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Political Behavior

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02-05-2022 | Original Paper

Response Decoupling and Partisans' Evaluations of Politicians' Transgressions

Authors: Omer Yair, Brian F. Schaffner

Published in: Political Behavior | Issue 4/2023

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Abstract

There is growing interest in the study of expressive responding in public opinion surveys, with scholars seeking to determine whether partisan differences in response to survey items attest to genuine differences in perceptions or to insincere responses meant to signal in-party approval or out-party disapproval. This study focuses on partisan gaps in evaluations of the inappropriateness of politicians’ transgressions and tests the effectiveness of a technique designed to reduce expressive responding. This “response decoupling” technique gives respondents the opportunity to separate their evaluations of a politician’s performance from their evaluations of a transgression committed by the politician, thereby allowing partisans to both disapprove of the transgression and signal support for the politician. The technique was experimentally tested in a study in Israel (N = 906) and in two pre-registered studies in the US (total N = 3,172), as these studies presented respondents with a real-life transgression of an actual politician. Overall, the technique had a weak effect, as only in the Israeli study was the effect statistically significant. On the whole, these results suggest that while partisan gaps in evaluations of politicians’ transgressions may reflect genuine perceptual differences, it may also be the case that allowing respondents to decouple their responses is not a sufficiently powerful method to reduce expressive responding. The paper concludes by discussing the implications and limitations of these findings.

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Bhattacharjee et al.‘s (2013) paper presents several hypothetical and real-life cases in which individuals support a transgressor’s performance while simultaneously condemning his/her transgression, and additional papers have shown that moral decoupling extends to people’s evaluations of transgressions of brands and corporations (Haberstroh et al., 2017; Lee & Kwak, 2016).

Bhattacharjee et al. (2013) did not directly test whether allowing respondents to “decouple” performance and immorality affected respondents’ evaluations of public figures’ transgressions. Throughout their paper these authors mostly used a “moral decoupling” scale to tap the extent of respondents’ decoupling in response to an immoral action. In fact, it seems that these authors consider decoupling as a “directionally-motivated” response intended to maintain support for the public figure.

Indeed, in a recent study Fahey (2022) employed a “response substitution” experimental treatment where he randomly assigned some Republican respondents to answer a question which allows for stating support for former President Trump (agreement with the statement that “it would be better for America if Donald Trump were still the president”) prior to answering questions regarding voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election and the January 6 insurrection. Fahey’s results show a “backlash” effect, with these Republican respondents being slightly more likely to endorse conspiratorial beliefs compared to those in the control condition.

A mere week prior to Passover Seder, Netanyahu specifically told Israelis during a televised declaration “don’t bring home [to Seder] your student son… or you soldier daughter” (Linder, 2020).

Power estimates in the studies were obtained using the ‘Retrodesign’ Stata package (Gelman & Carlin, 2014).

In retrospect, since at the time Joe Biden was only a presidential candidate, the item should have asked whether the comments of Joe Biden are relevant to how he would perform as president. Still, it is likely that most respondents properly understood the question’s intention, and it should be noted that the results of the Biden transgressions conditions are similar to those of the Trump transgressions conditions.

Using fixed effects models for all analyses presented in this section results in very similar estimates (results not shown).

That said, testing for moderating effects in this sample (namely, across age, gender, education, and religiosity) we did not find evidence of any heterogenous effects (analyses not shown).

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Title: Response Decoupling and Partisans' Evaluations of Politicians' Transgressions
Authors: Omer Yair
Brian F. Schaffner
Publication date: 02-05-2022
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Political Behavior / Issue 4/2023
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09796-0

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