Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Home
  • Home
Hostname: page-component-78dcdb465f-9pqtr Total loading time: 12.283 Render date: 2021-04-16T11:52:08.844Z Has data issue: true Feature Flags: { "shouldUseShareProductTool": true, "shouldUseHypothesis": true, "isUnsiloEnabled": true, "metricsAbstractViews": false, "figures": false, "newCiteModal": false, "newCitedByModal": true }
EnglishFrançais
American Political Science Review American Political Science Review

Article contents

An Asymmetrical “President-in-Power” Effect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

DAVIDE MORISI ,
JOHN T. JOST Open the ORCID record for JOHN T. JOST in new tab/window[Opens in a new window]  and
VISHAL SINGH
DAVIDE MORISI
Affiliation:
University of Vienna
JOHN T. JOST
Affiliation:
New York University
VISHAL SINGH
Affiliation:
New York University
Corresponding
E-mail address:
davide.morisi@univie.ac.at
john.jost@nyu.edu
vsingh@stern.nyu.edu
Get access
Rights & Permissions[Opens in a new window]

Abstract

When political polarization is high, it may be assumed that citizens will trust the government more when the chief executive shares their own political views. However, evidence is accumulating that important asymmetries may exist between liberals and conservatives (or Democrats and Republicans). We hypothesized that an asymmetry may exist when it comes to individuals’ willingness to trust the government when it is led by the “other side.” In an extensive analysis of several major datasets (including ANES and GSS) over a period of five decades, we find that in the United States, conservatives trust the government more than liberals when the president in office shares their own ideology. Furthermore, liberals are more willing to grant legitimacy to democratic governments led by conservatives than vice versa. A similar asymmetry applies to Republicans compared with Democrats. We discuss implications of this asymmetrical “president-in-power” effect for democratic functioning.

Type
Letter
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 113 , Issue 2 , May 2019 , pp. 614 - 620
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below.
If you should have access and can't see this content please contact technical support.

Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference of the International Society of Political Psychology in Edinburgh in July 2017. We thank Hanspeter Kriesi, participants in the Social Justice Lab at New York University, and three anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful feedback. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XF1157.

References

Abramowitz, Alan I. 2015. The New American Electorate. Partisan, Sorted, and Polarized. In American Gridlock: The Sources, Character, and Impact of Political Polarization, eds. Thurber, James A. and Yoshinaka, Antoine. New York: Cambridge University Press, 19–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alford, John R. 2001. We’re All in This Together. The Decline of Trust in Government, 1958–1996. In What Is It about Government That Americans Dislike? eds. Hibbing, John R. and Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 28–46.Google Scholar
Barber, Michael, and McCarty, Nolan. 2015. Causes and Consequences of Polarization. In Political Negotiation. A Handbook, eds. Mansbridge, Jane and Martin, Cathie Jo. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 37–90.Google Scholar
Barberá, Pablo, Jost, John T., Nagler, Jonathan, Tucker, Joshua A., and Bonneau, Richard. 2015. “Tweeting from Left to Right: Is Online Political Communication More than an Echo Chamber?” Psychological Science 26: 1531–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brandt, Marc J., Reyna, Christine, Chambers, John R., Crawford, Jarret T., and Wetherell, Geoffrey. 2014. “The Ideological-Conflict Hypothesis: Intolerance Among Both Liberals and Conservatives.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 23: 27–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boutyline, Andrei, and Willer, Robb. 2017. “The Social Structure of Political Echo Chambers: Variation in Ideological Homophily in Online Networks.” Political Psychology 38 (3): 551–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Citrin, Jack, and Green, Donald Philip. 1986. “Presidential Leadership and the Resurgence of Trust in Government.” British Journal of Political Science 16 (4): 431–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Citrin, Jack, and Luks, Samantha. 2001. Political Trust Revisited: Déjà Vu All Over Again? In What Is It about Government that Americans Dislike? eds. Hibbing, John R. and Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 9–27.Google Scholar
Federico, Christopher M., Deason, Grace, and Fisher, Emily L.. 2012. “Ideological Asymmetry in the Relationship between Epistemic Motivation and Political Attitudes.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 103 (3): 381–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fiorina, Morris P., and Abrams, Samuel J.. 2008. “Political Polarization in the American Public.” Annual Review of Political Science 11: 563–88.Google Scholar
Frimer, Jeremy A., Skitka, Linda J., and Motyl, Matt. 2017. “Liberals and Conservatives Are Similarly Motivated to Avoid Exposure to One Another’s Opinions.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 72: 1–12.Google Scholar
Gambetta, Diego, ed. 1988. Trust: Making and Breaking Social Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Grossmann, Matt, and Hopkins, David A.. 2016. Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hacker, Jacob S., and Pierson, Paul. 2006. Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Hare, Christopher, and Poole, Keith T.. 2014. “The Polarization of Contemporary American Politics.” Polity 46 (3): 411–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hetherington, Marc J. 2005. Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hetherington, Marc J., and Rudolph, Thomas J.. 2015. Why Washington Won’t Work. Political Trust and the Governing Crisis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hibbing, John R., Smith, Kevin B., and Alford, John R.. 2014. Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Iyengar, Shanto, Sood, Gaurav, and Lelkes, Yphtach. 2012. “Affect, Not Ideology. A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization.” Public Opinion Quarterly 76 (3): 405–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jost, John T. 2017. “Ideological Asymmetries and the Essence of Political Psychology.” Political Psychology 38 (2): 167–208.Google Scholar
Jost, John T., Federico, Christopher M., and Napier, Jaime L.. 2009. “Political Ideology: Its Structure, Functions, and Elective Affinities.” Annual Review of Psychology 60: 307–37.Google ScholarPubMed
Jost, John T., van der Linden, Sander, Panagopoulos, Costas, and Hardin, Curtis D.. 2018. “Ideological Asymmetries in Conformity, Desire for Shared Reality, and the Spread of Misinformation.” Current Opinion in Psychology 23: 77–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keele, Luke. 2005. “The Authorities Really Do Matter: Party Control and Trust in Government.” The Journal of Politics 67 (3): 873–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levendusky, Matthew. 2010. The Partisan Sort How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mann, Thomas E., and Ornstein, Norman J.. 2012. It’s Even Worse than It Looks. How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Mara, Gerald M. 2001. “Thucydides and Plato on Democracy and Trust.” The Journal of Politics 63 (3): 820–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarty, Nolan, Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 2006. Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Miller, Joanne M., Saunders, Kyle L., and Farhart, Christina E.. 2015. “Conspiracy Endorsement as Motivated Reasoning: The Moderating Roles of Political Knowledge and Trust.” American Journal of Political Science 60 (4): 824–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudolph, Thomas J., and Evans, Jillian. 2005. “Political Trust, Ideology, and Public Support for Government Spending.” American Journal of Political Science 49 (3): 660–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, Shalom H., Caprara, Gian Vittorio, and Vecchione, Michele. 2010. “Basic Personal Values, Core Political Values, and Voting: A Longitudinal Analysis.” Political Psychology 31 (3): 421–52.Google Scholar
Stern, Chadly, West, Tessa V., Jost, John T., and Rule, Nicholas O.. 2014. “‘Ditto Heads’: Do Conservatives Perceive Greater Consensus within Their Ranks than Liberals?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 40 (9): 1162–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warren, Mark E. 1999. “Democratic Theory and Trust.” In Democracy and Trust, ed. Warren, Mark E.. New York: Cambridge University Press, 310–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Morisi et al. supplementary material

Online Appendix

PDF 1 MB

Morisi et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XF1157
Link

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Full text views reflects PDF downloads, PDFs sent to Google Drive, Dropbox and Kindle and HTML full text views.

Total number of HTML views: 422
Total number of PDF views: 1119 *
View data table for this chart

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between 27th December 2018 - 16th April 2021. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

14
Cited by

Send article to Kindle

To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle.

Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

An Asymmetrical “President-in-Power” Effect
Available formats
×

Send article to Dropbox

To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox.

An Asymmetrical “President-in-Power” Effect
Available formats
×

Send article to Google Drive

To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive.

An Asymmetrical “President-in-Power” Effect
Available formats
×
×

Reply to: Submit a response

Your details

Conflicting interests

Do you have any conflicting interests? *