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Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines
It’s pretty rare for me to say, “Goodness, look at what Stanford’s Chandler Chair of Communication has to say!” And in truth, I haven’t looked closely at the methodology of this paper, and even if it’s flawless, let’s wait to see if it can be replicated. Still, the claim they’re making is interesting:
When defined in terms of social identity and affect toward co-partisans and opposing partisans, the polarization of the American electorate has dramatically increased. We document the scope and consequences of affective polarization of partisans using implicit, explicit and behavioral indicators. Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters’ minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race. We further show that party cues exert powerful effects on non-political judgments and behaviors. Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, and do so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race. We note that the willingness of partisans to display open animus for opposing partisans can be attributed to the absence of norms governing the expression of negative sentiment and that increased partisan affect provides an incentive for elites to engage in confrontation rather than cooperation.
Among the claims they make are these: “A standard measure of social distance — parents’ displeasure over the prospects of their offspring marrying into a family with a different party affiliation — shows startling increases in the United States” since the 1980s.” Moreover, they claim, data from online dating sites suggest that “marital selection based on partisanship exceeds selection based on physical (e.g. body shape) or personality attributes.”
This is of course partly gibberish: Party affiliation can’t be disambiguated from ‘personality attributes’ unless you genuinely believe there’s no difference at all between the parties.
But what’s interesting is that they used the Implicit Association Test on a sample of 2,000 adults. There’s a lot of controversy about this test, but it’s thought to measure attitudes that people claim not to have, or know they shouldn’t have. You may remember it from the “Are you a closet racist” tests that circulate online.
This is what they found:
The spread between Democrats and Republicans on the partisan D-score was massive (t(824.66) = 17.68, p<.001), with the Republicans averaging .27 (se = .02), the Democrats -.23 (se = .02), and Independents -.02 (.02). In the case of implicit racial bias, African Americans showed a preference for African Americans (D-score = -.09, se = .02), while whites displayed a somewhat stronger in-group preference (D-score = .16, se = .01). Hispanics and Asians both revealed a slight preference for whites over blacks. Consistent with previous research, the black-white difference in implicit bias was substantial (t(740.10) = 11.04, p<.001), but the effect size for race (Cohen’s d = .61) was not nearly as strong as the corresponding effect of party (Cohen’s d = .95).
Surprised by this, they tried randomly assigning 1,021 participants to perform two tasks. The first required them to choose between a Democrat and Republican; the second required choosing between a European American and an African American. They were asked to read the resumes of a pair of graduating high school seniors and decide to whom to award a scholarship:
Depending on the task to which they were assigned, participants were exposed to candidates with either a partisan affiliation (cued through membership in a partisan extracurricular group), or a racial identity (cued through a stereotypical African American/European American name and membership in an extracurricular group)
And whaddya know:
In the partisan task approximately 80% of partisans (both Democrats and Republicans) selected their in-party candidate. Democratic leaners showed a stronger preference for the Democratic candidate than Republican leaners showed for the Republican candidate, though both groups displayed the in-party preference (80.4% and 69.2% respectively). Independents showed a slight preference for the Democratic candidate (57.9%). In-group selection on the basis of race was confined to African Americans (73.1% selecting the African American), with European Americans showing a small preference for the African American candidate (55.8% selecting the African American).
Candidate qualification had no significant effect on winner selection. Even when the candidate from the opposing party was more qualified, the participants gave the scholarship to their co-partisans:
When the Republican was more qualified than the Democrat, the probability of a Democrat selecting the Republican candidate was only .30 (95% confidence interval), when both candidates were equally qualified the probability of a Democrat selecting the Republican candidate fell to .21 (95% confidence interval), and when the Democrat was most qualified the probability of a Democrat selecting the Republican candidate was a meager .14. Similarly, when the Democrat was more qualified, the probability of a Republican selecting the Democrat was only .15 (95% confidence interval), when the two candidates were equally qualified the probability of a Republican selecting the Democrat candidate was .21 (95% confidence interval), and when the Republican was most qualified the probability of Republicans selecting the Democrat candidate was .21 (95% confidence interval). The probability of a partisan selecting an out-party candidate never rose above .3 and the coefficients for the various interaction terms between participant partisan affiliation and candidate qualifications were never significant; partisanship simply trumped academic excellence in this task.
What happened when they tried the experiment with race, rather than partisanship?
The results of the race manipulation showed generally weaker effects of outgroup bias. Most African American and European American participants selected the African American candidate. African Americans were significantly more likely than European Americans to select the African American candidate (b=.95, se=.36, p<.01). However, there was an overall tendency to select the European American as the winner when she was the more qualified candidate (b=-.93, se=.30, p<.01). There were no significant interactions between participant race and candidate qualifications.
They then tried another experiment: trust and dictator games:
In the trust game, Player 1 is given an initial endowment ($10) and instructed that she is free to give some, all, or none to Player 2 (said to be a member of a designated group). She is further informed that the researcher will triple the amount transferred to Player 2, who will have a chance to transfer an amount back to Player 1 (though Player 2 is under no obligation to return any money). The dictator game is an abbreviated version in which there is no opportunity for Player 2 to return funds to Player 1 and where the amount transferred is not tripled by the researcher. Since there is no opportunity for Player 1 to observe the strategy of Player 2, variation in the amount Player 1 allocates to different categories of Player 2 in the dictator game is attributable only to group dislike and prejudice.
And whaddya know:
In both versions of the game, players were more generous toward co-partisans, but not co-ethnics. The average amount allocated to co-partisans in the trust game was $4.58 (95% confidence interval [4.33, 4.83]) representing a “bonus” of some ten percent over the average allocation of $4.17. In the dictator game, co-partisans were awarded twenty-four percent over the average allocation.
Their conclusion may be an overstretch, but it’s still an interesting thought:
… our evidence documents a significant shift in the relationship between American voters and their parties. Fifty years ago, comparative party researchers described American parties as relatively weak, at least by the standards of European “mass membership” parties. The prototypical instance of the latter category was a party “membership in which is bound up in all aspects of the individual’s life.” By this standard, American parties have undergone a significant “role reversal.” Today, the sense of partisan identification is all encompassing and affects behavior in both political and non-political contexts.
A big problem with the study is that inherently, they seem to be assuming that the parties don’t genuinely stand for anything. Now, I would have said this was ridiculous. But let’s face it: a Democrat with vile manners has managed to soar to the top of the GOP polls. Can’t really wish that fact away.
As I said, let’s see if these studies can be replicated. If they can, though, they’d make some sense of the frustration I feel when reading the news. The other day, I wrote about this:
I’m being driven insane by the way all journalism now is partisan journalism. I have to fact-check everything I read for myself — which is hugely time-consuming — and half the time, when I look up the original document or source material to which a piece of journalism alludes, I find it said nothing of the sort.
Genferei replied, and it’s a reasonable rebuttal:
At least now you can fact-check things yourself. You can look at the source document, or read another story from a different outlet about the same events. Were the gin-swilling, chain-smoking, hard-bitten reporters of The Golden Age Of Journalism (R) really paragons of unvarnished, fact-checked truth? Or was what they said all you got, so no point worrying about what ‘reality’ really was?
This is true. But those gin-swilling, chain-smoking, hard-bitten reporters — and I was once one of them, so I know — certainly weren’t as nakedly and obviously partisan. We at least paid lip-service to the virtue of “non-partisanship.” And as I recall, there really was a belief that politics stopped at the water’s edge. To play politics with American national security was, truly, held to be un-American.
Does it seem to you that partisanship is now the deepest social cleavage in America? If so what do you think will be the consequences of losing this amount of social trust?
Published in General, Politics
Next thing you know, Brad will tell us that fat people weigh more. See? Polarized by Rush.
I have a couple of liberal friends whose every utterance about politics sounds like direct quotes from Rachel Maddow.
For example, the other day we were discussing Clarence Thomas. My liberal friend first said that he is just Scalia’s puppet. I informed him that I’ve read all of Thomas’s important decisions and he has a very distinctive voice, and I find his analysis to often be brilliant. His response: “Do you think he writes his own opinions?” I wish I had said (I didn’t think to say it until later), “No, probably not. He is black, after all.”
Ricochet is social media.
For me, the “no more Mr. Nice Guy” moment was the Bork hearings. I’d be glad to be a nice guy myself, but that’s when I realized that the other side would stop at nothing to get its way. There would be no more hand-shaking-may-the-best-man-win-next-time. It was life or death.
But on my end, I haven’t made a contribution to a public radio station since then.
It wasn’t too long after those hearings that I quit discussing politics at work. Before that we could argue politics and then get back to working together. After that I saw that too many people could not separate politics from anything else.
And I have learned to dislike and distrust conservatives almost as much as liberals.
I live in east Tennessee, a hotbed of right wing nut jobbery. I run into very few liberals. In fact, our office could be considered the focus of RWNJ in the state.
Someone once said that we need to split up while we’re still talking to each other. I’m feeling that that’s more and more true.
The problems all started with the Leftists. They would whine and cry “can’t we all just get along?” and “why must you be so intolerant?”
Conservatives, being naturally genial and tolerant people, allowed Leftists into all sorts of positions. They gravitated to policy-making positions, serving on boards and committees. That stuff appeals to them, whereas conservatives find such activities to be a bore compared to getting things done. But what happens is that it is the members of boards and committees who screen the other nominees.
In this way they came to power in the Episcopal Church, in the universities and in the media and in the Democratic National Committee. After they have the votes, Leftists lose all interest in tolerance and getting along. Purges began in the 1970s.
By the 1990s there were no places left for conservatives in the institutions that had been targeted by the Left. Since the Democrat Party was one of those institutions, the conservatives all moved over to the GOP. Entire church denominations became unwelcoming to conservatives. Academia is a lost cause also.
When Rush Limbaugh first went national during the campaign of 1992, he was the only place besides National Review where a balance of information could be found. He became the go-to source for all the news that the lamestream buried. He became a standard-bearer for conservativism because he was the only conservative with a national voice. He did not cause the polarization; that was already under way.
I was not aware that you believed that we had lost two wars. Do you really mean that there are two wars that have been conclusively lost, rather than that we have paid too high a price for victory? In Iraq, the war I know best, our chief aim was to oust Saddam, which appears to have been done. We had a number of other goals, with eight goals being put forward by Rumsfeld here. There are instances of those taking longer to complete than they ought to have, but I believe that the long term outlook for all of them was positive.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban were toppled and have still not recovered. It is possible that they will retake Kabul in the future, but our loss in the Afghan war still seems to be in the future. Right now, it seems entirely possible that that loss will not take place, although I agree that this is far from certain. The chief objective (taking out Al Qaeda’s leadership) seems to have seen more success than failure to me. Again, the cost has been high, but that’s assessing whether the wars were worth it, not whether they were won.
They were able to make the music industry essentially 100% opposed to Reagan as expressed through music. You get positive songs about Clinton, and who could forget “Solid as Barack”, but if you search for songs about Reagan it’s all “If Reagan played disco/ He’d shoot it to [coc]/ You can’t disco in Jack boots”. I think I agree with you that Reagan was a big part of it. More than targeting Reagan, though, the late 70s and the 80s saw the myth really consolidate that Jim Crow Democrats became Republicans, and that Vietnam and Jim Crow were Republican things.
It’s not so much attacking a guy that matters (although figureheads aren’t unimportant) so much as attacking the party as a whole.
What you’re pointing to is statistics that show that race and religion strongly affect voting habits. If you read Our Kids or Coming Apart you’ll find a wealth of statistical data showing that race doesn’t affect how we live in the way that it used to, though. African Americans are more likely to be poor than whites, but for people in any given income band, race doesn’t make all that much of a difference to housing, education, and such, a real change from a decade ago. Both race and religion are dramatically less divisive than they used to be, with reduced Protestant hostility to Catholicism being the chief driver of that change (Roe, as it turns out, may really have been helpful in bringing the country together in some ways).
What Claire is talking about is a different thing, though. We have a fair amount of data like this suggesting that people are more averse to marriage to people with other political positions than to people of other races. For a lighter version, Comedy Central did a nice piece on Richard Brookhiser here.
I think that iWe is talking about your stuff; it’s true that a degree of partisanship is helpful in a Republic, although even political partisanship has limits. Few Americans want a return to a full blown spoils system. What Lerner did was wrong, and we ought not to make her approach the normative goal for the country.
Political tribalism in non-political contexts gets that way pretty quickly. It’s fine for iWe to preferentially hire Ricochetti, because Ricochet has the labor pool that he wants. If he was trying to set up a store in a Democratic part of Baltimore, though, he might struggle a little more, even if he opened the field more broadly to non-Ricochet conservatives. By and large, any reason we have for being jerks to each other and for not being able to interact in a mutually beneficial manner is regrettable, whether it’s about race, politics, or any other issue.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t important issues to be fought over, but we benefit from those issues being compartmentalized. I enjoy dancing with some incredibly liberal folks and it generally doesn’t get in the way. I’m looking forward to spending time with my Green party family members for a day or so after Christmas. I worked in Iraq for a guy whose views are on the left side of the Western spectrum, but Iraqi developmental issues were generally sufficiently removed from Western issues that our disagreements about elections elsewhere didn’t amount to much. In each case, I’d have lost out (and other would have, too), if I’d not been able to interact, either because of their prejudice or mine. Indeed, for a while that was the case with my sister in law and my brother.
As does Donald Trump’s performance in various polls. Trump’s detractors often claim he’s not really a Republican, or at least not a conservative. An interesting question, should Trump win the nomination, is whether establishment Republicans will support him over Hillary. Mike Murphy famously said, “The base always shows up.” One wonders if the same can be said for the establishment. Is tribal loyalty to the GOP sufficient to bring establishment Republicans out to vote against Hillary?