When Common Identities Decrease Trust: An Experimental Study of Partisan Women

How does sharing a common gender identity affect the relationship between Democratic and Republican women? Social psychological work suggests that common ingroup identities unite competing factions. After closely examining the conditions upon which the common ingroup identity model depends, I argue that opposing partisans who share the superordinate identity of being a woman will not reduce their intergroup biases. Instead, I predict that raising the salience of their gender will increase cross‐party biases. I support my hypotheses with a nationally representative survey of 3,000 adult women and two survey experiments, each with over 1,000 adult women. These findings have direct implications for how women evaluate one another in contentious political settings and, more broadly, for our understanding of when we can and cannot rely upon common identities to bridge the partisan divide.     

Shot by the Messenger: Partisan Cues and Public Opinion Regarding National Security and War

Research has shown that messages of intra-party harmony tend to be ignored by the news media, while internal disputes, especially within the governing party, generally receive prominent coverage. We examine how messages of party conflict and cooperation affect public opinion regarding national security, as well as whether and how the reputations of media outlets matter. We develop a typology of partisan messages in the news, determining their likely effects based on the characteristics of the speaker, listener, news outlet, and message content. We hypothesize that criticism of a Republican president by his fellow partisan elites should be exceptionally damaging (especially on a conservative media outlet), while opposition party praise of the president should be the most helpful (especially on a liberal outlet). We test our hypotheses through an experiment and a national survey on attitudes regarding the Iraq War. The results show that credible communication (i.e., “costly” rhetoric harmful to a party) is more influential than “cheap talk” in moving public opinion. Ironically, news media outlets perceived as ideologically hostile can actually enhance the credibility of certain messages relative to “friendly” news sources.

Political, Religious and Cultural Identities: The Undercurrents of Scottish Football

Despite recognition that religion plays an important role in Scottish and that Scotland has long been different from England in matters involving religion, there remains a dearth of relevant research on this subject. For example, only in recent years, with the works of Mitchell (1992) and Curtice and Seawright (1995), has there been a qualified look at least at one aspect of this relationship, the association between religion and politics. This paper will bring both of these subjects together by considering the religious and political undercurrents that for many people have come to characterise Scottish football. A characterisation that is particularly evident in the case of the two major clubs in Scotland: Glasgow Rangers and Celtic.     

Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions

I examine the impact of long-term partisan loyalties on perceptions of specific political figures and events. In contrast to the notion of partisanship as a simple running tally of political assessments, I show that party identification is a pervasive dynamic force shaping citizens' perceptions of, and reactions to, the political world. My analysis employs panel data to isolate the impact of partisan bias in the context of a Bayesian model of opinion change; I also present more straightforward evidence of contrasts in Democrats' and Republicans' perceptions of objective politically relevant events. I conclude that partisan bias in political perceptions plays a crucial role in perpetuating and reinforcing sharp differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans. This conclusion handsomely validates the emphasis placed by the authors of The American Voter on the role of enduring partisan commitments in shaping attitudes toward political objects.     

Identities, Interests, and Imports

There is increasing attention to the mass public in the politics of trade debate, yet we still know little about how Americans formulate opinion on trade. Scholars are puzzled by the ineffectiveness of traditional dispositional beliefs to account for trade policy judgment, while an emerging economic self-interest perspective contends that opinion on trade is based on material concerns. This article demonstrates how symbolic predispositions provide critical information shortcuts for Americans on trade in which the relationship between trade policy and economic self-interest may be unclear. Symbolic politics theory explains how citizens can rely on accessible symbolic predispositions, including conceptions of national identity, in an unfamiliar and evolving trade policy environment often subject to multiple and conflicting cues, limited political information, and changing economic circumstances.     

The Partisan and Policy Motivations of Political Donors Seeking Surrogate Representation in House Elections

Political Behavior - Non-constituent donors constitute an increasingly important fundraising base for members of the U.S. House. These donors are theorized to be seeking “surrogate...     

Feminisms, Islamophobia and Identities

There has been a tendency of late to conflate all Muslims as belonging to a single nation and aspiring to a single political aim. This effect has been achieved by some authors so as to accommodate Islamophobia, but by others to generate a sense of inclusive unity that encloses all Muslims. We contend that in the post 9/11 climate of Islamophobia women wearing the scarf, the mohajabehs, are making a political choice. They are publicly branding themselves as Muslims at a time when such a label carries the potential fear of making them vulnerable to open hostility. But the Islam that they embody is distinct and different from the stark, gendered divides envisaged by protagonists on both side of the Islamophobic divide. The unity demanded by some of the highly vocal and visible Islamic groups marginalises the contestations posed within these groups by women who may be described as feminists. The specificities demanded by those who envisage Islam primarily as an antagonistic political force in the UK are very different from the flexibility that many women envisage. They aspire to belong to the Umma or people of Islam, conceptualised as crossing ethnic, racial, geographical and political boundaries, an identity that is primarily inclusive rather than exclusive. The multiplicities of identities of many mohajabehs sit more easily within the permeable unbounded umma than the constrained gendered boundaries of the combative male political Islamism.     

Parties in Elections, Parties in Government, and Partisan Bias

Adam Meirowitz Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 e-mail: ameirowi{at}princeton.edu Thomas Romer Department of Politics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 e-mail: romer{at}princeton.edu Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidatesin elections and when winning candidates choose among policyalternatives in government. But the inextricably linked institutions,incentives, and behavior that determine these multistage choicesare substantively complex and analytically unwieldy, particularlyif modeled explicitly and considered in total, from citizenpreferences through government outcomes. To strike a balancebetween complexity and tractability, we modify standard spatialmodels of electoral competition and governmental policy-makingto study how components of partisanship—such as candidateplatform separation in elections, party ID-based voting, nationalpartisan tides, and party-disciplined behavior in the legislature—arerelated to policy outcomes. We define partisan bias as the distancebetween the following two points in a conventional choice space:the ideal point of the median voter in the median legislativedistrict and the policy outcome selected by the elected legislature.The study reveals that none of the party-in-electorate conditionsis capable of producing partisan bias independently. Specifiedcombinations of conditions, however, can significantly increasethe bias and/or the variance of policy outcomes, sometimes insubtle ways.     

Earthquakes and Aftershocks: Race, Direct Democracy, and Partisan Change

Although dramatic partisan change among the electorate is infrequent, the issue agendas of parties may produce large shifts. A major cause of such change is the politics of race. In a political environment charged with racially oriented issues, racial groups often align themselves with different parties (as witnessed most recently in the American South). Yet, if racial appeals violate norms of equality, these appeals may rebound on the party using them. Consequently, members of the (white) racial majority and racially targeted minority may both move away from the offending party. Using data from the California Field Poll, we find that racially charged ballot propositions sponsored by the Republican party during the 1990s in California reversed the trend among Latinos and Anglos toward identifying as Republican, ceteris paribus, by shifting party attachments toward the Democratic party. Our results raise serious questions about the long-term efficacy of racially divisive strategies for electoral gain.     

Character Weakness,Partisan Bias,and Presidential Evaluation: Modifications and Extensions

In a recent article Goren (American Journal of Political Science, 46, 627–641, 2002) draws upon theories of negativity bias, partisan bias, and motivated reasoning to posit that the more strongly people identify with the opposition party of a presidential candidate, the more heavily they will rely on character weakness impressions to construct global candidate evaluations. This paper modifies the theoretical framework by positing that (1) partisans will judge opposition nominees most critically on the traits owned by the former’s party and (2) partisan bias promotes negativity bias in the evaluation of incumbent presidents seeking reelection and incumbent vice presidents seeking the presidency. Analysis of data from the 2000 and 2004 NES surveys, along with a reconsideration of the results from the 1984 to 1996 period covered in the original piece, yields strong empirical support for these expectations.

Partisan issue preferences and partisan change

This paper addresses the relationship between changes in issue preferences and changes in partisanship, and examines the possibility that different types of issues may be associated with different dimensions of partisanship. A discriminant function analysis using the 1972–74–76 CPS Panel reveals that Democrats, Independents, and Republicans are very different from one another in terms of partisan issue preferences on a New Deal and a racial issue. The association between issue preferences and changes in strength among partisans is less stable, but the Democratic identification seems to be more closely aligned with the New Deal and racial issues than the Republican identification. Leaners appear to be more partisan in their issue preferences than weak identifiers are.     

Immigration,Latinos, and White Partisan Politics: The New Democratic Defection

Immigration is profoundly changing the racial demographics of America. In this article, we seek to understand if and how immigration and increasing racial diversity are shaping the partisan politics of individual white Americans. We show that whites’ views on immigration and Latinos are strongly related to their core political identities and vote choices. Using a range of different surveys, we find that, all else equal, whites with more anti‐immigrant views or more negative views of Latinos are less apt to identify as Democrats and less likely to favor Democratic candidates. This rightward shift harkens back to an earlier period of white defection from the Democratic Party and highlights the enduring but shifting impact of race on American politics.     

Partisan stabilization policy and voter control

Abstract. Representative democracy is a principal-agent institution. Voter influence over macroeconomic policy should be noticeable during election years when the president (agent) and median voter (principal) disagree about goals. They might disagree due to the prospective benefit of choosing a policymaker who is more conservative than the voter. This conclusion is demonstrated analytically in a new Keynesian model of endogenous stabilization in which the president reacts quickly to lean against the macroeconomic wind. We support the principalagent characterization of voters and presidents in an endogenous policy model with regression estimates of growth rate targets, allowing for differences between Democrats and Republicans.