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Political Behavior

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01.03.2010 | Original Paper

Clearer Cues, More Consistent Voters: A Benefit of Elite Polarization

verfasst von: Matthew S. Levendusky

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 1/2010

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Abstract

Scholars typically argue that elite polarization has only negative consequences for American politics. I challenge this view by demonstrating that elite polarization, by clarifying where the parties stand on the issues of the day, causes ordinary voters to adopt more consistent attitudes. Scholars have made such claims in the past, but because only observational data has been available, demonstrating a cause-and-effect relationship has proven to be difficult. I use original experiments to verify that there is a small but significant causal link between elite polarization and voter consistency. These findings have important normative implications for our understanding of the consequences of elite polarization, the role of political parties in a modern democracy, and the standards scholars use to assess citizen competence and participation.

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Throughout the paper, when I speak of elites, I follow Lee’s 2002 definition: elites are elected officials who have some control over policy (see also Zaller 1992). Functionally, elites are what Fiorina et al. (2006) label the “political class.”

Converse focused on voters’ ideologies, not on attitude consistency. But if citizens possess ideologies, they will necessarily possess consistent attitudes.

Comparisons between the U.S. and Europe also support this argument. European elites are more ideologically distinct than their American counterparts, and as a result, European voters hold more consistent attitudes (Niemi and Westholm 1984; Fuchs and Klingemann 1990).

Others argue that declining response rates give the illusion of increasing consistency (Converse 2006). The mass public is not any more consistent than they were fifty years ago, but the reluctance of low-information voters to speak to interviewers makes the public appear to be more consistent.

This theory assumes that as elite polarization increases, more voters will be able to correctly identify where elites stand on the issues of the day. For evidence supporting this assumption, see Hetherington (2001) and Levendusky (2009).

Although these examples come from high-salience issues, the same mechanism works on low-salience issues as well. The limitation, however, is that voters are less likely to know where elites stand on these more obscure issues.

As in many earlier studies (e.g., Converse 1964), I define consistency along a single left-right dimension.

As a randomization check, a joint test of statistical significance reveals treatment assignment is not predictable based on demographic characteristics, ideology, and partisanship (χ² = 19, p = 0.78).

These figures have been edited slightly for publication. For screenshots of the actual prompts seen by survey respondents, see the supplemental materials available at the author’s website [www.sas.upenn.edu/~mleven].

My design parallels Mutz’s (2005) study of social trust. To study the effects of trust on behavior, she changes subjects’ levels of trust using a story from Reader’s Digest. In the real world, many things beyond a simple news story alter trust, but that’s not the issue: because she changes levels of trust, her experiments speak to the ramifications of those changes. The same logic holds here: my manipulations do not exactly mimic the real world, but that is not particularly problematic given that they do shift respondent’s beliefs about elite polarization. For more on the general point about the relationship between realism and external validity, see Carlsmith et al. (1989), Berkowitz and Donnerstein (1982), and Anderson and Bushman (1997).

Alternatively, they could also simulate a situation where elites switch positions on an issue, and subjects need to learn anew how party maps onto the issue.

I pool across issues in the interest of simplicity. I have also re-estimated the results separately by issue and the substantive results remain the same.

Here, I use fixed/random effects to control for any un-modeled issue- or person-specific variation (see, more generally, Wooldridge 2000).

While some authors argue elite polarization may have some positive effects (e.g., Sinclair 2006; Abramowitz and Saunders 2008), most have been more skeptical.

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Titel: Clearer Cues, More Consistent Voters: A Benefit of Elite Polarization
verfasst von: Matthew S. Levendusky
Publikationsdatum: 01.03.2010
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Political Behavior / Ausgabe 1/2010
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-009-9094-0

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