Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T08:22:53.807Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Partisan Disagreements Arising from Rationalization of Common Information*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2015

Benjamin E. Lauderdale
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Why do opposing partisans sometimes disagree about the facts and processes that are relevant to understanding political issues? One explanation is that citizens may have a psychological tendency toward adopting beliefs about the political world that rationalize their partisan preferences. Previous quantitative evidence for rationalization playing a role in explaining partisan factual disagreement has come from cross-sectional covariation and from correction experiments. In this paper, I argue that these rationalizations can occur as side effects when citizens change their attitudes in response to partisan cues and substantively relevant facts about a political issue. Following this logic, I motivate and report the results of a survey experiment that provides US Republicans and Democrats with information that they will be inclined to rationalize in different ways, because they have different beliefs about which political actors they should agree with. The results are a novel experimental demonstration that partisan disagreements about the political world can arise from rationalization.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 477 - 492
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Benjamin E. Lauderdale, Associate Professor, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE ([email protected]). In addition to the editors and reviewers of this journal, the author thanks Chris Achen, Larry Bartels, John Bullock, Nick Carnes, Andy Eggers, Sarah Goff, Tali Mendelberg, Markus Prior, Marco Steenbergen and many others for comments on this paper and the various working papers from which it derived. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2015.51.

References

Bartels, Larry M. 2002. ‘Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions’. Political Behavior 24(2):117–150.Google Scholar
Bartels, Larry M. 2007. Unequal Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Berelson, Bernard R., Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and McPhee, William N.. 1954. Voting. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bullock, John G. 2011. ‘Elite Influence on Public Opinion in an Informed Electorate’. American Political Science Review 105:496–515.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bullock, John G., Gerber, Alan S., Hill, Seth, and Huber, Gregory A.. 2013. ‘Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs About Politics’. Working Paper No. 19080, NBER, Cambridge, MA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Geoffrey. 2003. ‘Party Over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85(5):808–822.Google Scholar
Evans, Geoffrey, and Pickup, Mark. 2010. ‘Reversing the Causal Arrow: The Political Conditioning of Economic Perceptions in the 2000–2004 U.S. Presidential Election Cycle’. Journal of Politics 72(4):1236–1251.Google Scholar
Festinger, Leon. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Gaines, Brian J., Kuklinski, James H., Quirk, Paul J., Peyton, Buddy, and Verkuilen, Jay. 2007. ‘Same Facts, Different Interpretations: Partisan Motivation and Opinion on Iraq’. Journal of Politics 69(4):957–974.Google Scholar
Gilens, Martin. 2001. ‘Political Ignorance and Collective Policy Preferences’. American Political Science Review 95(2):379–396.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, Lawrence C. 2010. ‘Education, Politics, and Opinions About Climate Change Evidence for Interactions Effects’. Climatic Change 104(2):231–242.Google Scholar
Heider, Fritz. 1958. The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. Hillsdale, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Jerit, Jennifer, and Barabas, Jason. 2012. ‘Partisan Perceptual Bias and the Information Environment’. Journal of Politics 74:672–684.Google Scholar
Kam, Cindy D. 2005. ‘Who Toes the Party Line? Cues, Values, and Individual Differences’. Political Behavior 27(2):163–182.Google Scholar
Krosnick, Jon A. 1990. ‘Americans’ Perceptions of Presidential Candidates: A Test of the Projection Hypothesis’. Journal of Social Issues 46(2):159–182.Google Scholar
Krosnick, Jon A. 2002. ‘The Challenges of Political Psychology: Lessons to Be Learned from Research on Attitude Perception’. In James H. Kuklinski (ed.), Thinking About Political Psychology, 115–152. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kuklinski, James H., Quirk, Paul J., Jerit, Jennifer, Schwider, David, and Rich, Robert F.. 2000. ‘Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship’. Journal of Politics 62(3):790–816.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kull, Steven, Ramsey, Clay, and Lewis, Evan. 2003. ‘Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War’. Political Science Quarterly 118(4):569–598.Google Scholar
Kunda, Ziva. 1987. ‘Motivated Inference: Self-Serving Generation and Evaluation of Causal Theories’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53(4):636–647.Google Scholar
Lauderdale, Benjamin E. 2010. ‘Political Inference When Information is Scarce’. PhD Thesis, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
Lenz, Gabriel S. 2012. Follow the Leader?: How Voters Respond to Politicians’ Policies and Performance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
McCarty, Nolan, Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 2006. Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Mutz, Diana C. 2011. Population-Based Survey Experiments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Nicholson, Stephan P. 2012. ‘Polarizing Cues’. American Journal of Political Science 56(1):52–66.Google Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan, and Reifler, Jason. 2010. ‘When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions’. Political Behavior 32(2):303–330.Google Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan, Reifler, Jason, and Ubel, Peter A.. 2013. ‘The Hazards of Correcting Myths About Health Care Reform’. Medical Care 51(2):127–132.Google Scholar
Osgood, Charles H., and Tannenbaum, Percy H.. 1955. ‘The Principle of Congruity in Prediction of Attitude Change’. Psychological Review 62:42–55.Google Scholar
Prasad, Monica, Perrin, Andrew J., Bezila, Kieran, Hoffman, Steve G., Kindleberger, Kate, Manturuk, Kim, and Powers, Ashleigh Smith. 2009. ‘“There Must be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification’. Sociological Inquiry 79(2):142–162.Google Scholar
Prior, Markus. 2007. Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taber, Charles, and Lodge, Milton. 2006. ‘Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs’. American Journal of Political Science 50(3):755–769.Google Scholar
Tourangeau, Roger, Rips, Lance J., and Rasinski, Kenneth. 2000. The Psychology of Survey Response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, J. Matthew, and Gronke, Paul. 2000. ‘Concordance and Projection in Citizen Perceptions of Congressional Roll-Call Voting’. Legislative Studies Quarterly 25(3):445–467.Google Scholar
Zaller, John R. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Lauderdale supplementary material

Appendix

Download Lauderdale supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 362.1 KB
Supplementary material: Link

Lauderdale Dataset

Dataset

http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WLLMIP
Link