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Political Behavior

Erschienen in:

01.06.2013 | Original Paper

The Impact of Elite Polarization on Partisan Ambivalence and Indifference

verfasst von: Judd R. Thornton

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 2/2013

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Abstract

Considerable evidence documents the impact that elite polarization has had on the influence of partisanship on vote choice and attitudes. Yet, much of the electorate remains moderate. This paper seeks to shed some light on this paradox. Examining trends from 1952 to 2004 demonstrates that the electorate is now more opinionated about the parties than in the recent past, but that a significant portion of the increase is in the form of negative statements about an individual’s party—there are fewer indifferent individuals, but the electorate is not overwhelmingly more one-sided, instead there has been an increase in both the proportion of one-sided and ambivalent individuals. It is next examined if the intensity of one’s ideological and partisan self-identification influences how they respond to elite polarization. The results suggest that non-ideologues and pure independents are more likely to be indifferent; all other groups have shown a decline in the likelihood of being indifferent and an increase in ambivalence. The results demonstrate that the public is responding to the increased clarity in elite positions in the form of an increased number of opinions, but for many the increase results from a mix of positive and negative reactions.

Vorheriger Artikel OLS is AOK for ACE: A Regression-Based Approach to Synthesizing Political Science and Behavioral Genetics Models

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See Abramowitz and Saunders (2008) for a different reading of the evidence. Part of the difference in opinion stems from different understandings and definitions of what polarization is; see Hetherington (2009, pp. 431–436) for a discussion of the difficultly of measuring mass polarization.

Most conceptualizations of “engagement” refer to an individual’s involvement with and participation in politics. For example, Abramowitz and Saunders (2008) defines engagement as an individual’s knowledge about as well as interest and participation in politics, and Hetherington (2008) looks at participation and measures of efficacy, trust, and if individuals perceive a difference between the parties.

The exception is 1972, where respondents were allowed to list up to three responses for each question.

Basinger and Lavine (2005, p. 173) classify individuals with a score greater than or equal zero as ambivalent as their responses indicate “a mix of positive and negative reactions toward the parties;” and individuals with negative scores are coded as one-sided because they have predominantly one-sided evaluations.

Because there are only a few comparable questions of political knowledge on each survey, I use one question that is asked in each of the years, knowledge of which party controls the House of Representatives. The question is particularly useful because the difficulty of the question appears to be roughly the same to answer in all but two of the years examined—in most years about 50–60% answered the question in correctly, in 1980 and 1996 about 70 and 75% answered the question correctly.

As a test of robustness, a selection model was estimated. The idea here is that because indifferent individuals are qualitatively different from those who are ambivalent and one-sided, a selection model allows for an estimation of the impact of the variables on experiencing indifference in the selection equation and on one’s score from the ambivalence measure in the outcome equation. In the context of the selection model, the two quantities of interest are the coefficient from the selection equation and the outcome equation, where a positive coefficient on the partisan identity term in the selection equation is associated with being either ambivalent or one-sided, but not indifferent. The results, available from the author, are entirely consistent with the results presented in Fig. 6.

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Titel: The Impact of Elite Polarization on Partisan Ambivalence and Indifference
verfasst von: Judd R. Thornton
Publikationsdatum: 01.06.2013
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Political Behavior / Ausgabe 2/2013
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-012-9196-y

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