A focus on partisanship: How it impacts voting behaviors and political attitudes

Abstract

The target article by John Jost (2017 – this issue) focuses on political ideology (liberalism vs. conservatism) and its association with personal characteristics, cognitive processing style, and motivational interests. Jost's arguments and data are very compelling and will inspire consumer psychologists to do more research in the political domain. To enable this goal further, we complement the target article by focusing on partisanship, another major determinant of political judgments and decisions. Whereas political ideology refers to people being more liberal or conservative, partisanship refers to how strongly people identify with a specific political party (e.g., Republicans or Democrats). In reviewing the literature on partisanship, we concentrate on voting behaviors and attitudes, an area not addressed by Jost, but of great importance for consumer psychologists given the large expenditures on political advertising. Adding to Jost's discussion of the link between political ideology and systematic processing, we examine the interplay between these two constructs and partisanship.

Asymmetries abound: Ideological differences in emotion, partisanship, motivated reasoning, social network structure, and political trust

“…Conversely, Democrats were more attentive than Republicans to substantive information about policy content. Krishna and Sokolova (2017) also cite research by Sen (2017), which found that Republicans were more sensitive than Democrats to partisan cues when asked to evaluate judicial candidates. Taken in conjunction, these results are consistent with Krishna and Sokolova's (2017) argument that systematic (vs. heuristic) processing of information attenuates the influence of partisan cues—as well as the observation that liberals are more likely than conservatives to engage in systematic processing (Jost, 2017a, 2017b).…”

“…Inspired by the work of Silvan Tomkins (1963), we propose that ideology is a “love affair”—an “elective affinity”—between a person (who possesses a wide range of chronic and temporary needs, interests, and motivations) and a socially constructed, historically situated belief system that offers some opportunity for seduction. Thus, “top‐down” processes of institutional socialization and communication, including exposure to messages from political elites (what Krishna & Sokolova, 2017 refer to as “macro‐level factors”) interact with “bottom‐up” psychological (or “micro‐level”) factors to produce matching (or resonant) ideological outcomes (Jost, Federico, & Napier, 2009). There is nothing “immutable” (or “invariant,” as Oyserman & Schwarz, 2017 suggest) about these outcomes, and there is no non‐tautological sense in which they may be said to spring from “essential differences” between liberal and conservative types of people.…”

“…Krishna and Sokolova (2017) are absolutely right that—in addition to ideological differences between the left and right (Jost, 2017a, 2017b)—the social and political world is rife with partisan commitments arising from affiliation with political parties, such as the Democratic and Republican parties. Oyserman and Schwarz (2017), too, underscore the role of identity‐based motivations in political psychology and the fact that these motivations may be highly sensitive to local, contextual factors.…”

“…As Krishna and Sokolova (2017) point out, registered Democrats have long outnumbered Republicans in the U.S., and yet Republicans do as well (if not better) than Democrats at election time. This implies that Democrats are more willing to vote for Republicans than vice versa or—as Rao (2017) would say—Democrats are more likely to be “brand switchers” than Republicans.…”

“…On the topic of motivated reasoning, Krishna and Sokolova (2017) recount Cohen's (2003) experiments involving college students, which suggested that Democrats and Republicans were equally susceptible to partisan biases with respect to policy preferences. In these studies, participants were generally supportive of policies that they believed were proposed by members of their own political party and rejecting of policies that they believed were proposed by members of the opposing party.…”