Electoral Incentives and Partisan Conflict in Congress: Evidence from Survey Experiments

Does partisan conflict damage citizens ’ perceptions of Congress? If so, why has partisan polarization presumably increased in Congress since the 1970s? To address these questions, we unpack the ―electoral connection ‖ by exploring the mass public’s attitudes towards partisan conflict via two original survey experiments in which we manipulated characteristics of individual members and Congress as a whole. We find that party conflict reduces confidence in Congress as an institution among citizens across the partisan spectrum. However, there exists heterogeneity by strength of party identification with respect to evaluations of individual members. Independents and weak partisans are more supportive of members that espouse a bipartisan image, whereas strong partisans are less supportive. Hence, people with strong attachments to a political party disavow conflict in the aggregate but approve of individual members behaving in a partisan manner. This empirical pattern helps us understand why members in safely partisan districts continue to engage in partisan conflict even though partisanship damages the collective reputation of the institution, as well as why members from competitive districts attempt to project a bipartisan image even as agenda control constrains legislative behavior. 1 The rise in partisan polarization since the 1970s has been one of the most extensively studied topics in congressional scholarship in recent years (e.g., Aldrich, Berger, and Rohd