Article Summary
Introduction
This article investigates the impact of social sorting on individuals’ emotional responses to political messages. Partisan sorting refers to the process wherein political, cultural, and racial social identities become more aligned. Democrats increasingly exhibit liberal, secular, and Black identities, while Republicans commonly share conservative, evangelical, and Tea Party identities. The alignment of these identities raises the question of whether social sorting influences how individuals respond emotionally to political messages, both within their own party and in response to messages from the opposing party. Hence, the author poses the following question: How does partisan sorting affect individuals’ emotional responses when they learn about threats from the out-party?
Analytical Approach
The article relies on two pieces of empirical evidence. Firstly, the author utilizes data from the American National Election Study (ANES) to demonstrate that over the last couple of decades, partisan citizens have increasingly expressed anger toward out-party candidates while becoming more enthusiastic about their co-partisan candidates.
Secondly, the author presents findings from a survey experiment conducted in 2011 with 1,100 respondents. At the survey’s outset, respondents were asked to identify themselves as members of various social groups, including evangelical, secular, Tea Party, and Black groups. The author then constructs an index to measure the extent of each individual’s social sorting. The survey also explores policy preferences and the significance of these policies to each respondent.
Subsequently, respondents are assigned to one of five treatment conditions. As depicted in the table below, a subset of respondents viewed a message threatening either the Democratic or Republican party. Another subset encountered a message threatening the implementation of liberal or conservative policy goals. Lastly, a separate subset did not see any message but was also not asked outcome questions.
| Treatment condition | Vignette content |
|---|---|
| Party threat | Blog comment in which Democrats threaten the electoral success of Republicans |
| Blog comment in which Republicans threaten the electoral success of Democrats | |
| Policy threat | Block comments in which liberal policy goals are threatened |
| Block comments in which conservative policy goals are threatened | |
| No message | No message was shown, but also none of the outcome questions were asked |
Following their assignment to the treatment groups, respondents were queried about a range of emotions, including anger, hostility, nervousness, disgust, anxiety, fear, hope, pride, and enthusiasm. Respondents were required to indicate the intensity of these emotions on a scale ranging from “A great deal” to “Not at all.” Subsequently, the author constructed an anger index based on responses to items related to feelings of anger, hostility, and disgust. Similarly, an enthusiasm index was developed using responses to items related to hope, pride, and enthusiasm.
Main Findings
The experimental results indicate that heightened policy preferences and partisan sorting are both linked to more pronounced emotional responses to both threatening and enthusiastic political messages. This finding implies that not only does partisan sorting play a role, but strong policy orientations also contribute to heightened emotional reactions to political messages. However, only individuals with cross-pressured social identities exhibit weaker emotional responses to threats concerning parties and issues.
Additionally, the descriptive analysis of the American National Election Study (ANES) data reveals that partisan citizens have increasingly expressed anger towards out-party presidential candidates and, conversely, have become more enthusiastic about their co-partisan presidential candidates.
Implications
The study’s findings suggest that individuals with cross-cutting social identities exhibit less volatility in their emotional reactions to political events and messages. This moderation is particularly evident when individuals with cross-pressured social identities receive threatening messages about their own party. In contrast, socially sorted identities have the potential to elicit stronger emotional reactions to such messages, and heightened policy preferences may contribute to these intensified responses.
Questions left unanswered
The author recognizes that her experimental evidence and ANES analysis fall short of establishing causal evidence for a direct link between partisan sorting and emotional reactions to political messages. Consequently, she proposes the need for future work to delve into establishing causal relationships in this context. Another question arising from the analysis is the interplay between partisan sorting and policy preferences. Namely, highly socially sorted individuals may be more inclined to hold strong policy preferences, and vice versa.
Methods and Analysis
Was the study and its analyses pre-registered?: Study was conducted before 2015
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
The most immediately noticeable effect in these models is that social sorting has a significantly steeper slope, and therefore a larger overall effect on anger in the presence of both issue-based and party-based threats (p. 15).
Limitations / Weaknesses
While the author implemented a fifth experimental condition with no vignette text, it cannot serve as a control condition because emotional outcome items were not presented to these respondents. Consequently, this design choice precludes a direct comparison of the effects of party and policy messages with respect to a pure control condition. Instead, the author can only compare the effects and heterogeneous responses between party and policy messages. Therefore, the analysis does not reveal how more strongly socially sorted respondents would have reacted to no or a placebo vignette treatment. Such an analysis would have provided more direct evidence of how individuals respond to political messages and how social sorting contributes to heterogeneous treatment effects.
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
Mason, L. (2016). A Cross-Cutting Calm: How Social Sorting Drives Affective Polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly, 80(S1), 351–377.
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@article{Mason.2016,
author = {Mason, Lilliana},
year = {2016},
title = {A Cross-Cutting Calm: How Social Sorting Drives Affective Polarization},
pages = {351--377},
volume = {80},
number = {S1},
journal = {Public Opinion Quarterly}
}