Impacts of Rising American Partisanship: Stability, Accountability, and Hostility

Partisanship has always been one of, if not the most important, characteristics for understanding American political behavior, both at the elites and mass levels. Partisan identity, and the strength of that identity, functions as a key determinant of vote choice, voter turnout, political activism, social affect, and most other outcomes important to Americanists. Since the 1980s, the power of partisanship has only grown stronger – ideological polarization among elites and ideological, demographic and regional sorting among masses has led partisanship to be seen by some as a “mega-identity”, functioning as a highly salient proxy for any number of social group conflicts. In turn, national politics has disintegrated into gridlock, hostility, and mistrust.This dissertation explores three novel roles partisanship plays in the political behavior of American mass publics. In each case, partisanship operates as a challenge to democratic accountability in the American system. In Chapter 1, my coauthors and I present evidence thatattitudinal stability in the mass public is dependent largely upon knowledge of where the parties stand on key issues. Not only do a significant portion of Americans lack this information, but our findings imply that, even among those who do have stable preferences, they often do not choose their parties because of their policies, but rather the reverse, highlighting the difficulty of accountability and representativeness in a hyper-partisan system. In Chapter 2, I argue that one of the few longstanding non-partisan determinants of the presidential vote – the state of the economy – is decreasing over time in its influence; as partisanship becomes increasingly important, voters are less likely to vote retrospectively, and more likely to vote in defense of their tribe. Finally, in Chapter 3, I focus on affective polarization, and the role of mass partisan attribution. From a series of novel survey experiments, I present evidence that partisans are increasingly likely to see the other side as primarily motivated by negative desires – bigotry, selfishness, hatred, etc. – and that the attributions we make about the preferences of those with whom we disagree play a key independent role in exacerbating and reinforcing partisan hostility.Taken together, the studies in this dissertation suggest several ways in which hyper-partisanship will remain a significant challenge in American politics for the foreseeable future. Partisan attitudes, towards both policies and out-partisans, are stable and highly resistant tocorrection. Performance assessments of elites are increasingly colored by tribal considerations. Though I present some evidence for the possibility of attenuating partisan polarization, the overall findings in this dissertation suggest that doing so will be no easy feat