Figure - available from: Public Choice
This content is subject to copyright. Terms and conditions apply.
Polarization in primary electorates and the US House. Note: In the top panel, each point represents the distance from the median voter in that party’s primary electorate to the median voter in the general electorate in that year. The bottom panel shows the trend in average DW-NOMINATE score for each party in the US House by congress (from http://www.voteview.com)
Source publication
Many scholars have argued that primary elections are an important factor in the polarization of the American Congress. Yet little research measures change in the policy preferences of primary electorates to evaluate the connection directly. We create the first explicit measures of the preferences of primary voters over the last 60 years using a Bay...
Citations
... The most commonly analyzed survey measures of the culture wars assess the extent of polarization in issue positions and ideological and partisan identification (see, e.g., Abramowitz & Saunders, 2008;Fiorina et al., 2006Fiorina et al., , 2008Layman, 1999;Baldassarri & Gelman, 2008;Hetherington et al., 2016;Hill & Tausanovitch, 2018;Jessee, 2016;Levendusky & Malhotra, 2016;Van Boven et al., 2012). Less commonly analyzed survey measures of the culture wars assess the extent of polarization in affect, intensity of belief, or affinity or dislike for various societal groups (see, e.g., Iyengar & Westwood, 2015;Mackie, 1986;Mason, 2016;Westfall et al., 2015). ...
We provide the first account of the culture wars in the political psychology and public opinion literature based on a theory of culture. Using innovative measures of grid‐group cultural theory (CT), we identify the cultures associated with ideological and partisan identifications in annual U.S. national surveys from 2011 to 2022, a unique data set of 24,870 respondents. As hypothesized, we find that the culture wars occur not just between ideologues and partisans but among them as they draw support from distinct, relatively stable yet shifting cultural coalitions. Egalitarian and, less often, fatalistic liberals and Democrats battle against individualistic and, less often, hierarchical, conservatives and Republicans. As hypothesized, fatalists are the least reliable coalition partners, and, as expected, they gravitate Republican and conservative in 2017, after Trump's election. However, fatalists who are strong partisan identifiers never defect. Moreover, our hypothesis that fatalist attraction to Trump would drive defections in their political identification is largely invalidated. Instead, fatalists mostly flee Trump in our aggregate analysis as well as in subanalyses of strong and weak ideological and partisan identifiers. In 2016 and 2018–2022, it appears that independent fatalists cause fatalists to gravitate liberal and Democrat. Unexpectedly, hierarchists also go liberal and Democrat in 2022, in apparent reaction to Trump's multifront attacks on the 2020 election that he lost. We identify the basis for cultural coalitions that can end particular culture wars, including the most significant one now occurring between egalitarians and individualists, and conclude with suggestions for further research.
... The idea that voters are polarizing along an educational axis has attracted recent public commentary, and is tied to the notion that globalization is creating an environment of high-skilled haves and low-skilled have-nots. 21 However, as with income, we find extremists at both ends of the political spectrum and moderates within each educational class. ...
... It is important to begin by stating that ideological orientation and party identification are not synonymous per se. However, there is evidence that self-identified political orientation correlates strongly with political party preference (e.g., Barber & Pope, 2019;Hill & Tausanovitch, 2018 Q4 ¶ ...
A growing number of studies demonstrate that consistent handers, people who use their dominant hand for all or most manual tasks, are less cognitively flexible than inconsistent handers, people who use their non-dominant hands at least some of the time. A recent hypothesis suggests that differences in handedness emerged evolutionarily because populations benefited from a balance between cognitively rigid and cognitively flexible people. One expectation is that cognitively rigid consistent handers would support more authoritarian policies or candidates. To test this idea, we looked at handedness, gender, and political affiliation as predictors of support for Donald Trump, a candidate whose supporters self-report being more authoritarian, in the 2016 primary. Our data show that in the Republican Primary, consistent handers report more support than inconsistent for Donald Trump. When authoritarianism was added as a covariate, the handedness effect disappeared. Further analyses showed that authoritarianism mediates the relationship between handedness and support for Donald Trump. In the Democratic Primary, there was a main effect of gender. Women reported more support than men for Hillary Clinton.
... A well-trodden path has been formed by the congested trail of southern politics scholarship. And for good reason: the contemporary partisan transformation of the American South from a long-time one-party Democratic bastion (Key 1949) to its now Republican dominant political system (McKee 2012) is one of the most important developments in US electoral history (Hood, Kidd, and Morris 2012). 1 Indeed, what happens in Dixie does not stay in Dixie: the southern Republican realignment (SRR) has greatly contributed to elite-level partisan and ideological polarization (Fleisher and Bond 2004), partisan resurgence within the electorate (Bartels 2000;Hetherington 2001), mass-level partisan sorting (Hill and Tausanovich 2018;Levendusky 2009b) and heightened competitiveness in congressional and presidential elections (Black and Black 2002), which has manifested in the remarkable volatility and instability of majority control of these federal offices (Shafer 2016). ...
Scholarly accounts attribute the American South's historic partisan transformation that began in the 1960s to a combination of political and economic factors, but no prior work emphasizes the connection between individuals' fundamental beliefs and partisan change. Using pooled American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 1988 to 2016, we show that egalitarianism and moral traditionalism are more likely to influence southerners' party affiliation relative to non-southerners. Southerners did not connect their core values to the same extent as other citizens in the early years of our analysis-owing to the vestiges of a one-party system operating in Dixie. But over time, the relationship between core values and partisanship among southerners strengthened remarkably. Moreover, 1992-96 panel data show that egalitarianism in particular influences southern partisanship (but not vice versa). Our results reveal that core values are integral to understanding the southern Republican realignment and southerners' persistent political distinctiveness.
... That selectorate can have policy positions that deviate significantly from the policy profile of the national and regional party leadership (e.g. Hill and Tausanovitch, 2018). Voteseeking candidates within regional party primaries need to address the interests of a different constituency than the party leaders acting at the national level, who have to take the preferences of the voters in the overall country into account. ...
Parties have strong incentives to present a relatively cohesive policy position to the voters across different levels of a political system. However, the adoption of inclusive forms of candidate selection methods like primaries could result in the selection of top candidates for elections on the subnational sphere who are not favoured by the party leadership. This is often seen as a threat to high levels of intra-party programmatic cohesion. Because subnational party organizations depend to a significant degree on the support from their national party, we argue that regional party branches that selected their top candidates by means of a primary adopt a policy position that deviates less strongly from the one of their national party. However, candidates selected by primaries might need to be responsive to the preferences of their regional selectorate, so that the incentives for parties at a regional level to deviate substantially from the position of their national party organization could increase. By analysing the content of 150 regional election manifestos of Spanish parties, we find that if a party's top candidate for a regional election is selected in a primary, then the policy distance between the respective regional and national party decreases. However, this effect is not observable for recently founded parties.
Previous research finds that nominating more centrist candidates increases vote share and win probability in congressional general elections. Yet party primary elections often nominate non‐centrist candidates, increasing polarization between the American parties. We develop a model of choice in nomination politics that shows when and how actors respond to incentives of the general election. We then combine 200 million contribution records with data on 22,400 candidates in 7100 House primary elections from 1980 through 2016. We find that potential candidates and primary voters respond to general election incentives but do not find clear evidence for contributors or the winnowing process. Connecting these results back to our model, this implies that actors in the invisible primary either place higher value on in‐party candidate ideology or have different beliefs about the general election than do primary voters. Our evidence adds to a body of research that suggests primary voters are a larger moderating force than elites in American party politics.
While the alignment of partisan and ideological identities—sorting—serves as a primary explanation for the rise in affective polarization, we theorize that this connection does not hold for all Americans, especially racial subgroups with unique political experiences. Using both cross-sectional and panel data, we find that even though Whites have sorted, and differences between the South and elsewhere have diminished over time, Black Americans have not sorted since 1972. However, affective polarization is just as high among Blacks as it is Whites. Thus, sorting does not appear to explain Black affective polarization. Multivariate models provide additional evidence that sorting does not adequately explain affective polarization among Blacks. Instead, we find that group norms and group consciousness (e.g., linked fate) better account for affective polarization among Black Americans. These findings provide important nuance to the sorting thesis and shed light on the relationship between sorting and affective polarization.
Zusammenfassung
Debatten um gesellschaftliche Spaltung haben derzeit Konjunktur. Allerdings bleibt oft unscharf, was darunter verstanden wird. Somit fallen die Diagnosen zum Zustand der Gesellschaft unterschiedlich, bisweilen sogar gegensätzlich aus. Dieser Literaturüberblick systematisiert das Konzept „politische Polarisierung“ und trägt die bisherigen Befunde zusammen. Gerade mit Blick auf die USA ist die Forschung vielfältig, allerdings nur bedingt übertragbar auf Deutschland. In einem Dreischritt wird die Literatur nach den jeweils betrachteten Formen von Polarisierung geordnet, nach Ursachen von Polarisierung befragt, und schließlich die Folgen von Polarisierung für demokratische Gemeinwesen diskutiert.
Many believe primary elections distort representation in American legislatures because unrepresentative actors nominate extremist candidates. Advocates have reformed primaries to broaden voter participation and increase representation. Empirical evidence, however, is quite variable on the effects of reform. I argue that when institutional reform narrows one pathway of political influence, aggrieved actors take political action elsewhere to circumvent reform. I use a difference-in-differences design in the American states and find that although changing primary rules increases primary turnout, campaign contributions also increase with reform. Implementing nonpartisan primaries and reforming partisan primaries lead to estimated 9 and 21 percent increases in individual campaign contributions per cycle. This suggests actors substitute action across avenues of political influence to limit effects of institutional reform.
Has polarization influenced how members of the public identify with ideological labels? In our analysis of patterns of ideological identification since the 1970s, we demonstrate that there has been an increase in the proportion of the electorate willing to locate themselves on the standard seven-point ideological scale as the parties have polarized. Moreover, consistent with existing evidence of partisan-ideological sorting, our results indicates that most of the increase in identifying with a label is associated with an increase in partisans selecting the ideological label that matches their partisanship. Finally, we show that attitudes toward moral traditionalism are increasingly related to ideological identifications. Our evidence indicates that the broader political system influences how members of the public identify with ideological labels.
