The Social-Psychological Measurement of Partisanship

This article undertakes a comprehensive examination of the social-psychological theory behind the concept of partisanship and addresses how well contemporary measures, especially the ubiquitous NES/Michigan measure, accord with contemporary theories of measurement, attitudes, and group identification. A number of shortcomings with the NES measure are discovered and more recent, psychologically informed measures that address these shortcomings are explored. After a brief empirical demonstration of the utility of these newer measures, recommendations are made for using new theory and new measures to improve our understanding of the role of partisanship in influencing political behavior.     

Voter Partisanship and the Effect of Distributive Spending on Political Participation

Do distributive benefits increase voter participation? This article argues that the government delivery of distributive aid increases the incumbent party's turnout but decreases opposition‐party turnout. The theoretical intuition here is that an incumbent who delivers distributive benefits to the opposing party's voters partially mitigates these voters’ ideological opposition to the incumbent, hence weakening their motivation to turn out and oust the incumbent. Analysis of individual‐level data on FEMA hurricane disaster aid awards in Florida, linked with voter‐turnout records from the 2002 (pre‐hurricane) and 2004 (post‐hurricane) elections, corroborates these predictions. Furthermore, the timing of the FEMA aid delivery determines its effect: aid delivered during the week just before the November 2004 election had especially large effects on voters, increasing the probability of Republican (incumbent party) turnout by 5.1% and decreasing Democratic (opposition party) turnout by 3.1%. But aid delivered immediately after the election had no effect on Election Day turnout.     

Representative Bureaucracy and Partisanship: The Implementation of Election Law

Studies of representative bureaucracy argue that public administrators hold attitudes that are generally representative of the public and will implement policy in accordance with those attitudes. However, studies of representative bureaucracy generally have not considered the partisanship of local administrators. Many local election officials affiliate with a political party, and there is concern that partisan officials will manipulate election procedures to help their party. The authors analyze a survey of local election officials about their attitudes toward provisional voting. Findings show that Democratic local election officials have significantly more positive attitudes toward provisional voting programs in highly Democratic jurisdictions and significantly less positive attitudes in highly Republican jurisdictions. No such relationship occurs for Republican administrators. In addition, positive attitudes toward provisional voting are associated with more provisional votes being cast and counted in the 2004 presidential election. This work questions whether representative bureaucracy—when it concerns partisanship—is always a desirable outcome.     

The Role of Partisanship in Aggregate Opinion

Despite the centrality of party identification in U.S. politics, the effects of partisanship on public opinion remain elusive. In this article, we use monthly economic opinion data disaggregated by partisanship to evaluate the role of party identification on economic perceptions. Using both static and time-varying error correction models, we find strong evidence of partisan bias in the public??s assessment of the state of the economy, and importantly, this bias changes over time. This evidence of the changing influence of partisanship helps reconcile some of the different findings of individual and aggregate level opinion studies. We also examine how the time-varying influence of partisanship affects aggregate public opinion. Specifically, we show that the increased influence of partisanship has led aggregate economic perceptions to respond more slowly to objective economic information.     

The Power of Partisanship in Brazil: Evidence from Survey Experiments

To what extent do party labels influence individuals’ policy positions? Much research has examined this question in the United States, where party identification can generate both in‐group and out‐group pressures to conform to a party's position. However, relatively little research has considered the question's comparative generalizability. We explore the impact of party labels on attitudes in Brazil, a relatively new democracy with a fragmented party system. In such an environment, do parties function as in‐groups, out‐groups, or neither? We answer this question through two survey experiments, one conducted on a nationally representative sample and another on a convenience sample recruited via Facebook. We find that both in‐ and out‐group cues shape the opinions of identifiers of Brazil's two main parties but that cues have no effect on nonpartisans. Results suggest that party identification can structure attitudes and behavior even in “party‐averse” electoral environments.     

The Economic Consequences of Partisanship in a Polarized Era

With growing affective polarization in the United States, partisanship is increasingly an impediment to cooperation in political settings. But does partisanship also affect behavior in nonpolitical settings? We show evidence that it does, demonstrating its effect on economic outcomes across a range of experiments in real‐world environments. A field experiment in an online labor market indicates that workers request systematically lower reservation wages when the employer shares their political stance, reflecting a preference to work for co‐partisans. We conduct two field experiments with consumers and find a preference for dealing with co‐partisans, especially among those with strong partisan attachments. Finally, via a population‐based, incentivized survey experiment, we find that the influence of political considerations on economic choices extends also to weaker partisans. Whereas earlier studies show the political consequences of polarization in American politics, our findings suggest that partisanship spills over beyond the political, shaping cooperation in everyday economic behavior.     

Partisanship and party preference in government and opposition: The mid-term perspective

Most previous in-depth survey analysis of British political partisanship and party preference has focused upon election times. We use new data from a major panel study covering the years 1965–1974 to investigate trends and patterns in the midterm as well as at general election times.This leads to rather different conclusions about the utility of the party identification concept, about homing tendencies, and about trends in class depolarization and partisan dealignment.The key to political change in Britain is the mid-term of Wilson's 1966–1970 Labour government, not the crisis election of 1974.     

Congressional Partisanship and Presidential Success: The Case of the Clinton and Bush Presidencies

Recent scholarship has documented the increased cohesion and influence of the congressional parties. In this new context, the status of the government as either unified or divided should function as an independent variable in determining presidential success rates. Occurring in just such a period, the Bush and Clinton presidencies can be used to test whether presidential success rates vary according to whether the national government is unified or divided. All the relevant data and comparisons confirm the hypothesis. In addition, a comparison of the presidential success rates for Carter and Nixon's first four years indicate that in the preceding period of less cohesive congressional parties there was a much weaker relationship between presidential success and the status of government as either unified or divided.     

Value Priorities,Partisanship and Electoral Choice: The Neglected Case of the United States

A wealth of comparative scholarship indicates that a transformation in the value priorities of Western publics has been occurring during the last quarter century, and that value-based cleavages are increasingly coming to structure Western political behavior. The United States, however, has been conspicuous by its relative absence from this research enterprise. This paper attempts to partially fill this void in the literature by examining the impact of materialist-postmaterialist value priorities on American political behavior. Using data from the 1972 through 1992 American National Election Studies, we first compare the impact of the value-based cleavage on partisanship and presidential vote choice to that of other relevant sociodemographic variables. These analyses show that the effect of postmaterialism on American political behavior is not negligible. When the parties take distinct stances on postmaterial concerns, value type exerts a noticeable, though not overwhelming, influence on partisanship and vote choice. Further analyses show that the effect of value priorities on electoral behavior is mainly indirect, as they significantly shape attitudes on defense and racial issues, which in turn influence vote choice. Surprisingly, however, value type is not related to attitudes on cultural issues such as abortion and homosexual rights. Thus, although postmaterialism does have some relevance for American political attitudes and behavior, it does not seem to be pertinent to the cultural conflicts that are increasingly salient to American political life.     

When Mayors Matter: Estimating the Impact of Mayoral Partisanship on City Policy

U.S. cities are limited in their ability to set policy. Can these constraints mute the impact of mayors’ partisanship on policy outcomes? We hypothesize that mayoral partisanship will more strongly affect outcomes in policy areas where there is less shared authority between local, state, and federal governments. To test this hypothesis, we create a novel dataset combining U.S. mayoral election returns from 1990 to 2006 with city fiscal data. Using regression discontinuity design, we find that cities that elect a Democratic mayor spend a smaller share of their budget on public safety, a policy area where local discretion is high, than otherwise similar cities that elect a Republican or an Independent. We find no differences on tax policy, social policy, and other areas that are characterized by significant overlapping authority. These results suggest that models of national policymaking are only partially applicable to U.S. cities. They also have implications for political accountability: mayors may not be able to influence the full range of policies that are nominally local responsibilities.     

Partisanship and independence: the peculiar moralism of American politics

Against the background of historical antipartyism in practice and in democratic theory, and with a focus on American political thought, this paper takes issue with contemporary arguments that value the political identity ‘Independent’ and disparage partisanship. A typology of ‘Independent’ is offered and both empirical and moral claims about the superiority of Independent voters are rebutted, with particular focus on the ‘weightlessness’ of Independents. The reasons to appreciate the moral distinctiveness of partisanship for democracy are set out: commitment to political pluralism, to regulated political rivalry, and to shifting responsibility for governing. Inclusiveness, comprehensiveness, and compromisingness set the contours for an ethic of partisanship.     

The Flypaper Effect under Different Institutional Contexts: The Colombian Case

An analysis of the flypapereffect under different institutionalcontexts is carried out for Colombia,where during the decentralizationprocess different sub-national fiscalstructures with different degrees ofautonomy to manage transfers,expenditures, taxes and debt havecoexisted. The analysis is carried outby using panel data models andalternative functional forms. Theresults show that the flypaper effectis observed when sub-national entitiesare highly dependent onintergovernmental transfers. Ananalysis of asymmetries in response totransfers shows that sub-nationalauthorities try to cover the reductionin transfers when the percentage oftransfers into the total currentrevenue is high.     

Seeing Spots: Partisanship,Negativity and the Conditional Receipt of Campaign Advertisements

Changes in the media landscape increasingly put voters in control of the amount and type of political content they consume. We develop a novel experiment to assess the factors that drive this conditional receipt of information. We focus on how party source and tone interact with partisanship to influence the campaign messages voters seek out or avoid, as discretion over self-exposure varies. We randomly expose subjects to comparable positive or negative television ads aired by Democratic or Republican candidates from the 2012 Presidential election, and measure subjects’ propensities to skip, re-watch and share the spots. Partisans avoid out-party ads, albeit asymmetrically: Republicans are more consistent partisan screeners than Democrats. We find more such selectivity as discretion increases, but little evidence that negativity influences self-exposure. Our findings provide greater insight into the forces behind information selectivity, and have important implications for elections in the post-broadcast era.     

Partisanship and principle: Voters and the New Zealand electoral referendum of 1993

Abstract. In a two–stage referendum process, in 1992 and 1993, New Zealand voters authorised a radical change from a plurality electoral system to proportional representation. Although ad hoc groups, not the major political parties, led the debate for and against the change, the nature of the issue ensured that partisanship had a strong effect on voters' choices. Yet many voters were also guided by their political principles and values, including fairness of representation on one side, and preference for single–party, decisive governments on the other. Experience of proportional representation since 1996 has resulted in a fairly high level of uncertainty toward electoral change, independent of partisanship. Values and partisanship, however, remain the two stabilising influences.     

Partisanship,media and the objective economy: Sources of individual-level economic assessments

Economic voting studies have repeatedly shown that voter's assessment of incumbent economic performance is important for the vote decision. However, there is little work explaining how individuals form their economic assessments. Utilizing individual-level data from Turkey, we find that variation in retrospective assessments can actually be predicted by individual income growth rates over the previous year, and the association is stronger for pocketbook assessments. Nonetheless, partisanship and media are important sources of bias, especially for sociotropic assessments. Controlled for partisanship, viewers of pro-government media are more likely to think that the national economy has done better than their own household over the last year, and also more likely to believe that the economy would fare worse if the incumbent is replaced. The findings testify both to the capacity of the individuals to anchor their assessments to personal experience, and to the media's ability to weaken this anchor.     

低碳经济——新的财富之源

低碳经济在全球蓬勃发展,正在创造出新的产业、新的增长点.文章采集全球最新的资料数据,展示了低碳经济在产业建设、战略投资、产值就业、新能源开发和碳金融市场等方面的发展情况与趋势.