Party Time

2 Dec

It has been nearly five years since the publication of Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization. In that time, the paper has accumulated over 450 citations according to Google Scholar. (Citation counts on Google Scholar tend to be a bit optimistic.) So how does the paper hold up? Some reflections:

  • Disagreement over policy conditional on aims should not mean that you think that people you disagree with are not well motivated. But regrettably, it often does.
  • A lack of real differences doesn’t mean a lack of perceived differences. See here, here, here, and here.
  • The presence of real differences is no bar to liking another person or group. Nor does a lack of real differences come in the way of disliking another person or group. The history of racial and ethnic hatred will attest to the point. In fact, why small differences often serve as durable justifications for hatred is one of the oldest and deepest questions in all of social science. (Paraphrasing from Affectively Polarized?.) Evidence on the point:
    1. Sort of sorted but definitely polarized
    2. Assume partisan identity is slow-moving as Green, Palmquist, and Schickler (2002) among others show. And then add to it the fact people still like their ‘own’ party a fair bit—thermometer ratings are a toasty 80 and haven’t budged. See the original paper.
    3. People like ideologically extreme elites of the party they identify with a fair bit (see here).
  • It may seem surprising to some that people can be so angry when they spend so little time on politics and know next to nothing about it. But it shouldn’t be. Information generally gets in the way of anger. Again,
    the history of racial bigotry is a good example.
  • The title of the paper is off in two ways. First, partisan affect can be caused by ideology. Not much of partisan affect may be founded in ideological differences, but at least some of it is. (I always thought so.) Secondly, the paper does not offer a social identity perspective on polarization.
  • The effect that campaigns have on increasing partisan animus is still to be studied carefully. Certainly, ads play but a small role in it.
  • Evidence on the key take-home point—that partisans dislike each other a fair bit—continues to mount. The great thing is that people have measured partisan affect in many different ways, including using IAT and trust games. Evidence that IAT is pretty unreliable is reasonably strong, but trust games seem reasonable. Also, see my 2011 note on measuring partisan affect coldly.
  • Interpreting overtime changes is hard. That was always clear to us. But see Figure 1 here that controls for a bunch of socio-demographic variables, and note that the paper also has over-time cross-country to clarify inferences further.
  • If you assume that people learn about partisans from elites, reasoning what kinds of people would support this ideological extremist or another, it is easy to understand why people may like the opposing party less over time (though trends among independents should be parallel). The more curious thing is that people still like the party they identify with and approve of ideologically extreme elites of their party (see here).