Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

How Ideology Fuels Affective Polarization

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Political Behavior Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Scholars have reached mixed conclusions about the implications of increased political polarization for citizen decision-making. In this paper, we argue that citizens respond to ideological divergence with heightened affective polarization. Using a survey experiment conducted with a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens, we find that increased ideological differences between political figures produce increasingly polarized affective evaluations, and that these differences are especially large among respondents with stronger ideological commitments and higher levels of political interest. We provide further support for these findings in an observational study of citizens’ evaluations of the U.S. Senators from their state. We also find that the polarizing effects of ideological differences can be largely mitigated with biographical information about the public officials, which suggests that the pernicious consequences of ideological polarization can be overcome by focusing on matters other than political disagreement.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. See, e.g., Dalia Sussman and Marina Stefar, April 10, 2010, “Obama and the ‘Birthers’ in the Latest Poll”, New York Times. Tesler (2012, 2013) further shows how Americans’ evaluations of Obama’s policy initiatives were polarized by racial attitudes.

  2. Brody and Page (1973) argue that small or negligible differences in evaluations of competing candidates may be indicative of indifference and thus lead these citizens not to vote. However, Brody and Page also show that citizens who fall into this category often resolve their indifference by relying on other evaluative criteria, such as shared partisanship.

  3. For excellent reviews of this literature, see Hetherington (2008), Carsey and Layman (2006), and Fiorina et al. (2008).

  4. These authors implicate difference mechanisms for why affective polarization has increased.  Abramowitz and Webster (2015) argues that citizens have prompted increased affective polarization by adopting more extreme ideological preferences, while Iyengar et al. (2012) use social identity theory to argue that citizens are responding to partisan group attachments.

  5. Based on the number of invitations sent to online panelists, this yielded a response rate of 66.8 %.

  6. Specifically, the question text was as follows: “We hear a lot of talk these days about liberals and conservatives. Here is an eleven-point scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged, from extremely liberal (−5) to extremely conservative (+5). And, of course, other people have views somewhere in between, at points −4, −3, −2, −1, 0, +1, +2, +3, or +4. What about you—where would you place yourself on this scale?”.

  7. For other research on the importance of ideological distinctions for voter decision-making, see, e.g., Hetherington (2001), Levendusky (2009), and Wright and Berkman (1986).

  8. These biographies were modeled after the descriptions provided by The Oregonian for the two candidates running for congress in 2010 for the 3rd congressional district in Washington state. Though these candidates biographies may not necessarily be representative of the average set of congressional candidates, that these candidates ran against each other in a relatively contested race suggests that the descriptions shown to subjects contain a high degree of realism.

  9. A small percentage of respondents did not provide feeling thermometer ratings, and are thus excluded from the analyses. Fortunately, the patterns of missingness do not appear to be systematically correlated with assignment to treatment (F = 1.51, p = 0.209). The number of missing responses across each condition ranged from 60 to 79, and thus we have 1725 complete responses.

  10. We note, however, that other scholarship treats affective evaluations as summary indicators of cognitive processes (e.g., Lodge et al. 1989), in which case emotions and political attitudes are largely inseparable.

  11. This prediction is consistent with both proximity (Downs 1957) and directional Rabinowitz and Macdonald (1989) theories of candidate preference.

  12. For the purposes of this comparison, we omit respondents who placed themselves at the midpoint of the ideological scale, as they would be predicted to be indifferent based on the candidates’ ideological locations.

  13. The t statistic for the difference in means is 3.29 (p = 0.001).

  14. The t statistic for the difference in means is 5.52 (p < 0.001).

  15. The treatment effect is negative (−3.4) among respondents who self-placed at −1, although this difference is not statistically distinguishable from zero.

  16. Even in the context of this hypothetical election, we find that political interest is strongly associated with the perceived importance of the election outcome. The bivariate correlation between our binary indicator political interest and a binary indicator of the importance of the election outcome is r = 0.40. The coefficient for political interest is also positive and statistically significant in a probit regression of the importance of the election outcome on an indicator for the divergent treatment condition, political interest, and the series of control variables shown in Table 1.

  17. Seven respondents did not provide a response for their level of interest.

  18. We note that we have also estimated models in which we included both interaction terms in the same model, both for the experimental results discussed here and the observational results presented below. We find consistent results when doing so. The main difference is that the coefficient for the interaction between Ideological divergence and Political interest in the analysis of the experimental data attenuates from 11.79 to 4.19, and falls just short of statistical significance (p < 0.117). Please see Table A.1.

  19. Our results are also robust to include a measure of the strength of partisan identity, measured using a folded version of the seven-point party identification question that ranges from 0 to 3. Please see Table A.2.

  20. Please see Appendix B and Table B.1 for the results of these supplementary analyses.

  21. We obtain the same patterns when estimating linear regression models similar to those shown in Table 1. The coefficient for the interaction term between ideological divergence and assignment to the biographical information condition is −13.57 (SE = 2.88), p < 0.001. Please see Table A.3 in the supplementary online resource.

  22. Among respondents who received the biographical information, the effect of candidate divergence on the proportion of respondents who reported a preference for Candidate A was 1.6 % points (SE = 4.6). Among respondents who received only the ideological positions, the effect of candidate divergence was 1.2 % points (SE = 4.8). The difference between these treatment effects is negligible: 0.4 % points (SE = 6.6), with a t statistic of 0.06 and corresponding p value of 0.953.

  23. We dropped observations in which a state had more than two Senators in the same Congress due to, for instance, resignation or death.

  24. The average level of divergence in DW-NOMINATE estimates was 0.30, and ranged from 0 to 1.19.

  25. These years include: 1978, 1980, 1982, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, 2004, and 2008.

  26. We uncover no evidence that the probability of providing feeling thermometer ratings is associated with the divergence in senators’ roll call voting records. We created an indicator for whether each respondent provided a thermometer rating for both of their Senators and used logistic regression to explore its correlates. We find statistically significant evidence that it is associated with political interest, education, age, sex, and race. However, the coefficient for ideological divergence falls far short of statistical significance.

  27. This corresponds to question number VCF0313, which reads as follows: “Some people seem to follow what’s going on in government and public affairs most of the time, whether there’s an election going on or not. Others aren’t that interested. Would you say you follow what’s going on in government and public affairs most of the time, some of the time, only now and then, or hardly at all?” A little more than a quarter (26.4 %) of respondents said they follow government and public affairs “most of the time.” Our results are also robust to including these responses as a continuous or four-point interval measure.

  28. These results are shown in Table A.4.

References

  • Abramowitz, A. I. (2010). The disappearing center: Engaged citizens, polarization, and American democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Abramowitz, A., & Webster, S. (2015). All politics is national: The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. house and senate elections in the 21st century. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association Conference (pp. 16–19). Chicago, IL.

  • Abramowitz, A. I., & Saunders, K. L. (2008). Is polarization a myth? Journal of Politics, 70, 542–555.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Abramowitz, A. I., & Stone, W. J. (2006). The bush effect: Polarization, turnout, and activism in the 2004 presidential election. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 36, 141–154.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Alvarez, R. M. (1998). Information and elections. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • American Political Science Association, Committee on Political Parties, (1950). Toward a more responsible two-party system. American Political Science Review. 44, pp. 1–96

  • Ashworth, S., & de Mesquita, E. B. (2009). Elections with platform and valence competition. Games and Economic Behavior, 67, 191–216.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bafumi, J., & Shapiro, R. Y. (2009). A new partisan voter. Journal of Politics, 71, 1–24.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baldassarri, Delia, & Gelman, Andrew. (2008). Partisans without constraint: Political polarization and trends in American public opinion. American Journal of Sociology, 114, 408–446.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barabas, J., & Jerit, J. (2010). Are survey experiments externally valid? American Political Science Review, 104, 226–242.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bolce, L., & De Maio, G. (1999). The anti-Christian fundamentalist factor in contemporary politics. Public Opinion Quarterly. doi:10.1086/297869

    Google Scholar 

  • Brody, R. A., & Page, B. I. (1973). Indifference, alienation, and rational decisions: The effects of candidate evaluations on turnout and the vote. Public Choice, 15, 1–17.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bullock, J. G. (2011). Elite influence on public opinion in an informed electorate. American Political Science Review, 105, 496–515.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buttice, M., & Stone, W. (2012). Candidates matter: Policy and quality differences in congressional elections. Journal of Politics, 74, 870–887.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carsey, T. M., & Layman, G. C. (2006). Changing sides or changing minds? party identification and policy preferences in the American electorate. American Journal of Political Science, 50, 464–477.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clark, M., & Leiter, D. (2014). Does the ideological dispersion of parties mediate the electoral impact of valence? A cross-national study of party support in nine western European democracies. Comparative Political Studies, 47, 171–202.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Downs, A. (1957). an economic theory of democracy. New York: Harper and Row.

    Google Scholar 

  • Druckman, J. (2004). Priming the vote: Campaign effects in a U.S. senate election. Political Psychology, 25(4), 577–594.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Druckman, J. N., Peterson, E., & Slothuus, R. (2013). How elite partisan polarization affects public opinion formation. American Political Science Review, 107, 57–79.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fiorina, M. P., Abrams, S. A., & Pope, J. C. (2008). Polarization in the American public: Misconceptions and misreadings. Journal of Politics, 70, 556–560.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fiorina, M. P., Abrams, S. J., & Pope, J. C. (2011). Culture War? The myth of a polarized America (3rd ed.). New York: Pearson-Longman.

    Google Scholar 

  • Funk, C. (1997). Implications of political expertise in candidate trait evaluations. Political Research Quarterly, 50(3), 675–697.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Funk, C. (1999). Bringing the candidate into models of candidate evaluation. The Journal of Politics, 61(03), 700.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Garner, A., & Palmer, H. (2011). Polarization and issue consistency over time. Political Behavior, 33, 225–246.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gilens, M., Vavreck, L., & Cohen, M. (2007). The mass media and the public’s assessments of presidential candidates, 1952–2000. Journal of Politics, 69, 1160–1175.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Groseclose, T. (2001). A model of candidate location when one candidate has a valence advantage. American Journal of Political Science, 45, 862–886.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hetherington, M. J. (2008). Turned off or turned on? How polarization affects political engagement. In Red and blue nation? Consequences and correction of America’s polarized politics. Washington, D.C.: Brookings.

  • Hetherington, M. (2001). Resurgent mass partisanship: The role of elite polarization. American Political Science Review, 95(3), 619–631.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Iyengar, S., Sood, G., & Lelkes, Y. (2012). Affect, not ideology: A social identity perspective on polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly, 76, 405–431.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Iyengar, S., & Westwood, S. J. (2013). Fear and loathing across party lines: New evidence on group polarization. American Journal of Political Science, 59, 690–707.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jacobson, G. C. (2003). Partisan polarization in presidential support: The electoral connection. Congress & the Presidency, 30, 1–36.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jacobson, G. C. (2006). Polarized opinion in the states: Partisan differences in approval ratings of governors, senators, and George W. Bush. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 36, 732–757.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jacobson, G. C. (2011). Legislative success and political failure: The public’s reaction to Barack Obama’s early presidency. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 41, 220–243.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jerit, J., Barabas, J., & Clifford, S. (2013). Comparing contemporaneous laboratory and field experiments on media effects. Public Opinion Quarterly, 77, 256–282.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jessee, S. A. (2009). Spatial voting in the 2004 presidential election. American Political Science Review, 103, 59–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jewitt, C. E., & Goren P. (2015). Ideological structure and consistency in the age of polarization. American Politics Research. (Forthcoming).

  • Lau, R. R. (1986). Political schemata, candidate evaluations, and voting behavior. In R. R. Lau & D. O. Sears (Eds.), Political cognition: The 19th annual carnegie symposium on cognition (pp. 95–125). Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lau, R., & Redlawsk, D. (2001). Advantages and disadvantages of cognitive heuristics in political decision making. American Journal of Political Science, 45(4), 951.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lavine, H., & Gschwend, T. (2006). Issues, party and character: The moderating role of ideological thinking on candidate evaluation. British Journal of Political Science, 37, 139–163.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lelkes, Y., Shanto I., & Gaurav S. (2013). The hostile audience: Selective exposure to partisan sources and affective polarization. Working Paper. Stanford, CA: Stanford University.

  • Levendusky, M. (2009). The partisan sort: How liberals became democrats and conservatives became republicans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Lodge, M., McGraw, K. M., & Stroh, P. (1989). An impression-driven model of candidate evaluation. American Political Science Review, 83, 399–419.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lupton, R. N., Myers, W. M., & Thornton, J. R. (2015). Political sophistication and the dimensionality of elite and mass attitudes, 1980–2004. Journal of Politics, 77, 368–380.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marcus, G. E. (1988). The structure of emotional response: 1984 presidential candidates. American Political Science Review, 82, 737–761.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marcus, G. E., Neuman, W. R., & MacKuen, Michael. (2000). Affective intelligence and political judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mason, L. (2015). I disrespectfully agree: The differential effects of partisan sorting on social and issue polarization. American Journal of Political Science, 59, 128–145.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McCarty, N., Poole, K. T., & Rosenthal, H. (2006). Polarized America: The dance of ideology and unequal riches. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McDermott, M. L. (1997). Voting cues in low-information elections: Candidate gender as a social information variable in contemporary United States elections. American Journal of Political Science, 41, 270–283.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McDermott, M. L. (2009). Religious stereotyping and voter support for evangelical candidates. Political Research Quarterly, 62, 340–354.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Miller, A. (1990). Public judgments of house and senate candidates. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 15(4), 525–542.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Miller, A. H., Wattenberg, M. P., & Malanchuk, O. (1986). Schematic assessments of presidential candidates. American Political Science Review, 80, 521–540.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nicholson, S. P. (2011). Dominating cues and the limits of elite influence. Journal of Politics, 73, 1165–1177.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Plane, D. L., & Gershtenson, J. (2004). Candidates’ ideological locations, abstention, and turnout in U.S. midterm senate elections. Political Behavior, 26, 69–93.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rabinowitz, G., & Macdonald, S. E. (1989). A directional theory of issue voting. American Political Science Review, 83, 93–121.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rogowski, J. C. (2014). Electoral choice, ideological conflict, and political participation. American Journal of Political Science, 58, 479–494.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rogowski, J. Voter decision-making with polarized cues. British Journal of Political Science. (Forthcoming).

  • Shor, B., & Rogowski, J. Ideology and the U.S. congressional vote. Political Science Research and Methods. (Forthcoming).

  • Sniderman, P. M., & Stiglitz, E. H. (2012). The reputational premium: A theory of party identification and policy reasoning. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stokes, D. E. (1963). Spatial models of party competition. American Political Science Review, 57, 368–377.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tesler, M. (2012). The spillover of racialization into health care: How president obama polarized public opinion by racial attitudes and race. American Journal of Political Science, 56, 690–704.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tesler, M. (2013). The return of old-fashioned racism to White Americans’ partisan preferences in the early Obama era. The Journal of Politics, 75(01), 110–123.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thornton, J. R. (2012). The impact of elite polarization on partisan ambivalence and indifference. Political Behavior, 35, 409–428.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tomz, M., & Van Houweling, R. P. (2008). Candidate positioning and voter choice. American Political Science Review, 102, 218–303.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Valentino, N., Hutchings, V., & White, I. (2002). Cues that matter: How political ads prime racial attitudes during campaigns. American Political Science Review, 96(1), 75–90.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vegetti, F. (2014). From political conflict to partisan evaluations: How citizens assess party ideology and competence in polarized elections. Electoral Studies, 35, 230–241.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wright, G. C., & Berkman, M. B. (1986). Candidates and policy in United States senate elections. American Political Science Review, 80, 567–588.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We thank the Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences and the co-PIs, Jeremy Freese and Penny Visser, for funding the survey experiment component of this project. We also thank Betsy Sinclair and two anonymous TESS reviewers for their suggestions and feedback in designing the experiment. Finally, we are grateful to the Editor and three anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and criticisms on earlier versions of the manuscript. The data and replication files for this study can be accessed via the Political Behavior Dataverse at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/B9OYRP.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, Campus Box 1063, St. Louis, MO, 63130, USA

    Jon C. Rogowski

  2. Department of Political Science, Columbia University, 7th Floor, IAB, 420 West 118th Street, Mail Code 3320, New York, NY, 10018, USA

    Joseph L. Sutherland

Authors
  1. Jon C. Rogowski
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Joseph L. Sutherland
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jon C. Rogowski.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 30 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Rogowski, J.C., Sutherland, J.L. How Ideology Fuels Affective Polarization. Polit Behav 38, 485–508 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-015-9323-7

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-015-9323-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation