Party Brands and Partisanship: Theory with Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Argentina

Scholars disagree about the nature of party attachments, viewing partisanship as either a social identity or a rational maximization of expected utility. Empirically, much of this debate centers on the degree of partisan stability: findings of partisan fluctuations are taken as evidence against the social‐identity perspective. But drawing such conclusions assumes that the objects of identity—parties—are fixed. If we instead allow party brands to change over time, then partisan instability is consistent with a social‐identity conception of partisanship. To demonstrate this, I develop a branding model of partisanship in which voters learn about party brands by observing party behavior over time and base their psychological attachment to a party on these brands. The model suggests that convergence by rival parties, making their brands less distinguishable, should weaken party attachments. I test this implication using a survey experiment in Argentina and find evidence consistent with the model.     

The partisan heuristic and the voters’ knowledge: The essential role of the information environment

The low-information rationality theory expects voters with low political knowledge to make more use of the partisan heuristic than those with high knowledge. However, empirical studies on decision making in direct democracy observe a positive correlation between political knowledge and the use of party cues. We resolve this tension between theory and empirical evidence by demonstrating that the relationship between political knowledge and the use of party cues is conditional on the information environment. We provide evidence for this hypothesis by exploiting a natural experiment in Switzerland and analyze a large variety of direct democratic votes. The results show that voters with lower levels of political knowledge tend to align less with their preferred party because they often have a wrong perception of their preferred party’s vote recommendation. However, if information on parties’ position is easily available, their vote choice is at least as much in line with their preferred party as among those with high knowledge. This suggests that in such an information environment voters with low political knowledge strongly rely on the partisan heuristic. Our research note supports the low-information rationality theory and this way contributes to the literature on the quality of political opinion formation and the political psychology of reasoning and decision making.     

Is There an Emerging Age Gap in US Politics?

There is evidence of a realignment among voters entering the electorate in recent years, with younger voters deviating from older voters in their ideological and partisan preferences. Younger voters today tend to be more liberal and more supportive of Democratic candidates than other age groups. Younger Americans are generally favor a more activist government, as demonstrated by their views on equality, the role of government, health care, and spending for public schools and child care. The leftward movement of younger Americans ideologically is also the result of the increasing political emphasis on cultural issues. Younger Americans as a group are less religious and less conservative on social issues than other age cohorts. They put less emphasis on traditional values and are more tolerant than other age groups on social issues such as gay rights. Older voters, on the other hand, tend to be more conservative on policy issues and less supportive of Democrats than they used to be. At the state level, the partisan polarization in the United States is even greater among younger Americans than it is for the nation as a whole. This suggests that if younger Americans follow other generations in keeping the same partisan voting patterns throughout their life, the blue states will become bluer and the red states redder.

Information and party voting in “semipartisan” judicial elections

Research on the relationship between the quantity of information that voters possess and their party voting behavior in partisan elections has produced mixed and confusing empirical results. In an effort to provide a broader perspective, this paper explores that relationship in nonpartisan elections contested by candidates of opposing parties. The paper analyzes survey data on two 1984 contests for seats on the Ohio Supreme Court, using the presidential race for comparison. Despite a highly partisan campaign, party defections by voters were far more common in the supreme court races than in the presidential race, reflecting the importance of party designations on the ballot as a source of information on candidates' party affiliations. At the individual level, levels of information had differing effects in the two supreme court races and for Democratic and Republican voters; this finding suggests that the impact of imformation levels on voters' choices is conditioned by the content of information in particular campaigns.     

From voter ID to party ID: How political parties affect perceptions of election fraud in the U.S.

This paper uses a survey experiment to assess what individuals understand about election fraud and under what circumstances they see it as a problem. I argue that political parties are central to answering both these questions. Results from the 2011 CCES survey suggest respondents are able to differentiate between the relative incentives of Democrats and Republicans where fraud tactics are concerned, but whether voters see these tactics as problematic is heavily influenced by partisan bias. The results show little support for the notion that partisan ideology drives fraud assessments, and suggest support for the idea that individual concerns for fraud are shaped a desire for their preferred candidate to win. These results offer insights that might be applied more broadly to questions of perceptions of electoral integrity and procedural fairness in democracies.     

Policy or person? What voters want from their representatives on Twitter

Social media have the potential to transform democracies as they allow for direct contact between representatives and represented. Politicians can use social media to show their policy positions but they can also give insight into their private lives. Based on survey experiments in Germany and Switzerland we show that social media messages about politicians’ private lives rather deter voters. Instead, we find that voters prefer candidates that communicate policy positions. The effect of a policy-oriented communication style on Twitter can even lead to appreciating a politician from a different party in Switzerland, which has an electoral system that gives a strong incentive to cultivate a personal vote.     

Elite communication and affective polarization among voters

How does elite communication influence affective polarization between partisan groups? Drawing on the literature on partisan source cues, we expect that communication from in- or outgroup party representatives will increase affective polarization. We argue that polarized social identities are reinforced by partisan source cues, which bias perceptions of elite communication and result in increased intergroup differentiation. Further, we expect that the effect of such source cues is greater for voters with stronger partisan affinities. To evaluate our hypotheses, we performed a survey experiment among about 1300 voters in Sweden. Our analyses show that individuals who received a factual political message with a source cue from an in- or outgroup representative exhibited higher affective polarization, especially when they already held strong partisan affinities. This suggests that political elites can increase affective polarization by reinforcing existing group identities, and that this occurs in conjunction with biased interpretation of elite communication. The results improve our understanding of how political elites can influence affective polarization and add to previous research on party cues and attitude formation by demonstrating that such source cues can also increase intergroup differentiation.     

Left-right perceptions,partisan preferences,electoral participation,and partisan choice in France

An analysis based on survey data shows that electoral participation at the second ballot in France can be accounted for by partisan preferences but not by left-right perceptions of party locations. This finding runs counter to the work of Rosenthal and Sen (1973), who validated a spatial model of participation at the second ballot employing left-right perceptions and partisan preferences interchangeably. Because they use aggregate data, Rosenthal and Sen (1973) are restricted in two ways that, operating interactively, lead them to an unwarranted conclusion concerning the power of left-right perceptions. Later work by Rosenthal and Sen (1977) indicating that left-right perceptions can account for shifts in partisan choice between the two ballots by voters who have decided to participate is confirmed, but partisan preferences account even better for second-ballot choices. Left-right perceptions and partisan sympathies are related, but discrete partisan attitudes are a more powerful factor than left-right perceptions in French second-ballot electoral behavior.     

Strategic Candidate Entry and Congressional Elections in the Era of Fox News

Elections are designed to give voters the ability to hold elected officials accountable for their actions. For this to work, voters must be presented with credible alternatives from which to choose. In the United States, as in other weak-party systems, the decision to challenge an incumbent representative rests with individual, strategic-minded politicians who carefully weigh the available information. We investigate the role that one source of information—partisan media—plays in shaping electoral competition. We hypothesize that the haphazard expansion of the conservative Fox News Channel in the decade after its 1996 launch influenced congressional elections by affecting the decision calculus of high-quality potential candidates. Using congressional district-level data on the local availability of Fox News, we find that Fox News altered Republican potential candidates' perceptions about the vulnerability of Democratic incumbents, thereby changing their entry patterns.     

Cleavage Formation in Norway: The Contextual Dimension

To explore the mechanism underlying the formation and persistence of cleavage structures the author applies a contextual approach in the case of Norway where regional variation in political cleavages persists over time. This study focuses on the time period between 1890 and 1930, the formative years of the Norwegian party system. The premise of the argument is that a factor contributing to persisting patterns of electoral mobilization is the location of new voters in patterns of social interaction deriving from the class composition in different regions. Initial electoral mobilizations coupled with enduring social structures can be carried on for a long time. These social conditions may pose high costs of mobilization to new parties in a political system. The article shows the persistence of a distinct class composition across regions in Norway and demonstrates the contextual effect by examining the behaviour of new voters in the 1900 election. It evaluates the contextual argument against other party incentives for mobilization by means of a statistical model that incorporates contextual incentives in addition to incentives deriving from electoral rules and political competition.     

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.     

Social networks and mass media as mobilizers and demobilizers: A study of turnout at a German local election

This paper explores the impact of informal communication in voters’ social networks and the formal communication of the mass media on individuals’ propensity to take part in elections. Analyzing survey data from a recent local election in Germany it shows how both forms of communication may not only mobilize, but also demobilize voters. On the whole, personal communication appears more influential than mass communication. The media’s effects are generally weaker than those of social networks. Moreover, they are mediated by attitudes, while social networks have strong direct effects. These originate mainly from information conveyed through personal contact with voters and abstainers in one’s immediate social environment. Social voting norms are only influential, if they originate from persons’ families and are in favor of electoral participation.     

Candidate Choice Without Party Labels:

In the absence of party labels, voters must use other information to determine whom to support. The institution of nonpartisan elections, therefore, may impact voter choice by increasing the weight that voters place on candidate dimensions other than partisanship. We hypothesize that in nonpartisan elections, voters will exhibit a stronger preference for candidates with greater career and political experience, as well as candidates who can successfully signal partisan or ideological affiliation without directly using labels. To test these hypotheses, we conducted conjoint survey experiments on both nationally representative and convenience samples that vary the presence or absence of partisan information. The primary result of these experiments indicates that when voters cannot rely on party labels, they give greater weight to candidate experience. We find that this process unfolds differently for respondents of different partisan affiliations: Republicans respond to the removal of partisan information by giving greater weight to job experience while Democrats respond by giving greater weight to political experience. Our results lend microfoundational support to the notion that partisan information can crowd out other kinds of candidate information.     

Media proliferation and partisan selective exposure

The number of Internet news media outlets has skyrocketed in recent years. We analyze the effects of media proliferation on electoral outcomes assuming voters may choose news that is too partisan, from an informational perspective, i.e., engage in partisan selective exposure. We find that if voters who prefer highly partisan news—either because they are truly ideologically extreme, or due to a tendency towards excessive selective exposure—are politically “important,” then proliferation is socially beneficial, as it makes these voters more likely to obtain informative news. Otherwise, proliferation still protects against very poor electoral outcomes that can occur when the number of outlets is small and the only media options are highly partisan. Our model’s overall implication is thus that, surprisingly, proliferation is socially beneficial regardless of the degree of selective exposure.     

The role of the political context in voting indecision

A substantive portion of the electorate declares in pre-electoral surveys that they are undecided. However, little has been done in trying to understand who these voters are and how they finally decide their vote. In this article, we try to advance the literature by disentangling the circumstances under which voters are more likely to be undecided. While the traditional approach to the study of electoral indecision has been to characterize which individual traits make voters more likely to be undecided, this article provides consistent evidence showing that key elements of the political context may also affect electoral indecision. Using long-term harmonized data from Spanish pre-electoral surveys over 30 years, we find that voting indecision is influenced by two different types of contextual factors. First, there are some political contexts that reduce voters' cognitive costs when deciding their vote, i.e. the level of electoral competitiveness and the number of parties competing in the elections. Second, there are other political contexts that increase voters' social or expressive costs, i.e. the level of government popularity, since costs of expressing preference for the party in government increases when its public image is undermined.     

Racial attitudes & political cross-pressures in nationalized elections: The case of the Republican coalition in the Trump era

While scholars have found that Trump was able to capitalize on the racial attitudes of white voters, it is less clear how these racial attitudes influenced vote-choice across partisan and ideological cleavages in the electorate. It is also unclear whether racial attitudes affected voting at the congressional level or electoral outcomes at the aggregate level. Using a novel measure of racial attitudes at the subnational level and survey data, we make three clear findings: (1) Trump and Republican congressional candidates benefited from conservative racial attitudes both at the aggregate level and among white voters, (2) this electoral benefit for Republicans persisted during the 2018 midterm elections, and (3) the effect of attitudes on vote-choice did not significantly vary across partisan and ideological cleavages in the white electorate. Our findings suggest that, even during the era of highly nationalized and partisan elections, racial attitudes are still a mechanism by which Republicans can win significant electoral support among Democrats and relatively liberal voters in the white electorate. These findings have implications for the growing salience of race in the Republican electoral coalition.     

The more,the better? Counterfactual evidence on the effect of compulsory voting on the consistency of party choice

Compulsory voting (CV) undoubtedly raises electoral turnout. Yet does it also affect individual party choices and aggregate election outcomes? Previous studies have focused on partisan or ‘directional’ effects of CV in favour of, for example, social‐democratic or anti‐establishment parties. These effects are usually small, however. Using survey data from the Belgian General Elections Study, this article finds that CV primarily affects the consistency, rather than the direction, of party choices. In particular, the analyses suggest that CV compels a substantial share of uninterested and less knowledgeable voters to the polls. These voters, in turn, cast votes that are clearly less consistent with their own political preferences than those of the more informed and motivated voluntary voters. Claims that CV promotes equal representation of political interests are therefore questionable.     

Voters in a multi-member constituency: The 1977 Auckland election

Voters in multi-member constituencies typical of local government elections must decide how to allocate the votes at their disposal. The secrecy of the ballot has hitherto prevented study of how these preferences are distributed or of the composition of the vote received by individual candidates.Access was gained via a computer printout to the actual behaviour of voters in a five member constituency of the Auckland Regional Authority (New Zealand) in the 1977 local elections. It was contested by two full tickets and three distinctive independents.A computer programme which scanned over 12,000 combinations enabled the vote to be analysed for partisan and other forms of voting. It revealed that 80 per cent of voters were essentially partisan, 62 per cent being Citizens and 37 per cent Labour inclined. However, there was widespread refusal to vote the full ticket, but the ‘spare’ votes were given to independents rather than the opposition.There was little sign of feminist or alphabetical voting, but a weak local notables vote may have existed. The successful candidates depended less on their own partisan supporters.     

The Better Angels of Our Nature: How the Antiprejudice Norm Affects Policy and Party Preferences in Great Britain and Germany

Existing research on public opinion related to race and immigration politics emphasizes the role of prejudice or bias against minority groups. We argue that the social norm against prejudice, and individual motivations to comply with it, are crucial elements omitted from prior analyses. In contemporary Western societies, most citizens receive strong signals that prejudice is not normatively acceptable. We demonstrate that many majority‐group individuals have internalized a motivation to control prejudiced thoughts and actions and that this motivation influences their political behavior in predictable ways. We introduce measures capturing this motivation, develop hypotheses about its influence, and test these hypotheses in three separate experimental and nonexperimental survey studies conducted in Britain and Germany. Our findings support a dual‐process model of political behavior suggesting that while many voters harbor negative stereotypes, they also—particularly when certain contextual signals are present—strive to act in accordance with the “better angels of their natures.”