Abstract
Many Americans associate themselves with their political party in a deep, visceral way. Voter identification with a political party has powerful implications for not just how voters behave, but how there are exposed to and receive information about the world. We describe how this tying of one’s self-concept to a party, which can be analogous to die-hard sports fandom, plays a central role in political cognition. It leads voters identifying with the two parties to perceive the political (and even seemingly apolitical) world in dramatically different ways. We detail the psychological mechanisms by which this party identity produces these distortions and offer examples of the bias that emerges. We conclude by discussing the implications of these phenomena for perpetuating our current hyper-polarized political discourse.
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©2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- The Group Theory of Parties: Identity Politics, Party Stereotypes, and Polarization in the 21st Century
- Partisanship as Social Identity; Implications for the Study of Party Polarization
- Losing Common Ground: Social Sorting and Polarization
- Affective Polarization and Ideological Sorting: A Reciprocal, Albeit Weak, Relationship
- Seeing Red (or Blue): How Party Identity Colors Political Cognition
- Who is Ideological? Measuring Ideological Consistency in the American Public
- The Dynamics of Voter Preferences in the 2016 Presidential Election
- Book reviews
- When Bad Policy Makes Good Politics
- Opting Out of Congress: Partisan Polarization the Decline of Moderate Candidates
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- The Group Theory of Parties: Identity Politics, Party Stereotypes, and Polarization in the 21st Century
- Partisanship as Social Identity; Implications for the Study of Party Polarization
- Losing Common Ground: Social Sorting and Polarization
- Affective Polarization and Ideological Sorting: A Reciprocal, Albeit Weak, Relationship
- Seeing Red (or Blue): How Party Identity Colors Political Cognition
- Who is Ideological? Measuring Ideological Consistency in the American Public
- The Dynamics of Voter Preferences in the 2016 Presidential Election
- Book reviews
- When Bad Policy Makes Good Politics
- Opting Out of Congress: Partisan Polarization the Decline of Moderate Candidates