Exploring the Attitudinal Structure of Partisanship

Abstract

This study examined the structure of attitudes toward the political party an individual primarily identifies with and attitudes toward the other party with an emphasis on differentiating between the cognitive and affective components. Participants responded to a telephone survey that included measures of party identification, partisan attitudes, political information involvement activities, and voting behavior. Results indicated attitudes toward the parties were a function of both cognitive and affective components, although strong partisans had an attitudinal structure characterized as having a stronger cognitive component. Strong partisans were more polarized in their attitudes across parties. In addition, individuals with more cognitive‐affective ambivalence toward their own parties were less likely to vote, and their votes were less likely to be along party lines.

Left- and Right-Leaning News Organizations' Negative Tweets are More Likely to be Shared

“…While predictions regarding the way emotionality is used by news outlets and the way emotions spread are straightforward, the question of whether these outcomes are moderated by political affiliation is much less clear. While some argue that there are inherent differences in the way different political groups express, experience, and react to emotions (Jost et al, 2003;Napier & Jost, 2008;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012), others find that there are more similarities than differences in emotional expression and reactions between political groups (Steiger et al, 2019;Roscoe & Christiansen, 2010;van Prooijen et al, 2015;Iyengar, Sood, & Lelkes, 2012). Therefore, it is currently an open question as to what extent leftand right-leaning news organizations differ in their expression of positive or negative affect on social media platforms such as Twitter.…”

Contempt of congress: Do liberals and conservatives harbor equivalent negative emotional biases towards ideologically congruent vs. incongruent politicians at the level of individual emotions?

“…It logically follows that conservatives, compared to liberals, could potentially experience these emotions more strongly towards groups that represent a threat to their values (such as ideologically dissimilar congresspersons). In contrast, a growing body of work related to the ideological conflict hypothesis has found that liberals and conservatives may have equivalent levels of generalized negative affect towards ideologically dissimilar groups and/or generalized positive affect towards ideologically similar groups (Roscoe & Christiansen, 2010;van Prooijen et al, 2015). However, no studies had yet fully examined specific discrete emotions as separate variables within this context.…”

“…Similar to the literature on ideological differences in emotion, a robust body of work on ideological differences in attitudes has linked conservatism with a greater propensity towards prejudice (e.g., see Sibley & Duckitt, 2008 for a meta-analysis) and political intolerance (e.g., see Jost et al, 2003 for review). However, a recent series of studies have found that liberals and conservatives may actually express similar degrees of intolerance and prejudice towards groups that are perceived as ideologically-incongruent (i.e., ideologically threatening and/or different from their own; Chambers et al, 2013;Crawford & Pilanski, 2014;Roscoe & Christiansen, 2010;Wetherell, Brandt, & Reyna, 2013). Some of these studies also found that liberals and conservatives have similarly positive attitudinal biases towards ideologically-congruent groups.…”

“…However, several studies have examined ideological similarities and differences in generalized positive and negative affect held towards ideologically-incongruent versus ideologically-congruent political groups. Roscoe and Christiansen (2010) examined generalized positive versus negative affect that liberal and conservative partisans felt towards the Democratic and Republican parties by creating positive and negative emotion scales derived additively from categorical (yes/no) items assessing: anger, hope, pride, embarrassment, fear, safety, happiness, sadness, nervousness, and calm-but they did not analyze specific emotions. Similarly, van Prooijen and colleagues (2015) examined Dutch liberals' and conservatives' generalized negative affect towards ideologically-incongruent political parties using a composite scale using "anger," "afraid," "fearful," and "disgust" (p. 489) averaged together-but did not analyze specific emotions.…”

“…On the other hand, a growing body of research has found that negative attitudes typically associated with conservatism such as intolerance (Brandt, Reyna, Chambers, Crawford, & Wetherell, 2014) and prejudice (Chambers, Schlenker, & Collisson, 2013) may become equivalent between liberals and conservatives in contexts of ideological conflict-when they are directed towards groups perceived as ideologically threatening. Initial research on emotion within this context has found that liberals and conservatives may indeed have similar levels of generalized negative affect towards ideological rivals and similar levels of generalized positive affect towards ideological allies (Roscoe & Christiansen, 2010;van Prooijen, Krouwel, Boiten, & Eendebak, 2015). However, whether or not this pattern is varied or consistent across specific (discrete, qualitatively distinct) emotions such as anger, contempt, disgust, fear, and happiness, has not been fully explored.…”