Finding Partisanship Where We Least Expect it: Evidence of Partisan Bias in a New African Democracy

Much of the literature on political behavior in Africa’s new semi-democracies has treated partisan affiliation as weak, purely pragmatic, or a proxy for other, more meaningful identities such as ethnicity. In this article, I dispute these conceptions by demonstrating that partisanship in an African context, like partisanship in established democracies, is a psychologically meaningful identity that can inspire voters to engage in motivated reasoning. By combining survey data with an original dataset of objective indicators of local public goods quality in Uganda, I show that supporters of the incumbent president systematically overestimate what they have received from government, while opposition supporters systematically underestimate. Partisan support precedes, rather than results from, this mis-estimation. I also show that partisans of the incumbent (opposition) are significantly more (less) likely to attribute any bad outcomes they observe to private actors rather than the government. I argue that these findings are consistent with the predictions of social identity theory: the conflict that marked many African political transitions, and the mapping of African parties onto existing social cleavages, are sufficient conditions for the creation of strong political-social identities like those that characterize partisanship in the West. My findings indicate that Africanists should take partisanship seriously as a predictor of political behavior and attitudes.     

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.     

Short-Term Forces and Partisanship

One of the most intriguing aspects of the debate regarding the persistence of party identification is that proponents of different schools of thought have each managed to use the same quasi-experimental data and similar state of the art techniques to defend their point of view. In this article we argue that this debate cannot be resolved with quasi-experimental data alone and propose another method that we believe can help us triangulate in on the correct answer: experimentation. Two experiments are performed and analyzed. The first tests the hypothesis that party identification is updated in response to the vote choice; the second tests the hypothesis that candidate evaluations influence party choices. The results of our experiments provide some additional support for the traditional conception of partisanship as the unmoved mover of American politics.     

A New Electorate? Comparing Preferences and Partisanship between Immigrants and Natives

As immigrants constitute a large and rising share of both the population and the electorate in many developed democracies, we examine aspects of immigrant political behavior, a vital issue that has gone largely unexplored outside of the U.S. context. We focus on Germany and Great Britain, two countries that provide good leverage to explore both within-country and cross-national variation in Europe. Our overall aim is to assess the impact of the immigration context. As a first step, we investigate whether immigrants and natives have systematically different attitudes on two issues that have dominated postwar European politics: social spending and redistribution. With controls in place, we observe that immigrants are no more likely to support increased social spending or redistributive measures than natives and find support for hypotheses highlighting selection effects and the impact of the immigration regime. Where we do find an opinion gap, immigrants tend to have more conservative preferences than natives. As a second step, we explore the determinants of immigrant partisan identification in Britain and find that the salience of the immigration context helps explain immigrants' partisan attachment to the Labour Party.     

Partisanship and Incumbency in Presidential Elections

Party identification is a standard part of our understanding of presidential voting, but the effects of presidential incumbency on presidential voting have not been recognized in most voting models. Democratic candidates in the twentieth century received 10 percent more of the two-party vote when Democratic incumbents were running for reelection than when Republican incumbents were running. National Election Studies surveys show that the effect of incumbency varies with individual partisanship, with the greatest effect, as expected, among independents. Opposition party identifiers defect at a higher rate than incumbent party identifiers when the incumbent is running for reelection. Even after controlling for retrospective and prospective economic voting, a 6 percent effect is found for incumbency. Incumbency thus conditions the impact of partisanship on presidential voting.     

New Developments in Deliberative Democracy

This paper inspects recent theoretical work in deliberative democracy. It identifies three distinct ways in which such theories attempt to justify their claims for an increase in deliberation. Each has its strengths; each has its implications for practice. If the new deliberative theories are to move beyond a critique of liberal democracy in order to articulate a legitimate and practical politics, the respective gains of these three types must be brought together.     

Partisanship and the party system

The defining properties of party identification long established for the United States fail with some frequency to be replicated in electoral systems abroad. A number of plausible suggestions have been made to account for this system-level variability: Most of these have some face merit, but none taken alone is adequate to provide a full cross-system explanation. Variation in party system size or fractionalization has recently been discussed as another source of differential dynamics of party loyalties. Unfortunately, the conventional means of assessing party identification properties are subject to rather severe artifacts, typically ignored, when comparisons are made across systems of very different party size. The conceptual stakes underlying key methods options for such comparisons—most notably, between continuous and discrete statistical tools—are examined. The use of continuous statistics for systems of very multiple parties rests on an assumption that voters do in some degree regard these party systems as imbedded in a continuous space. A simple test for this assumption is mounted in four systems and unsurprisingly it shows very clear support. Analysis of residuals beyond this obvious result add several points of less obvious information about the distribution of party affect in such systems.     

Partisanship in a Social Setting

No factor appears more powerful in explaining how individuals evaluate political information and form political preferences than partisanship. Yet, virtually all work on the effects of partisanship on preference formation neglects the crucial role of social settings. In this study, I examine how social settings can fundamentally change the influence of partisanship on preferences. I demonstrate that, in fact, social settings exert an independent influence over preference formation—one that is even larger than the influence of partisan ambivalence. The central implication of these findings is that, going forward, we cannot fully explore how citizens apply their partisanship in evaluating political information without also accounting for the social settings in which individuals find themselves.     

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.     

New Public Management and Substantive Democracy

The authors are concerned that a remaining refuge of substantive democracy in America, the public sector, is in danger of abandoning it in favor of the market model of management. They argue that contemporary American democracy is confined to a shrunken procedural remnant of its earlier substantive form. The classical republican model of citizen involvement faded with the rise of liberal capitalist society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Capitalism and democracy coexist in a society emphasizing procedural protection of individual liberties rather than substantive questions of individual development. Today's market model of government in the form of New Public Management goes beyond earlier "reforms," threatening to eliminate democracy as a guiding principle in public-sector management. The authors discuss the usefulness of a collaborative model of administrative practice in preserving the value of democracy in public administration.     

Labor Unions and White Democratic Partisanship

The Democratic Party’s declining support among white voters is a defining feature of contemporary American politics. Extant research has emphasized factors such as elite polarization and demographic change but has overlooked another important trend, the decades-long decline of labor union membership. This oversight is surprising, given organized labor’s long ties to the Democratic Party. I argue that the concurrent decline of union membership and white support for the Democratic Party is not coincidental, but that labor union affiliation is an important determinant of whites’ partisan allegiances. I test this using several decades of cross-sectional and panel data. I show that union-affiliated whites are more likely to identify as Democrats, a substantively significant relationship that does not appear to be driven by self-selection. Overall, these findings underscore the political consequences of union decline and help us to better understand the drivers of declining white support for the Democratic Party.

     

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.     

Parties and Partisanship: A Brief Introduction

Political Behavior -