The Nature of Partisan Stereotypes and Mass Polarization, 2008-2016

• In Event: The Psychology of Political Polarization in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Recent research suggests that people’s mental images of the parties matter for partisan polarization. Specifically, individuals who think of partisans in a predominantly traits-based manner – that is, in a way consistent with partisanship as a social identity – display dramatically higher levels of both affective and ideological polarization than those who mainly conceptualize the parties in terms of positions on various political issues or as aggregations of other social groups. While important, this work has not yet considered trends over time, or how party images might fluctuate with different political environments. We look to directly fill this gap and explore how the public’s relative tendency to think about partisans in these different ways varies with time and how this variation relates to over-time changes in mass polarization. To do so, we employ structural topic modeling to examine open-ended responses regarding both major political parties from the 2008, 2012, and 2016 American National Election Studies. We also explore the way different themes in these responses correlate with key political and demographic variables. This research advances our understanding of partisan polarization by helping to clarify mass conceptions of partisanship itself, the relationship between stereotypes of the parties and attitudes toward those parties, and the temporal dimension of these relationships. We discuss the implications of this research for the study of partisanship, polarization, and political behavior.

Authors

• Ethan C Busby, Northwestern University

• Adam Howat, Northwestern University

• Richard M Shafranek, Northwestern University