Negative Political Identities and Party Activism

• In Event: Field and Natural Experiments on Electoral Behavior

Abstract

Over recent years, there has been an increase in negative partisanship across Western democracies, as well as an emergence of new political identities structured around the liberal-authoritarian dimension. Emerging issue-based identities compete with traditional party identities. Simultaneously, politics is increasingly characterised by strong negative feelings towards both partisan and issue-based outgroups. In times of such political turmoil, how can parties use salient political identities to mobilise supporters? Are negative identity cues more powerful than positive ones in encouraging costly political behaviour?

We conducted a large-scale, pre-registered randomized field experiment in collaboration with a major UK political party (PAP available at: https://osf.io/nzvku). We test whether supporters of the party were more likely to donate and volunteer if they were exposed to negative rather than positive political identity cues, and whether the effect of these cues varied depending on whether they primed traditional party identities or salient issue-based identities. Party supporters received either an email invoking a positive party identity (helping the in-party win), an email invoking negative party identity (stopping the out-party from winning), an email invoking positive Brexit identities (supporting Remain), an email invoking negative Brexit identities (stopping Brexit), or no email (control). We hypothesised that negative political identities are more effective in encouraging costly political behaviour than positive ones, and that negative cues should be more effective when paired with issue-based identities. We use time-stamped confirmed donations to the political party as a measure of mobilisation.

In line with our theoretical expectations, we find that emails containing negative identity cues are more effective than positive cues in encouraging donations. Interestingly, the type of identity invoked (a traditional party cue vs an issue-based identity cue) does not condition the effect of negative identity cues. Rallying voters around stopping a disliked out-group from winning is a powerful and effective mobilisation strategy for political parties. Our results provide novel experimental evidence that negative identities matter when it comes to affecting costly, real-world political behaviour. This paper thus makes an important contribution to the literature on affective polarisation and negative partisanship, as well as to the literature on campaign mobilisation and donations.

Authors

• Katharina Lawall, London School of Economics

• Stuart J Turnbull-Dugarte, King’s college London

• Florian Foos, London School of Economics and Political Science