Elections Activate Partisanship across Countries

Abstract

It has long been argued that elections amplify partisan predispositions. We take advantage of the timing of the cross-national post-election surveys included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems to explore the effects that elections have on individuals’ attachments to political parties. Within these surveys, under the assumption that the dates on which respondents are interviewed are assigned independent of factors known to affect partisanship, we are able to identify the causal effects of election salience on partisan attachments. We find strong evidence that election salience increases the probability of one having a party attachment, increases the strength of attachments, and heightens the relationship between partisanship and evaluations of political actors. Empirical explorations of our identifying assumption bolster its validity. Our results substantiate the causal role that elections play in activating partisanship.

Bully Pulpit? Twitter Users’ Engagement With President Trump’s Tweets

“…We note that the decline in engagement after inauguration primarily occurs in the first 75 days. This is consistent with the evidence presented in Singh and Thornton (2019) who find that the decline in the salience of partisanship flattens after an initial drop. We present figures for both likes and retweets in the period following Trump's inauguration in the Supplemental Material.…”

“…Therefore, we expect that as time from inauguration increases, we should see a decline in engagement. Second, partisan engagement more generally waxes and wanes with the electoral cycle (e.g., Michelitch & Utych, 2018;Singh & Thornton, 2019) meaning that as politics recedes into the background, we should expect engagement to similarly decline. Consequently, our second hypothesis is that engagement will decline over time.…”

When You Win, Nothing Hurts: The Durability of Electoral Salience on Individuals’ Satisfaction with Democracy

“…US Supreme Court decisions, Gibson and Nelson, 2015). The electoral boost of elections on partisanship, as another example, has been shown to be a short-lived phenomenon (Singh and Thornton, 2018). And while satisfaction is not partisanship, one might expect that any downstream attitudes to partisanship—such as satisfaction with democracy—would be likely to resonate diminishing partisanship.…”

“…I provide an explicit test of the identifying assumption of random assignment. As Singh and Thornton (2018: 4) point out, it is crucial to assess the plausibility of this identifying assumption; that is, to determine whether the treatment process requires control for potential confounders. To test the validity of the assumption that time between election and interview is sufficiently random, a regression including the time elapsed between election and interview should—at a minimum—include any controls for potential confounders or, ideally, show that the time elapsed between election and interview do not correlate with potentially related variables.…”

Triggering Ideological Thinking: How Elections Foster Coherence of Welfare State Attitudes

“…I consider two alternative explanations. First, perhaps it is not people's ideological position but rather their party identification that explains why consistency increases when confronted with a divergent political majority (Bowler, Lanoue, and Savoie 1994;Freeder, Lenz, and Turney 2018;Kalmoe 2020;Singh and Thornton 2019). As left-right position and preferred party are correlated, 14 my analysis could detect an effect caused by party identification.…”