Article Summary
Introduction
High affective polarization has been shown to affect many non-political aspects of life in the U.S., including where Americans choose to live and with whom they choose to socialize. However, less work has examined how affective polarization might affect attitudes about political policies (issue polarization). This is in part because it is extremely difficult to disentangle whether affective polarization causes issue polarization, issue polarization causes affective polarization, or other processes cause both issue and affective polarization. This paper examines issue polarization over the Covid-19 pandemic, arguing that because there were not pre-existing issue stances before the pandemic, issue polarization on this topic is driven primarily by affective polarization.
Analytical Approach
The authors conducted a survey in 2019 that measured affective polarization prior to the Covid-19 pandemic beginning. Then in April of 2020, they recontacted the previous respondents. In this second survey, participants were randomly assigned to either be asked about “President Trump’s” response or the “United States’” response. They hypothesized that if affective polarization drove issue polarization, there would be more polarization in the “President Trump” condition than in the “United States” condition.
Main Findings
As expected, Democrats offered more favorable evaluations of the United States’ pandemic response than they did about Trump’s pandemic response. Conversely, Republicans offered a more positive evaluation of Trump’s response than of the U.S. response. Further, more affectively polarized Democrats were more critical of both the Trump and U.S. responses, while more polarized Republicans were more positive toward both.
Implications
In the initial study, partisans were affectively polarized but did not have polarized attitudes toward the Covid-19 response before the pandemic began. The authors argue that the emergence of polarization on the issue suggests that affective polarization causes issue polarization. Specifically, they argue that while affective polarization may not have an effect on issues that are already polarized, it can politicize ostensibly neutral or recently emergent ones.
Questions left unanswered
The authors do not address the alternative explanation that other factors (e.g. elite discourse, information silos, etc) drive both affective polarization and issue polarization on these types of emerging policy debates.
Methods and Analysis
Was the study and its analyses pre-registered?: Yes
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
P230 “The figure makes clear that affective polarization has a causal impact on political assessments, leading partisans to politicize evaluations even in cases with an, ostensibly, neutral target”
Limitations / Weaknesses
This design smartly utilizes a natural experiment (i.e. collects data before and after a naturally occurring event to assess the impact of that event). While natural experiments can help narrow in on causality, the work here cannot speak as definitively to causality as the authors suggest. Specifically, the study design does not rule out the possibility that other factors (e.g. elite discourse, information silos, etc) cause both affective and issue polarization.
Open Data & Analyses
Does the article make the replication data publicly available?: Yes
Does the article make the replication analysis scripts publicly available?: No
Article Citation
Druckman, J., Klar, S., Krupnikov, Y., Levendusky, M., & Ryan, J. (2021). How Affective Polarization Shapes Americans’ Political Beliefs: A Study of Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 8(3), 223-234. doi:10.1017/XPS.2020.28
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@article{druckman2021affective,
title={How affective polarization shapes Americans’ political beliefs: A study of response to the COVID-19 pandemic},
author={Druckman, James N and Klar, Samara and Krupnikov, Yanna and Levendusky, Matthew and Ryan, John Barry},
journal={Journal of Experimental Political Science},
volume={8},
number={3},
pages={223--234},
year={2021},
publisher={Cambridge University Press}
}