(iPoster) Causal Theories of Partisan Minds

• In Event: Poster Sessions: IR Theory; Experiments; Presidents and Executive Politics; & Political Cognition, Crisis, and Conflict Attitudes
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Experiments

Abstract

Do citizens believe partisanship drives policy preferences, or that policy preferences motivate party choice? Drawing on the theory-based causal induction framework, I model lay beliefs as Bayesian networks and test their implications in two studies. In a pre-registered incentivized laboratory experiment, I find that while independents consistently believe others are policy-motivated, partisans seem to exhibit a double standard: they attribute policy-motivations to co-partisans but attribute out-partisan policy preferences to partisanship. However, these inferences change with experience: as participants observe greater intra-party diversity, inferences about out-partisans shift toward a policy-motivated model. A second study reanalyzes 30 candidate choice studies and finds a similar asymmetry in elite evaluation: partisans use party-incongruent policy stances to discount the policy commitments of outpartisan elites but treat copartisan elites as having authentic copartisan priorities even when they defy party norms elsewhere.

Author

• Marli Dunietz, Florida State University