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Where party identification is in decay or in flux, alternative political identifications have gained centrality. In this Element, the author develops a typology of post-partisan political identities: alternative ways in which rejection of or the absence of partisan politics are defining political identifiers or non-identifiers. Based on original evidence collected through opinion polls in different Latin American countries, as well as applying an innovative measurement, the author shows the respective magnitudes and ideological composition of anti-partisans (individuals who hold negative partisanships: strong identities based on predispositions against a specific political party or movement), anti-establishment identifiers (individuals who hold many negative partisanships simultaneously), and apartisans (individuals who lack any positive or negative partisanships). This Element demonstrates the usefulness of employing these categories in order to better understand different levels of party system institutionalization, party-building, and partisan polarization in the region.
Chapter 7 explores how monitors’ and meddlers’ effects are conditional on individuals’ vote choice. Bush and Prather show across the three countries they study that winners were much more likely than losers to view the election as credible. The question then in terms of theory is whether winners and losers responded differently to the information they provided about foreign electoral interventions. In terms of monitoring, they find that positive information about monitors’ presence and complimentary reports did not reassure losers, who were much more receptive to negative information from monitors’ critical reports. The evidence can be interpreted as consistent with individuals forming beliefs in both accuracy- and directionally driven ways. Similarly, the book’s meddling experiments never caused election winners to lose trust, although they did have such an effect on election losers. Moreover, election losers were much more likely to believe in the existence of foreign meddling and its success to begin with. Overall, these results are sobering since democracy depends on the consent of election losers and a commitment among election winners to the rules of the game.
Partisans rarely punish their party at the polls for violating democratic norms or cheating in elections. However, we know little about the underlying reasons. I examine why partisans rarely sanction in-party malpractice. Using pre-registered survey experiments in Denmark and Mexico, I examine the different steps in how partisans adjust their views in response to revelations of electoral malpractice and distinguish between two substantively different explanations. Do pervasive biases prevent partisans from viewing in-party malpractice as illegitimate? Or, do partisans accurately update their views when learning about malpractice but refrain from voting against their party? The analysis demonstrates that partisans do not apply double standards when evaluating malpractice. However, although partisans punish in-party malpractice, they hold opposing parties in such low esteem that even revelations of malpractice do not change their minds. These findings contribute to our understanding of how partisans think about electoral malpractice and political malfeasance more broadly.
To successfully address large-scale public health threats such as the novel coronavirus outbreak, policymakers need to limit feelings of fear that threaten social order and political stability. We study how policy responses to an infectious disease affect mass fear using data from a survey experiment conducted on a representative sample of the adult population in the USA (N = 5,461). We find that fear is affected strongly by the final policy outcome, mildly by the severity of the initial outbreak, and minimally by policy response type and rapidity. These results hold across alternative measures of fear and various subgroups of individuals regardless of their level of exposure to coronavirus, knowledge of the virus, and several other theoretically relevant characteristics. Remarkably, despite accumulating evidence of intense partisan conflict over pandemic-related attitudes and behaviors, we show that effective government policy reduces fear among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike.
Ethnonationalist politics have been on the rise in the United States since the 2008 financial crisis, culminating with the rise of Donald Trump. We examine why two seemingly unconnected things—economic crises and prejudice—so often arise simultaneously. Combining theories of economics and emotions, we connect economic crises and prejudice through the role of emotional response to crises, namely anger and anxiety. We use two survey experiments in the United States to test various theories of how emotions might connect economic threat to negative intergroup attitudes. We find that economic concerns increase both anger and anxiety among individuals, but that these emotions have distinct effects on prejudice. Angry individuals show increased prejudice, but only towards groups one is ideologically predisposed to be prejudiced towards. In contrast, anxiety exhibits few consistent effects on prejudice.
Two parallel processes structure American politics in the current moment: partisan polarization and the increasing linkage between racial attitudes and issue preferences of all sorts. We develop a novel theory that roots these two trends in historical changes in party coalitions. Changing racial compositions of the two major parties led to the formation of racialized images about Democrats and Republicans in people’s minds—and these images now structure Americans’ partisan loyalties and policy preferences. We test this theory in three empirical studies. First, using the American National Election Studies we trace the growing racial gap in party coalitions as well as the increasing overlap between racial and partisan affect. Then, in two original survey studies we directly measure race–party schemas and explore their political consequences. We demonstrate that race–party schemas are linked to partisan affect and issue preferences—with clear implications for the recent developments in U.S. politics.
Why have citizens become increasingly polarised? One answer is that there is increasing identification with political parties – a process known as partisanship. This chapter focuses on the role that social identity and partisanship play in contemporary politics. Partisan identities influence political preferences, such that partisans are more likely to agree with policies that were endorsed by their political party, regardless of the policy content, and, in some cases, their own ideological beliefs. We will describe how partisanship mirrors other forms of social identity, both behaviourally and in the brain. However, partisanship also has distinct biological origins, and consequences in political domains such as fake news sharing, conspiracy theory beliefs, and voting behaviour. Our chapter focuses on the psychology and neuroscience of partisanship within broader sociopolitical contexts.
Gause contends that reelection incentives motivate legislators to support protest demands, especially as protesters’ resources decrease. However, how legislators respond to salient protest demands may depend on legislator or congressional district characteristics. The empirical models in the previous chapter include control variables to account for the influence of public opinion, partisanship, and legislators’ personal preferences on legislative behavior. Those empirical models provide evidence for the average legislator’s support of protesters’ preferences.
This chapter looks more closely at a legislators’ electoral context to evaluate whether certain legislators or congressional districts misalign with the theory of costly protest and legislative behavior. The results demonstrate that all legislators are responsive to the costly protest of their constituents. A legislator’s party, race, or electoral vulnerability changes the degree but seldom the direction of legislative voting behavior in favor of low-resource protesters.
The link between objective facts and politically relevant beliefs is an essential mechanism for democratic accountability. Yet the bulk of empirical work on this topic measures objective facts at whatever geographic units are readily available. We investigate the implications of these largely arbitrary choices for predicting individual-level opinions. We show that varying the geographic resolution—namely aggregating economic data to different geographic units—influences the strength of the relationship between economic evaluations and local economic conditions. Finding that unemployment claims are the best predictor of economic evaluations, especially when aggregated at the commuting zone or media market level, we underscore the importance of the modifiable areal unit problem. Our methods provide an example of how applied scholars might investigate the importance of geography in their own research going forward.
Why do middle-income country governments use costlier sovereign debt markets when cheaper finance is available from official creditors? This research note argues that left-leaning governments with labor and the poor as core constituencies are likely to prioritize markets in their annual foreign borrowings. This is because markets provide an exit option from official creditor conditions that have disproportionately negative effects on working classes. This finding puts limits on disciplinary assumptions that left-leaning governments should have relatively less access to sovereign debt markets and thus use them less. Instead, left-leaning middle-income countries are likely to use proportionally more market finance as they fulfill annual foreign borrowing needs. This, in turn, shapes which middle-income countries are likely to become relatively more exposed to global debt market costs and pressures as they accumulate external debt over time.
The literature on comparative partisanship has demonstrated the low rates of party identification in Latin America. Such low rates are commonly interpreted as a sign of citizens’ disengagement with parties and democracy in the region. This article revisits this interpretation by considering voters’ adverse affection toward a party, or negative partisanship. It shows that examining the negative side of partisanship can help us develop a clearer perspective on the partisan linkages in the electorate. To support this claim, this study analyzes an original conjoint experiment in Argentina and Mexico, as well as two other public opinion surveys fielded in Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador. The study presents empirical evidence indicating that negative partisanship helps voters without an attachment to a party to distinguish themselves from nonpartisans, is independent of positive partisanship, and is different from a general distrust of the democratic system.
Do citizens think polarization is a threat? Does it impact how they define good citizenship? Chapter 5 presents the first vignette survey experiment on the effects of information on polarization as a threat on citizenship norms. We find citizens who receive the polarization treatment are significantly more vigilant (“watches the government”) than the control group in all three cases. A disaggregated analysis by partisanship reveals that the effects of the polarization treatment differ between the left and right. In highly polarized, winner-take-all contexts, polarization may be framed as a shared problem, but only partisan left challengers mobilize to repair it. There are differences in how they respond across cases, but we only see significant changes to citizenship norms within this subset of respondents.
This concluding chapter reviews key findings and implications of partisan citizenship, namely, that democratic threat fractures consensus over core citizenship values, in which only some citizens recognize and respond to threat. I also argue that this divided citizenship makes democratic problems worse: it undermines an objective definition of what constitutes a threat, exposes fundamental disagreement over what democracy is, and the solutions itself become politicized. I raise skepticism that civic education or natural cycles can repair these deep divisions but, nevertheless, point to the necessity of trying.
The prosecutorial independence of the Attorney General (AG) is a firmly established constitutional convention in Canada, but it is also an evolving convention, subject to ongoing contestation and debate. This article is a contribution to that debate. It defends a normative constitutional framework wherein the AG’s authority to make final decisions in matters of criminal prosecution is balanced against a corresponding duty to consult with cabinet and the prime minister on the public interest implications of prosecutorial decisions when the circumstances warrant. Within this normative framework, respectful contestation and debate amongst ministers, the prime minister, and the AG in determining the public interest merits of prosecution is welcomed, even encouraged, and if conducted with the requisite integrity, objectivity, and transparency, it is regarded not as a threat but as a valuable check and balance on AG independence and an indispensable form of quality control on the exercise of prosecutorial discretion.
When a party or candidate loses the popular vote but still wins the election, do voters view the winner as legitimate? This scenario, known as an electoral inversion, describes the winners of two of the last six presidential elections in the United States. We report results from two experiments testing the effect of inversions on democratic legitimacy in the US context. Our results indicate that inversions significantly decrease the perceived legitimacy of winning candidates. Strikingly, this effect does not vary with the margin by which the winner loses the popular vote, nor by whether the candidate benefiting from the inversion is a co-partisan. The effect is driven by Democrats, who punish inversions regardless of candidate partisanship; few effects are observed among Republicans. These results suggest that the experience of inversions increases sensitivity to such outcomes among supporters of the losing party.
After several years of hard-fought negotiations on a project co-founded and championed by it, the United States sent shockwaves through the international trade community by withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This chapter seeks to discuss the political environment in Washington, DC during the TPP’s negotiation and the failed attempt at shepherding it through to final fruition, taking care to explain the seemingly arcane way that trade agreements are implemented in the U.S. system. The authors map out the shifts in trade politics leading up to completion of the TPP, highlight a few of the more contentious substantive issues that arose along the way, and deliver a kind of post- mortem for the United States’ participation in the TPP, commenting briefly on the likelihood of a resumption of interest in the project in Washington, DC.
Americans today are affectively polarized: they dislike and distrust those from the opposing political party more than they did in the past, with damaging consequences for their democracy. This Element tests one strategy for ameliorating such animus: having ordinary Democrats and Republicans come together for cross-party political discussions. Building on intergroup contact theory, the authors argue that such discussions will mitigate partisan animosity. Using an original experiment, they find strong support for this hypothesis – affective polarization falls substantially among subjects who participate in heterogeneous discussion (relative to those who participate in either homogeneous political discussion or an apolitical control). This Element also provides evidence for several of the mechanisms underlying these effects, and shows that they persist for at least one week after the initial experiment. These findings have considerable importance for efforts to ameliorate animus in the mass public, and for understanding American politics more broadly.
Public mask use has emerged as a key tool in response to COVID-19. We develop a classification of statewide mask mandates that reveals variation in their scope and timing. Some US states quickly mandated wearing of face coverings in most public spaces, whereas others issued narrow mandates or no mandate at all. We consider how differences in COVID-19 epidemiological indicators and partisan politics affect when states adopted broad mask mandates, starting with the earliest mandates in April 2020 and continuing through the end of 2020. The most important predictor is the presence of a Republican governor, delaying statewide indoor mask mandates an estimated 98.0 days on average. COVID-19 indicators such as confirmed case or death rates are much less important predictors. This finding highlights a key challenge to public efforts to increase mask wearing, one of the most effective tools for preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 while restoring economic activity.