Partisanship as Pictures in Our Heads

• In Event: The Psychology of Partisanship

Abstract

Political psychologists have long posited that social groups play a pivotal role in political cognition and behavior. An integrated theory linking social attitudes and political beliefs that relied on a schematic model of human cognition was developed nearly three decades ago (Conover 1988; Conover and Feldman 1984). Beginning with the assumption that people have limited cognitive capacity and, generally, do not invest much in making judgments about politics, the model suggested that groups figured prominently in the pictures in our heads when we think about issues, candidates, parties and the like. While this group schematic model seemed to perform well in some respects, empirical evidence has remained scarce and quite circumstantial. This has been primarily due to measurement challenges: since the theory posits the automatic and even non-conscious activation of group schemas, it cannot be directly tested using standard self reports. As a result, skeptics remain concerned that the role of groups may be more rationalization than cause of decisions driven primarily by narrower economic interests. In this paper, we build upon the recent developments in political psychology to propose a new measurement strategy. We conceptualize group schemas in politics using the implicit cognition framework and develop a measure of schema strength that employs a response latency task similar to the now familiar Implicit Attitude Test. Our resulting measure of group schema strength does not depend on respondents’ self-reports and is applicable in different social and political contexts. We validate the measure in three empirical studies about how social group images form the schematic building blocks for partisan identification in contemporary politics.

Authors

• Nicholas A. Valentino, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Kirill Zhirkov, University of Michigan