Band 19, Heft 3

Using the extensive battery of issue questions included in the 2020 ANES survey, I find that a single underlying liberal-conservative dimension largely explains the policy preferences of ordinary Americans across a wide range of issues including the size and scope of the welfare state, abortion, gay and transgender rights, race relations, immigration, gun control and climate change. I find that the distribution of preferences on this liberal-conservative issue scale is highly polarized with Democratic identifiers and leaners located overwhelmingly on the left, Republican identifiers and leaners located overwhelmingly on the right and little overlap between the two distributions. Finally, I show that ideological preferences strongly predict feelings toward the parties and presidential candidates. These findings indicate that polarization in the American public has a rational foundation. Hostility toward the opposing party reflects strong disagreement with the policies of the opposing party. As long as the parties remain on the opposite sides of almost all major issues, feelings of mistrust and animosity are unlikely to diminish regardless of Donald Trump’s future role in the Republican Party.

The United States’ long-standing broad “catch-all” political parties have historically combined voters from distinct regions of the country, each including both rural and urban dwellers. Since the late 1990s, however, rural Americans nationwide have increasingly supported the Republican Party, while urbanites have persisted in their allegiance to the Democratic Party. The growing rural-urban divide has become mapped onto American polarization in ways that are fostering tribalism. This place-based cleavage is now contributing to the transformation of the nation’s politics and that of many states. It also threatens to have deleterious effects on democracy.

People belong to political tribes that support particular positions on a variety of substantive policy topics; however, when the topics that divide a polity involve identity, in-groups, out-groups, core institutions, homogeneity, diversity, security from outsiders, and immigration, tribalism will be especially ferocious and debilitating. I refer to tribes based on these core matters as proto-tribes because the issues involved connect to our species’ evolutionary past. Due to longstanding individual predispositions, people manifest deep policy preferences either 1) to protect their society’s insider populations and institutions by being relentlessly vigilant against the intrusions of human outsiders, especially immigrants or 2) to enrich their society by embracing diverse outsiders and by being vigilant against the untoward power of insider institutions. Whenever societal conflict centers on proto-tribes—as was the case in the 1860s and 1960s and is the case today—rather than tribes that emphasize positions on issues such as taxes, regulations, transgender rights, and preferred governmental structure, the political system will be endangered.

Contemporary American politics is notable for its high levels of anger and partisan antipathy. While these developments are attributable in large part to societal-level sociopolitical trends, I argue that they are also the result of politicians’ deliberate and strategic attempts to elicit mass-level anger. In this paper, I analyze over one million tweets sent by members of the 116th Congress to demonstrate that political elites do appeal to anger and that the angriest of these appeals are most likely to come from the most ideologically extreme Members of Congress – that is, the most liberal Democrats and the most conservative Republicans. I further show that this relationship is stronger for Democratic politicians, and that authoring tweets with a greater amount of anger generates more engagement. The results suggest that as long as politicians have an incentive to appeal to mass-level anger, the divisions characterizing American politics are likely to persist.

This article explores Rush Limbaugh’s efforts to tribalize American politics through his racially divisive, falsehood-ridden portrayal of President Obama. By playing and preying on white anxiety, the host laid the groundwork for the election of a president who essentially adopted his view of the Obama presidency. Limbaugh’s rhetoric about Obama serves as a case study whereby the most influential part of the conservative media during those years represents the whole. “How did we get here?” is the essential question right now in American politics. How did we go from a society that relatively easily elected Barack Obama twice to one that, popular vote loss aside, elected Donald Trump, and came within a small popular vote shift in three states from doing so again in 2020? Analyzing how Limbaugh ginned up white racial anxiety about a Black president helps us understand the rise of Trump, who began his White House campaign by serving as the nation’s birther-in-chief and who, in his reaction to the white nationalist terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, to name just one example, demonstrated his reliance on white identity politics. As Jamelle Bouie wrote: “You can draw a direct line to the rise of Trump from the racial hysteria of talk radio—where Rush Limbaugh, a Trump booster, warned that Obama would turn the world upside down.”

Scholarship on partisanship has been transformed by political scientists’ embrace of social and cognitive psychology in the past few decades. This interdisciplinary union has drastically changed the way political scientists examine the origins and effects of partisanship. In this essay, I provide a brief history of scholarship on partisanship, its transformation into a partisan identity as well as its role in the study of polarization. I then demonstrate how this identity framework has propelled research on negative partisan identity in the U.S. two-party system and European multi-party systems. I conclude with a few avenues for future research that could enrich our understanding of partisanship. Scholarship on partisanship has been transformed by political scientists’ embrace of social and cognitive psychology in the past few decades. Since then, the concept of partisan identity has become widely known beyond the narrow subfield of political psychology. Indeed, the sheer volume of research on the origins, measurement, and effect of partisan identity on political behavior is indicative of its centrality in the general discipline of political science. In this essay, I provide a brief (and therefore necessarily incomplete) history of scholarship on partisanship as well as its transformation into a partisan identity . I then review contemporary research on positive and negative partisan identity in the U.S. and beyond, focusing on their differential effects on political attitudes and behavior. Last, I sketch out a few thoughts on the complexities and caveats of current scholarship, including a plea for more research on the interaction of partisanship with other identities, the necessity of studying partisanship in more externally valid contexts, as well as the promise of common identities in bridging partisan divisions.

Negative partisanship is one of the most popular explanations for current levels of dysfunction in American politics. Yet, the term is used inconsistently in both academic research and the popular press. It is sometimes referred to as negative affect towards the out-party that is a more important predictor of political behavior than positive affect towards the in-party. It is also sometimes referred to as a negational identity, wherein identification with one party is founded upon not being identified with the other party. In this essay, I first review the two definitions of negative partisanship and their preponderance in the mass public. Counter some reports, disdain is not more prevalent than warmth. Next, I discuss new evidence which shows that partisan disdain and negational partisanship are mutually exclusive concepts. Finally, in a reanalysis of published work, I reexamine the evidence that purportedly shows that negative partisanship is a better explanation for political behavior than positive partisanship.

Is religion a form of political tribalism? Conventional wisdom suggests it is. Discussion of religion and American politics generally focuses on the “God Gap”—the tendency for religious Americans to vote Republican, while the non-religious vote Democratic. However, there is also reason to argue that religion cannot be reduced to political tribalism. The God Gap is found mostly among white voters; among people of color, religiosity is a far weaker predictor of the vote. Even among white voters, the size of the God Gap varies across different religious traditions. Furthermore, there is more nuance to the non-religious population than suggested by the standard account of the God Gap. When the analysis includes the full scope of the American religious landscape, religion is not as “tribal” as conventional wisdom suggests.

Whether American citizens hold presidents accountable for changes in the condition of the economy has increasingly been questioned. At the same time, the outcome of the 2016 election has been widely interpreted in economic terms. Press and pundits on both sides of the aisle have endorsed the “left behind” voter thesis suggesting that those who were economically dissatisfied or anxious voted against the incumbent party and thus elected Donald Trump. Likewise, some have argued that Trump would have won again in 2021 if not for the economic downturn caused by the COVID19 pandemic. In this study I use seven waves of nationally-representative panel data to examine change over time in individuals’ perceptions of the economy across the two most recent presidential election periods. I compare the magnitude of change from partisan rationalization of the economy to the magnitude of changes in perceptions due to the record-breaking decline in GDP during the year that COVID19 hit the US. My results provide little to no evidence that changes in perceptions due to real economic change were strong enough to overcome the effects of partisan rationalization. Given that the COVID19 recession was unusually severe, these results provide little reason for optimism that voters can hold leaders accountable for economic change.