E.E. Schattschneider (1960, 138) concluded his classic book, The Semisovereign People, by defining democracy as "a competitive political system in which competing leaders and organizations define the alternatives of public policy in such a way that the public can participate in the decision-making process" (italics in original). Although his work vastly influenced the trajectory of multiple areas of political science, his concluding conception of democracy has received relatively scant attention. In this article, we take up an aspect of his definition by addressing this question: How does the tenor of political competitiona defining element of democracy-affect the nature of citizen decision making?We focus on one of the most discussed contemporary developments in U.S. politics: elite polarization. Over the last quarter-century, elected representatives and activists from the major parties have become more ideologically distinct from one another and more internally homogeneous (e.g., McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006). Therefore, following previous work, we define elite polarization as high levels of ideological distance between parties and high levels of homogeneity within parties. Lively debate revolves around the causes and consequences of elite polarization, with notable attention to whether citizens have also become polarized. Although there is far from a consensus on the status of citizen polarization (e. 582; Hetherington 2009, 429), we nonetheless turn to the more fundamental question of how elite polarization affects the nature of citizen decision making.We theorize and find, with two experiments on immigration and energy, that elite polarization dramatically changes the ways citizens form opinions. This change occurs because polarization stimulates partisan motivated reasoning, which in turn generates decision making that relies more on partisan endorsements and less on substantive arguments. We discuss the consequences of this shift in decision-making criteria for understanding the nature of public opinion. We also consider the implications of these findings for normative debates about "quality opinions" and more general discussions about polarization and democratic competition. 1 FRAMING AND PARTY COMPETITIONOur goal is to assess the impact of elite polarization on citizen decision making. To do so, we employ a counterfactual: We compare the decisions citizens reach in the presence of competing arguments made in a polarized environment against those made in less polarized environments (see Mansbridge 1983, 25). Our central question is, do opinions formed under conditions of elite polarization differ from those formed sans polarization? We specifically compare the role of perhaps the two most widely used types of information on which citizens base political decisions: substantive arguments (of varying types or "strengths") in the form of distinct issue frames and partisan cues. We discuss each in turn. FramingWe operationalize "arguments" as directional issue or emphasis frames. Few topics have been s...

Fixed effects estimators are frequently used to limit selection bias. For example, it is well known that with panel data, fixed effects models eliminate time-invariant confounding, estimating an independent variable’s effect using only within-unit variation. When researchers interpret the results of fixed effects models, they should therefore consider hypothetical changes in the independent variable (counterfactuals) that could plausibly occur within units to avoid overstating the substantive importance of the variable’s effect. In this article, we replicate several recent studies which used fixed effects estimators to show how descriptions of the substantive significance of results can be improved by precisely characterizing the variation being studied and presenting plausible counterfactuals. We provide a checklist for the interpretation of fixed effects regression results to help avoid these interpretative pitfalls.

Survey experiments are ubiquitous in social science. A frequent critique is that positive results in these studies stem from experimenter demand effects (EDEs)—bias that occurs when participants infer the purpose of an experiment and respond so as to help confirm a researcher’s hypothesis. We argue that online survey experiments have several features that make them robust to EDEs, and test for their presence in studies that involve over 12,000 participants and replicate five experimental designs touching on all empirical political science subfields. We randomly assign participants information about experimenter intent and show that providing this information does not alter the treatment effects in these experiments. Even financial incentives to respond in line with researcher expectations fail to consistently induce demand effects. Research participants exhibit a limited ability to adjust their behavior to align with researcher expectations, a finding with important implications for the design and interpretation of survey experiments.

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Do partisan disagreements over politically relevant facts, and preferences for the information sources from which to obtain them, represent genuine differences of opinion or insincere cheerleading? The answer to this question is crucial for understanding the scope of partisan polarization. We test between these alternatives with experiments that offer incentives for correct survey responses and allow respondents to search for information before answering each question. We find that partisan cheerleading inflates divides in factual information, but only modestly. Incentives have no impact on partisan divides in information search; these divides are no different from those that occur outside the survey context when we examine web‐browsing data from the same respondents. Overall, our findings support the motivated reasoning interpretation of misinformation; partisans seek out information with congenial slant and sincerely adopt inaccurate beliefs that cast their party in a favorable light.