Election Outcomes and Affective Polarization in the United States

Political Research Quarterly · 2026-01-02

Do election outcomes exacerbate affective polarization? While polarization often rises during campaigns and correlates with democratic backsliding, isolating the effect of winning or losing has proven difficult because of the need for a pre-election baseline and to generalize across multiple elections. In this study, we leverage pre- and post-election questions about partisan affect in the American National Election Study between 1996 and 2024. Our first analysis studies how respondents’ attitudes changed based on their party’s success in its bid for the White House. Our second analysis extends this to hundreds more races, applying a regression discontinuity design to attitudes after close subnational election results. Both analyses support the conclusion that the losing side drives the post-election gap in polarization, and that they do so by feeling less warmly toward their own party. In the United States, political loss may erode in-group attachment more than it fuels out-group hostility.

Affective Polarization across Time and Place in the United States

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

Issue Ownership and Economic Perceptions: Is the Economy “Better” under Republicans?

2025-07-30

Economic perceptions are biased by partisanship, as citizens perceive a stronger economy when their party is in power. This research note considers a second partisan bias, by which the Republican Party's association with business and capitalism may lead to more favora-ble economic perceptions under its leadership. I study this first at the presidential level, applying time series analyses to 1,577 survey toplines from 1985 to the present. The results show no overall effect of Republican presidencies on economic perceptions—and no condi-tional effects based on honeymoon periods, time in office, approval rating, news economic sentiment, or economic conditions. I then turn to five surveys about state-level conditions conducted between 1986 and 2016, and find that Republican governors do not elicit stronger economic ratings either. These findings highlight the limits of issue ownership: reputational advantages may shape prospective voting, but they do not appear to influ-ence the way people assess conditions.

Partisan Wishful Thinking in Polarized Times

2025-08-11

Partisans engage in “wishful thinking” ahead of elections, being more likely to expect their party to win than lose at the polls. This research asserts that wishful thinking is endemic to the current polarized era in US politics. In today’s presidential races, nine-in-ten voters expect their preferred candidate to triumph, a sharp increase from just two decades ago. Drawing on the American National Election Study’s 2016-2024 panel survey, I show that partisan animosity (or out-party hate) is likely to be causally linked to high electoral hopes, and using surveys from 1980 to the present, I show that it can explain a sizable share of the increase in wishful thinking over time. Finally, I explore reciprocity in this relationship. An analysis of ANES data from presidential elections between 1996 to 2024 finds that high expectations lead to greater post-election animosity among an election’s losers, independently of their pre-election attitudes.

Whose Party Is This? Explaining Perceptions of US Party Ideology

Public Opinion Quarterly · 2025-01-01

Abstract How do Americans perceive the parties ideologically? Using a multiverse analysis of 720 models, I observe how citizens’ ideological placement of the parties varied from 1990 to 2020 as a function of party ideologies at different levels: in Congress, in state legislatures, and in the electorate. Although public perceptions associate somewhat with elite ideology, more variation is attributable to how citizen-level partisans identify ideologically. This carries mixed implications. On one hand, partisan-ideological sorting in the electorate has made it easier for voters to see the difference between parties. On the other, it leads voters to see the parties as being more extreme than they would otherwise. These findings underscore the extent to which parties, beyond their governmental function, are social groups with norms that are fluid, identifiable, and politically impactful.

PhD stipends and program placement success in political science

Research & Politics · 2024-04-01 · 1 citations

A key grievance of the student labor movement is that across much of academia, and especially in the social sciences and humanities, stipends tied to PhD assistantships fall short of a living wage. In this article, we consider the issue from a pedagogical perspective, expecting that higher pay may lead to stronger program outcomes. We collect and validate data on assistantship stipends in political science from PhDStipends.com, and on tenure-track placements from an analysis of departmental placement pages. Graduate pay is significantly associated with tenure-track placements in the job market cycles spanning 2019–2021, independently of program size, rank, student unionization, location, and institution type and endowment. Across model specifications, a US$5,000 increase in student pay corresponds with 2.7 more placements per 100 enrolled students (or 34% of the median rate) over this period.

Election Outcomes and Affective Polarization in the United States: A Regression Discontinuity Design

2024-11-07

Do election outcomes lead to affective polarization? A growing set of studies pose this question, fearing that the fundamental mechanism of democracy—competitive elections—may also pose a risk to its stability. However, many political stimuli occur around election time. How can researchers isolate the effect of winning or losing itself? In this study, we use a pre-post regression continuity design (RDD) to study the effect of 648 close US House, Senate, and state-level presidential outcomes between 1996 and 2020 on the attitudes of survey respondents who experienced them. When controlling for pre-election polarization, people whose party saw a “close win” emerge more polarized than their opposition. However, this is primarily because of movement among the election’s losers, who depolarize by feeling less warmly toward their own party. If election losses weaken people’s commitment to democracy, anger at the opposition may not be the reason.

Toward an Ideological Common Space: Extending Bonica’s CFscores to the Citizen Level

Political Behavior · 2023-06-20

Measuring Executive Ideology and Its Influence

State Politics & Policy Quarterly · 2022-10-11 · 4 citations

Abstract Executives are important elites, and ideology is important to elite behavior, but measurement challenges and a focus on the presidency have kept scholars from fully exploring executive ideology. This article advocates studying US governors to learn more about executive ideology. It provides an overview of the data scholars can use to measure gubernatorial preferences, and highlights Bonica’s campaign finance-based ideology scores (CFscores) as offering the greatest coverage and allowing common-scale comparisons with other actors. As a validation exercise, I find that CFscores explain within-party variation in other measures and predict the decisions that governors make when in office. Then, I run a preliminary test of the substantive importance of executive ideology. Four models explain state policy liberalism as a function of executive, legislative, and citizen ideology. Gubernatorial preferences emerge as most predictive of the three. These results encourage greater investigation into the role of executive ideology in the policy process.

Analyzing Attention to Scandal on Twitter: Elites Sell What Supporters Buy

Political Research Quarterly · 2022-08-10 · 5 citations

Scandal has been described as socially constructed, in that some combination of the public, the media, and the political elite agrees that a transgression has occurred. This study is among the first to directly observe the “scandal as a construct” premise, using time-series data to estimate how each group’s attention to scandal affects that of every other. These data, collected from Twitter by Barberá et al. (2019) , measure the daily tweet volume of media outlets, Members of Congress, and samples of the public in relation to four Obama Administration scandals. Granger causality testing and impulse response functions show, as expected, that a jump in scandal-related tweets by one group affects the tweet volume of every other. But the groups wield unequal influence. Over the long-run, elites drive their supporters’ attention to scandal more than vice-versa. However, in two of the four scandals, the opposite effect was seen in the short-run, opening the possibility of a “sounding board” effect where elites are responsive to the initial reactions of their supporters but lead the conversation thereafter. These results encourage further study into how short- and long-term information flows differ, and why groups may lead in some issue areas but follow in others.