Information Wars: Polarization and Ideological Think Tanks

• In Event: Poster Session: Legislative Studies

Abstract

Since the 1990s, Congress has decreased its internal capacity to process information by cutting the budgets of the analytical bureaucracies and committee staff. The void created by these cuts allowed party-aligned, privately-financed think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and Center for American Progress, to rise to prominence. This paper examines the consequences the shift in the information processing environment from non-partisan information production by the analytical bureaucracies to party-aligned think tanks. It argues that extended political party elites were able to use the newly ideological information environment to shift preferences toward the extremes, increasing polarization on issues with more information from party-aligned think tanks and less information from the analytical bureaucracies. The paper presents new data on the policy agenda of Congressional Research Service reports and party-aligned think tank white papers using the Policy Agendas Project issue coding scheme. Using time series cross-sectional methods, it finds that as the balance of information in an issue area becomes more ideological, polarization in roll call votes on that issue area increases. However, these effects are limited to domestic policy, as roll call votes on defense and foreign affairs remain bipartisan despite high levels of attention from party-aligned think tanks.

Author

• E.J. Fagan, University of Texas at Austin