The Differential Impact of Ideology on Out-group and In-group Party Affect

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Psychology

Abstract

Affective polarization has increased in the United States over the last 40 years, defined as partisans disliking their out-group party (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012). The dominant explanation for this rise in partisan animus has focused on the role of partisan identities, but several scholars have claimed that differences on policy attitudes are more important. This paper makes three contributions to this debate. First, I offer a theoretical critique of a common assumption in the literature that positive affect towards the in-group party is necessarily linked to negative affect towards the out-group party; social identity theory is explicit that “out-group hate” emerges from “in-group love” only under certain conditions (Brewer 1999). Second, I show that the empirical relationship between affect towards the in-group and out-group parties is surprisingly weak, which means that measures of partisan bias that combine attitudes towards the in-group and out-group parties are poor proxies of how much someone dislikes the out-group party. Third, because affect towards the in-group and out-group parties are not analytically or empirically interchangeable, I use the same set of predictors to model each of them with ANES data from 1984 – 2012, to compare what causes Democrats and Republicans to like their own party and dislike the opposing party, respectively. I find that: 1) strength of partisan identification is an important predictor of both affect towards the in-group and out-group parties; 2) ideology is much more important for predicting affect towards the out-group party than in-group party; and 3) for Republicans, ideological identity is consistently more important at predicting feelings towards the parties than policy positions, while for Democrats policy positions are more important.

Author

• Jonathon Kingzette, Ohio State University