmatic stability to study its interaction with party replacement in fifteen European countries during the period of the economic crisis. As the article shows, the two dimensions shape the transformation of party systems in northwestern, southern, and eastern Europe. Relying on multidimensional scaling, the article analyzes in detail the cases of the United Kingdom, Romania, Ireland, and Latvia to showcase party competition under different conditions of systemic instability.

Executive Turnover and the Investigation of Former Leaders in New Democracies

What prompts governments in new democracies to investigate elected leaders once they leave office? Theorizing about democratic regimes suggests that leadership turnover by constitutional means should generate few such cases: democratic entry to and exit from office are thought to prompt benign treatment from successor administrations. Yet over a third of democratically elected presidents and prime ministers who left office between 1970 and 2011 have faced investigations for malfeasance. This study analyzes the conditions that generate such cases. We find that the odds of investigation rise when there is strong evidence of former leaders’ personal culpability; but also when the executive regime is presidential, and the judiciary lacks independence from other branches. Partisanship has a more limited impact: co-partisanship with the incumbent reduces the odds of investigation for ex-prime ministers, but sharing a party label with an incumbent offers no such protection to a former president.

Still dividing the electorate? Brexit and voter evaluation of candidates

ABSTRACT Voters use various cues to make their decision. We examine the impact of the cue of candidate position on Brexit. Brexit is still on the agenda and we explore how this topic continues to divide the electorate. We test this by assessing the general preference of candidates among respondents in a series of surveys providing variation in the information regarding candidates’ positions on Brexit and party identification. In contrast to existing literature, we find strong evidence that candidates can utilise either their own previous voting behaviour or that of their opponent to provide an electoral advantage. Leave supporting candidates are highly rated by leave voters and poorly rated by remain voters, and vice versa for remain candidates, although it is dependent on the party label of the candidate. The issue of Brexit has a strong impact, but partisanship is mostly of equal importance for the respondents.

What’s in a name? Gauging the effect of labels on third party vote shares

ABSTRACT In this paper we examine an understudied question: Does the inclusion of a party label boost the vote shares of third party candidates? For years, third parties in Tennessee have contended that the high barrier to appear on the ballot with a label is a decided disadvantage for their candidates. Our empirical analysis, however, tells a different story. Various federal court decisions have allowed third party candidates in Tennessee to appear on the ballot with their respective party label in the 2000, 2012, and 2014 election cycles. This fact creates a ready-made natural experiment whereby the electoral fortunes of third party candidates with a label can be compared to those running without a label. Using data from 1992 through 2016 we test whether the inclusion of a label for third party candidates enhances their vote share. The results of our analysis make it clear that in a dominant two-party system it makes no difference, in terms of electoral viability, whether or not a third party candidate appears on the ballot with a party label.

Pairwise concurrence in cyclically symmetric quantum states

We provide an initial characterization of pairwise concurrence in quantum states which are invariant under cyclic permutations of party labeling. We prove that maximal entanglement can be entirely described by adjacent pairs, then give explicit descriptions of those states in specific subsets of 4 and 5 qubit states - X states. We also construct a monogamy bound on shared concurrences in the same subsets in 4 and 5 qubits, finding that above non-maximal entanglement thresholds, no other entanglements are possible.

The attractiveness of local and national list labels: the role of socio-economic inequalities on the success of electoral lists

ABSTRACT According to the nationalisation hypothesis, it is sometimes argued that electoral lists competing at local elections under a national party label are more likely to win. Yet, in many countries, local lists are still much present. This article seeks to assess the attractiveness of local and national list labels at local elections. Following Rokkan’s hypothesis of the nationalisation of local politics, we test the role of socio-economic inequality on the success of electoral lists across local polities. Based on an original dataset distinguishing the labels of 1.012 electoral lists – be they local, mixed or national – in the 262 Walloon municipalities in Belgium, the multilevel regression demonstrates that local and mixed labels present a significant electoral advantage vis-à-vis national party labels. However, the article shows that this electoral gain decreases as economic inequalities increase: national labels, especially left-wing parties, attract more voters as inequalities rise.

Enemy or Ally? Elites, Base Relations, and Partisanship in America

Abstract A wealth of research demonstrates that partisans dismiss information that challenges their attitudes toward political elites, especially when citizens are aware of these elites’ party membership. Relatively little is known, however, about the conditions under which partisans will adjust their support for such elites. Drawing upon research on the group-foundations of partisanship, I hypothesize that, issues and policy stances aside, partisans’ support for, and willingness to compromise with, a given elite is contingent upon how well the elite relates to the groups associated with his or her party (i.e., the party’s “base”). In short, partisans should be inclined to exhibit greater political support for, and greater willingness to compromise with, the enemy of their socio-political enemies, but less support for the enemy of their socio-political allies. Findings from survey experiments and observational analyses involving real-world executives offer strong empirical support for these contentions. Thus, while acknowledging the powerful effects of cues involving elites’ party labels, this study reveals that “base relations” cues can potentially counteract the motivated reasoning processes that arise from partisans’ attentiveness to party cues alone. Such effects should be observed, I argue, precisely because base relations cue an elite’s fidelity to the very groups that endow the party label with its symbolic meaning. Therefore, more broadly, this study advances our understanding of polarization by demonstrating an important way in which politically aligned social groups underpin American partisanship and public opinion.

Language and Political Psychology: Can Grammar Influence Electability?

Daily, the public is plied with political messages from various sources and millions are invested in campaign ads each election year. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the influence of linguistic details in such messages on attitudes about political candidates, especially within the context of Malaysia. The present study is grounded within the structure of framing and grammar, and suggests that grammar can influence attitudes towards a candidate’s electability. The study involved 387 male and female Malaysian university students (19- to 25-year-olds) of various ethnicities. The researcher designed two comprehensive questionnaires based on Fausey and Matlock’s (2011) work. Participants were randomly assigned Version A ( n =192) or Version B ( n =195) of the questionnaire. Both versions were about the conduct of Members of Parliament, unnamed and without party labels, to avoid bias about actual politicians. The conduct or actions were of negative and positive valence; Version A was framed using the imperfective form [‘was verb + ing ’] and employed the modal verb ‘must’, whereas Version B was framed using the perfective form [‘verb + ed ’] and employed the modal verb ‘have to’. Primarily, results revealed that imperfective descriptions of negative actions resulted in negative responses to the re-election of a candidate. However, the participants were largely insensitive to grammatical alteration when judging a candidate’s past positive actions. The results on modality demonstrated a preference for the modal verb ‘must’ which carries more “emotional value” than ‘have to’. The present study is novel in that it covers the dimension of modality (which has never been explored in previous studies) and that to date, there is no available research similar to it in the Malaysian context.

Candidate nomination rules and party leader strategies

Parliamentary party leaders have an electoral incentive to protect the informational value of their party's label by promoting unity, but recent research has shown that parties can also benefit electorally from appealing broadly through a wide distribution of candidate positions on political issues. This article suggests that party leaders with formal candidate nomination powers balance these incentives by nominating new candidates who are more congruent with the party when the distribution of issue positions among the senior candidates is wide, and, conversely, by nominating new candidates who are more divergent from the party when the senior candidate position distribution is narrow. These possibilities are tested with candidate survey data from six parliamentary democracies, and the results show that new party leader nominations are indeed conditional on the senior candidate distribution, but only on issues that are salient to the party’s electoral brand.

Short-Term Pain for Long-Term Gain: The Logic of Legislative Party Switching in the Contemporary American South

One of the most important career decisions for a legislator is the decision to switch parties, and it raises a theoretical puzzle: it carries significant risk, yet sometimes legislators do change partisan affiliation. We elucidate this puzzle with the first-ever systematic comparison of the entire careers of state legislative switchers and non-switchers in the American South, where the high prevalence of party switching coincided with rapid realignment toward the Republican Party. Our analysis is the first to evaluate all post-switch career decisions (retiring, running for reelection, running for higher office) simultaneously, and it is the broadest in its scope with two full decades of career data. We demonstrate that converts to the Grand Old Party (GOP) pay a reelection cost. However, they are less likely to retire than Democratic non-switchers and more likely to seek higher office. This latter finding is especially strong during the earlier part of our study—when the Republican bench in the South was not as deep and competition for the party label was not as intense. Our findings suggest that political ambition motivates legislators to trade short-term electoral costs for a more promising long-term electoral career with the ascendant party.

Show Your Flag or Be Everyone's Friend?: The Effects of District Magnitude on Vote-Securing Strategies

In this paper, we argue that a difference in district magnitude—the number of seats per district—causes variation in electoral competition. We show that in the Single-Member District with Plurality voting (SMDP) system, voters may cast their ballots using the candidate’s “visual cues”—this is particularly notable when voters cannot rely on party labels. We quantify the candidate’s smile in a replicable form by using automated facial recognition technology. Using data from local assembly elections in an urban area in Japan, we showed how a candidate’s smile, the proxy of the candidate’s visual, is effective in gathering floating votes in SMDP, but it does not increase the vote share in Multi-Member Districts with Single Non-Transferable Voting (MMDs/SNTV) system.