The Paradox of the Politically-Sophisticated Partisan: The French Case

The erosion of partisan ties observed in many advanced industrialised democracies has been attributed to a cluster of factors associated with societal modernisation. This article considers the impact of one of these explanatory factors, the political sophistication of the electorate, in the case of France. Specifically, it tests the proposition that a more highly-educated and better-informed electorate will be less partisan. Its findings challenge a number of the assumptions behind the ‘independent’ voter thesis. The evidence points to the fact that it is lower rather than higher cognitive mobilisation that is associated with apartisanship. More politically-sophisticated voters, young and old alike, tend to have stronger party attachment and to rely on this rather than on complex evaluations of issues and policy to guide their voting decision.     

Partisan Influence on Immigration: The Case of Norway

Do governments decide the size of immigration? This article analyses partisan impact on refugee immigration to Norway. The first part maps party positions on refugee immigration and demonstrates that the views of Norwegian parties are far from consensual. The second part tests whether the number of refugees admitted has been affected by changes of government by way of a panel analysis covering the period 1985–2005 and 143 sending countries. Controlling for other determinants of immigration both in receiving and sending countries, the analysis suggests that that the number of refugees admitted to Norway has been significantly lower during Conservative rule. Among parties with government experience, the Conservative Party also has adopted the most restrictive stand in its manifestoes. No significant differences between Labour Party and centre governments were found, even though the centre parties express more liberal preferences.     

Partisan Differences in Swedish Macroeconomic Policy

The purpose of this paper is to trace partisan differencesamong Swedish governments during the period 1958-2000. According tothe Partisan Theory of macroeconomic policy left-wing governmentsare relatively more concerned with the performance of the realside of the economy (real output and unemployment) as compared toright-wing governments, that place a higher weight on the nominalvariables (inflation). Left-wing governments would therefore pursue moreexpansionary aggregate demand policy, and thereby be willingto risk a higher inflation, in order to improve real economicperformance. In this paper we apply the model developed in Hibbs (1994) onSwedish data. Our empirical results support the partisan theory,showing that, ceteris paribus, aggregate demand policy under left-winggovernments is relatively more expansionary than under right-wing governments, even if the expansionary policysometimes leads to higher inflation.     

Individual Differences in Group Loyalty Predict Partisan Strength

The strength of an individual’s identification with their political party is a powerful predictor of their engagement with politics, voting behavior, and polarization. Partisanship is often characterized as primarily a social identity, rather than an expression of instrumental goals. Yet, it is unclear why some people develop strong partisan attachments while others do not. I argue that the moral foundation of Loyalty, which represents an individual difference in the tendency to hold strong group attachments, facilitates stronger partisan identification. Across two samples, including a national panel and a convenience sample, as well as multiple measures of the moral foundations, I demonstrate that the Loyalty foundation is a robust predictor of partisan strength. Moreover, I show that these effects cannot be explained by patriotism, ideological extremity, or directional effects on partisanship. Overall, the results provide further evidence for partisanship as a social identity, as well as insight into the sources of partisan strength.     

Helping the Homeless: The Role of Empathy,Race and Deservingness in Motivating Policy Support and Charitable Giving

Political Behavior - What will motivate citizens to support efforts to help those in need? Charitable organizations seeking support for their cause will often use the story of a specific individual...     

Partisan Differences in Opinionated News Perceptions: A Test of the Hostile Media Effect

The proliferation of opinion and overt partisanship in cable news raises questions about how audiences perceive this content. Of particular interest is whether audiences effectively perceive bias in opinionated news programs, and the extent to which there are partisan differences in these perceptions. Results from a series of three online experiments produce evidence for a relative hostile media phenomenon in the context of opinionated news. Although, overall, audiences perceive more story and host bias in opinionated news than in non-opinionated news, these perceptions—particularly perceptions of the host—vary as a function of partisan agreement with the news content. Specifically, issue partisans appear to have a “bias against bias,” whereby they perceive less bias in opinionated news with which they are predisposed to agree than non-partisans and especially partisans on the other side of the issue.     

The Limits of Partisan Loyalty

Political Behavior - While partisan cues tend to dominate political choice, prior work shows that competing information can rival the effects of partisanship if it relates to salient political...     

Partisan Differences in Economic Outcomes and Corresponding Voting Behavior: Evidence from the U.S.

The present empirical work examines the differences ineconomic outcomes delivered by partisan governments, and theway in which voters take this into account. Autoregressivemodels of output growth, unemployment and inflation, augmentedwith political variables; and probit binary choice models ofvoting decisions, incorporating expectations about inflationand unemployment, are estimated for U.S. post-war data. Theanalysis confirms that partisan differences in economic outcomes are actually observed in the data. U.S. unemployment rate exhibits adistinct partisan cycle, behavior of output growth andinflation rate partly supports the partisan differenceshypothesis. Thus suggesting that each party can be``instrumental'' in solving particular economic problems. Inline with this logic, U.S. voters seem to believe in theasymmetric abilities of parties to fight inflation andunemployment. Most interesting empirical findings includeevidence that U.S. citizens tend to vote for the left party(Democrats) when high unemployment is expected, and for theright party (Republicans) when high inflation is expected.This relation is especially robust for Presidential elections.There is also evidence pointing to the presence of electoralinertia and absence of ``midterm'' electoral cycle in the U.S.     

The Effect of Media on Charitable Giving and Volunteering: Evidence from the “Give Five” Campaign

Fundraising campaigns advertised via mass media are common. To what extent such campaigns affect charitable behavior is mostly unknown, however. Using giving and volunteering surveys conducted biennially from 1988 to 1996, I investigate the effect of a national fundraising campaign, “Give Five,” on charitable giving and volunteering patterns. The widely advertised Give Five campaign was aimed to encourage people to give 5 percent of their income and volunteer 5 hours a week. After controlling for selection into being informed about the Give Five, I find that people who were informed about the campaign increased their weekly volunteering activity on average by almost half an hour, but their giving behavior was not significantly affected. I discuss the policy implications associated with this result and argue that although the Give Five campaign did not achieve its goal, its impact on volunteering was considerable. © 2012 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Gender Differences in Agency Head Salaries: The Case of Public Educaton

This study demonstrates a quantitative approach to assessing gender discrimination in public salaries at the individual level. Using data from more than 1,000 school districts in Texas over a period of four years, the results show that gender differences in superintendents' salaries are subtle rather than systematic. Female superintendents who replace male superintendents receive lower compensation. Local district wealth also interacts with gender to affect salaries.     

Perceptions of Partisan Ideologies: The Effect of Coalition Participation

Recent scholarship in comparative political behavior has begun to address how voters in coalitional systems manage the complexity of those environments. We contribute to this emerging literature by asking how voters update their perceptions of the policy positions of political parties that participate in coalition cabinets. In contrast to previous work on the sources of voter perceptions of party ideology in parliamentary systems, which has asked how voters respond to changes in party manifestos (i.e., promises), we argue that in updating their perceptions, voters will give more weight to observable actions than to promises. Further, coalition participation is an easily observed party action that voters use as a heuristic to infer the direction of policy change in the absence of detailed information about parties’ legislative records. Specifically, we propose that all voters should perceive parties in coalition cabinets as more ideologically similar, but that this tendency will be muted for more politically interested voters (who have greater access to countervailing messages from parties). Using an individual‐level data set constructed from 54 electoral surveys in 18 European countries, we find robust support for these propositions.     

The Role of Media Distrust in Partisan Voting

As an institution, the American news media have become highly unpopular in recent decades. Yet, we do not thoroughly understand the consequences of this unpopularity for mass political behavior. While several existing studies find that media trust moderates media effects, they do not examine the consequences of this for voting. This paper explores those consequences by analyzing voting behavior in the 2004 presidential election. It finds, consistent with most theories of persuasion and with studies of media effects in other contexts, that media distrust leads voters to discount campaign news and increasingly rely on their partisan predispositions as cues. This suggests that increasing aggregate levels of media distrust are an important source of greater partisan voting.     

'Beyond Left and Right': The New Partisan Politics of Welfare

The 'new politics of the welfare state,' the term coined by Pierson (1996) to differentiate between the popular politics of welfare expansion and the unpopular politics of retrenchment, emphasizes a number of factors that distinguish countries' capacities to pursue contentious measures and avoid electoral blame. Policy structures, vested interests, and institutions play a prominent role in accounting for cross-national differences in leaders' abilities to diffuse responsibility for divisive initiatives. One important omission from the 'new politics' literature, however, is a discussion of partisan politics. 'Old' conceptualizations of the political right and left are implicitly taken as constants despite radical changes in the governing agenda of many leftist parties over the last decade. Responding to this oversight, Castles (1998) has recently probed the role of parties with respect to aggregate government expenditures, only to concludethat parties do not matter under 'conditions of constraint.' This article contends that parties are relevant to the 'new politics' and that, under specified institutional conditions, their impact is counterintuitive. In some notable cases the left has had more effect inbruising the welfare state than the right. One explanation for these cross-cutting tendencies is that parties not only provide a principal source of political agency, they also serve as strategies, thereby conditioning opportunities for political leadership. By extension, they need to be situatedwithin the 'new politics' constellation of blame-avoidance instruments.     

The Politics of Beauty: The Effects of Partisan Bias on Physical Attractiveness

Does politics cause people to be perceived as more or less attractive? As a type of social identity, party identifiers often exhibit in-group bias, positively evaluating members of their own party and, especially under conditions of competition, negatively evaluating out-party members. The current experiment tests whether political in-party and out-party status affects perceptions of the physical attractiveness of target persons. In a nationally representative internet sample of U.S. adults during the 2012 presidential election, we presented participants with photos of individuals and varied information about their presidential candidate preference. Results indicate that partisans, regardless of gender, rate target individuals as less attractive if they hold a dissimilar candidate preference. Female partisans, however, were more likely to rate target persons as more physically attractive when they held a similar candidate preference whereas no such effect was found for male partisans.     

The Partisan Usage of Parliamentary Salaries: Informal Party Practices Compared

It is widely acknowledged that political parties in European democracies have become increasingly dependent on state resources, most notably direct state funding. Yet cross-national studies on parties' usage of state resources that are not earmarked for partisan purposes, which require the assessment of informal, intra-organisational practices, are still rare. This article looks at one such practice across 33 parties in five European democracies: namely the ‘taxing’ of national MPs' salaries. Under this practice, candidates who enter elected office on a party ticket are obliged regularly to donate a fixed share of their public salaries to party coffers. The empirical analysis shows that the presence of a taxing rule is more likely in parties with a strong extra-parliamentary organisation, while a leftist ideology facilitates the collection of high salary shares from parliamentarians. Moreover, where party entanglement with the state is particularly pronounced, the partisan usage of parliamentary salaries is easier irrespective of their organisational dispositions. Finally, while in unitary systems national headquarters are usually able to monopolise control over national MPs' contributions, in federal systems regional party executives are able to insist on their share of these payments.     

The Dynamics of Partisan Conflict on Congressional Approval

Partisan divisions in American politics have been increasing since the 1970s following a period where scholars thought parties were in decline. This polarization is observed most frequently within the debates and deliberation across issues within Congress. Given that most studies of public opinion place the behavior of elites at the center of public attitudes, surprisingly little research examines the effect of partisan conflict on the mass public. This research examines quarterly congressional approval data from 1974 to 2000 to determine the consequences, if any, of party conflict on the dynamics of congressional approval. The findings indicate that over-time changes in partisan conflict within Congress have a direct and lasting effect on how citizens think about Congress.     

The Effects of Partisan Trespassing Strategies Across Candidate Sex

Political Behavior - Candidates frequently engage in partisan trespassing strategies where a candidate will highlight issues and traits associated with stereotypes of the opposing political party....