Article Summary
Introduction
Americans appear increasingly polarized, both with regard to their policy views and their feelings toward non-copartisans. While up to the time of this paper’s publication the focus of scholarship on affective polarization had been on causal mechanisms behind the phenomena, Iyengar and Krupekin turn their focus to the behavioral and attitudinal consequences of affective polarization in this 2018 paper. Specifically, they aim to determine whether partisan affect is part of a broader attitudinal belief system and if partisan affect has consequences for behavioral political outcomes, with a focus on political participation. With a longer time horizon (1970-2016), these results help situate the current state of affective polarization in the broader contemporary political context, with implications for political and social civility writ large.
Analytical Approach
The authors utilize data from the American National Election Studies’ (ANES) national survey from the 1970s through the 2016 election cycle. Each wave of the survey yields several thousand respondents, which are split (in recent years) between in-person and online questionnaires. For their main variables of interest, the authors track feeling thermometers of parties and candidates, how well certain traits described candidates, and emotional responses to candidates.
Most analyses involve simple correlations between variables (such as feeling thermometers of Republicans versus Democrats). These correlations are meant to document the level of “constraint” imposed by affect on attitudes. The greater the correlations, the more constrained a respondent’s belief system; certain beliefs more reliably “go together” than others.
Do determine the relationship between partisan affect on political participation, the authors regressed self-reported political participation (both voting and non-voting, the latter being an index of various political behaviors) on in- and out-party feeling thermometers and various demographic controls (partisanship, age, gender, race, year of survey, and education) using a binomial logistic regression. Feeling thermometer ratings were interacted with survey year to gauge changing levels of influence such feelings had on behavior.
Main Findings
The authors start with a series of descriptive analyses. They show a steep decline in out-party affect among members of both parties from the 1970s to 2016 (with larger numbers rating the opposite party at the coldest possible level), although in-party affect has remained relatively stable. These trends extend to attribution of positive and negative traits to presidential candidates of parties, with more pronounced affective polarization for those responding to the online survey.
Turning to levels of attitudinal constraint, the authors find an increasingly negative correlation between feeling thermometer ratings of Democratic and Republican candidates, implying in-party love and out-party hate are two sides of the same coin. These correlations extend to all positive and negative trait items for candidates as well, with respondents more consistently evaluating candidates across all such traits.
Finally, the authors examine the relationship between partisan affect and political participation. They find the effect of in-party affect on voting has declined to zero over the past 30 years (with the effect of participatory behaviors also declining but less dramatically). However, out-party affect has become much more strongly related to both voting and participatory actions, suggesting the driving force behind political participation is increasingly negative affect of the out-party.
Implications
The authors document several implications of their findings. Most importantly, attitudes and behavior driven increasingly by negative affect have disturbing consequences for political accountability. If the calculus is as simple as “us versus them,” candidates seem increasingly able to escape sanction from their own voters simply by not being a member of the other party. Antagonizing the other party may be rewarded more than delivering on promises to one’s own constituents.
The authors close with several questions for future researchers, many of which have been addressed in research in the following years. First, how can the effect of partisanship be isolated from other aspects of social identity when those components are becoming increasingly correlated? Second, given the historical trend toward more affective polarization, how can the tide be reversed? What interventions may prove useful in stemming rising partisan antipathy? While many researchers have subsequently taken on this question, it is still very much an open area of research.
Questions left unanswered
Iyengar and Krupenkin start with a lofty objective: to evaluate the “attitudinal and behavioral consequences of heightened partisan affect.” In many ways, they achieve this. However, they only analyze a small subset of attitudes and behaviors. For attitudes, the system of constraint is limited to beliefs and feelings regarding party and candidate warmth, but this is likely where we’d most expect to see constraint in belief systems. Left unanswered is whether this constraint extends to policy attitudes or non-political beliefs. Similarly, while affect may inform participatory behavior, many other behaviors are also potentially implicated by increasingly negative feelings toward non-copartisans. This opens another question of where we should expect to see negative affect having an effect on attitudes and behavior, and what are the limits of such beliefs?
Methods and Analysis
Was the study and its analyses pre-registered?: No
Did the study rely on proxy variables to measure polarization?: No
Were standard p-value thresholds used (p<.05 or 95% Confidence Intervals that don’t overlap zero)?: Yes
- Largest p-value presented as significant: 0.05
Were correlational results interpreted with causal language?: Yes
Section “Partisan Affect and Political Participation”, Page 214, last paragraph
Limitations / Weaknesses
While Iyengar and Krupenkin do not frame their analysis as causal, occasionally the description of their results suggests such a relationship. For example, “More than ever, it is partisans’ dislike and distrust of the opposing party that leads them to participate in political life.” This is too strong a claim given the constraints of the analysis run: negative attitudes and political participation could both plausibly be a function of some third, confounding variable. Alternatively, the relationship could flow in the other direction: participation may lead to negative experiences with the political system, increasing negative affect toward the opposite party. The authors cannot rule out either possibility with their analytical approach. Even a more cautious interpretation of the results would not necessarily yield a conclusion that negative affect is the “dominant” factor in political participation. As the authors suggest, parties are becoming increasingly sorted demographically, so it is plausible one of the demographic controls not listed in the regression results is similarly becoming increasingly strong with every passing year.
Open Data & Analyses
Does the article make the replication data publicly available?: No
Does the article make the replication analysis scripts publicly available?: No
Article Citation
Iyengar, S., & Krupenkin, M. (2018). The strengthening of partisan affect. Political Psychology, 39(S1), 201–218. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12487
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@article{https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12487,
author = {Iyengar, Shanto and Krupenkin, Masha},
title = {The Strengthening of Partisan Affect},
journal = {Political Psychology},
volume = {39},
number = {S1},
pages = {201-218},
keywords = {parties, partisanship, polarization},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12487},
url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12487},
eprint = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/pops.12487},
year = {2018}
}