Matthew S. Levendusky

When Backing Down Is the Right Decision: Partisanship, New Information, and Audience Costs

How do domestic political conditions shape when leaders get punished for backing down in international crises? We explore how three factors—the president’s partisanship, the reaction of other elites, and whether the president justifies his decision on the basis of new information—influence the size of domestic audience costs. While standard theories in American politics suggest that partisanship should exert a large effect over voter behavior, we offer an alternative theory explaining why the president’s unique informational advantage following a crisis will mute partisanship’s effect on audience costs. We argue that the president’s justification for why he backed down, however, will have a large effect on audience costs. Using a series of original survey experiments, we find strong support for our theoretical argument. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the role of partisanship, framing, and the audience costs literature more broadly.

Measuring District-Level Partisanship with Implications for the Analysis of U.S. Elections*

Studies of American politics, particularly legislative politics, rely heavily on measures of the partisanship of a district. We develop a measurement model for this concept, estimating partisanship in the absence of election-specific, short-term factors, such as national-level swings specific to particular elections, incumbency advantage, and home-state effects in presidential elections. We estimate the measurement model using electoral returns and district-level demographic characteristics spanning five decades (1952–2000), letting us assess how the distribution of district partisanship has changed over time, in response to population movements and redistricting, particularly via the creation of majority-minority districts. We validate the partisanship measure with an analysis of congressional roll-call data. The model is easily extended to incorporate other indicators of district partisanship, such as survey data.

Drafting Support for War: Conscription and Mass Support for Warfare

How does a military’s recruitment policy—whether a country has a draft or conscript army—influence mass support for war? We investigate how military recruitment affects the way the American public evaluates whether a war is worth fighting. While some argue that conscription decreases support for war by making its costs more salient, others argue that it increases support by signaling the importance of the conflict. Existing evidence is inconclusive, with data limited to one particular conflict. Using an original survey experiment, we find strong support for the argument that conscription decreases mass support for war, a finding that replicates in several different settings. We also show that these findings are driven by concerns about self-interest, consistent with our theory. We conclude by discussing the relevance of these findings for debates about how domestic political conditions influence when states go to war.

Does Media Coverage of Partisan Polarization Affect Political Attitudes

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in the partisan polarization of the American electorate. Scholarly investigation of this topic has coincided with the media’s portrayal of a polity deeply divided along partisan lines. Yet little research so far has considered the consequences of the media’s coverage of political polarization. We show that media coverage of polarization increases citizens’ beliefs that the electorate is polarized. Furthermore, the media’s depiction of a polarized electorate causes voters to moderate their own issue positions but increases their dislike of the opposing party. These empirical patterns are consistent with our theoretical argument that polarized exemplars in journalistic coverage serve as anti-cues to media consumers. Our findings have important implications for understanding current and future trends in political polarization.

Measuring Aggregate-Level Ideological Heterogeneity

Ideological heterogeneity is a key variable for the study of legislative and electoral politics. Scholars have long recognized that members with more ideologically heterogeneous constituencies behave differently than members with more homogeneous ones. empirical tests of these theories, however, have typically been stymied by a lack of appropriate measures. w e corrected this shortcoming by developing a measurement model for ideological heterogeneity, and we used our method to generate estimates for the 50 u.S. states and 435 congressional districts. Beyond the specific results presented here, a key contribution of our model is its flexibility: our technique can be used to produce similar estimates in a variety of contexts. Ideological heterogeneity is a key explanatory variable for the study of legislative politics. Seminal works by Fenno (1978) and Fiorina

Relying on the Ground Game The Placement and Effect of Campaign Field Offices

Though elite-based campaign mobilization was thought to be dead just a few election cycles ago, it has come roaring back in recent years. The vast majority of this direct voter outreach is coordinated through campaign field offices. Despite the increasing importance of such activities, little is known about where campaigns choose to locate these field offices and what effect campaign offices have on election outcomes. We develop a theoretical argument about where candidates will locate these offices, and test our argument using data from recent elections. We also show that these field offices increase county-level vote share by approximately 1%, netting Obama approximately 275,000 additional votes in the 2008 election. We conclude by discussing the normative implications of increased campaign investment in field operations.

Americans, Not Partisans: Can Priming American National Identity Reduce Affective Polarization?

In recent years, Americans have become more affectively polarized: that is, ordinary Democrats and Republicans increasingly dislike and distrust members of the opposing party. Such polarization is normatively troubling, as it exacerbates gridlock and dissensus in Washington. Given these negative consequences, I investigate whether it is possible to ameliorate this partisan discord. Building on the Common Ingroup Identity Model from social psychology, I show that when subjects’ sense of American national identity is heightened, they come to see members of the opposing party as fellow Americans rather than rival partisans. As a result, they like the opposing party more, thereby reducing affective polarization. Using several original experiments, as well as a natural experiment surrounding the July 4th holiday and the 2008 summer Olympics, I find strong support for my argument. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for efforts to reduce polarization more generally.

What Do Citizens Want from Their Member of Congress

What do citizens want from their members of Congress? Do they expect them to be constituent servants? Do they expect them to work on local problems? Or do they expect them to represent them on the national issues of the day? While citizens expect members of Congress to perform all of these roles, we argue that, in the contemporary political environment, citizens especially value members who represent them on the salient national issues of the day. We also argue that such behavior will be especially pronounced among those who are the most educated and partisan. We show, using several recent nationally representative surveys, that citizens prioritize this sort of issue representation, and that such evaluations shape member approval and vote choice. We conclude by discussing the implications of this pattern for related trends such as elite polarization and the nationalization of elections.

Morris Fiorina’s Foundational Contributions to the Study of Partisanship and Mass Polarization

Morris Fiorina is a giant of American political science. According to Google Scholar, as of June 2016, Fiorina has more than 23,000 citations, which almost certainly makes him one of the most well cited political scientists in the entire discipline. Few scholars in the past few decades have amassed such an impressive record of scholarly influence on such a wide variety of topics. Fiorina has written seminal works on congressional influence on the bureaucracy (Fiorina 1977), partisanship and retrospective voting (Fiorina 1981), the personal vote (Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina 1987), divided government (Fiorina 1992), voter turnout (Ferejohn and Fiorina 1974), political polarization (Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2005) and many other topics. One could write a detailed essay on how Fiorina’s work has impacted the field in each of these areas; here, I focus on the two areas closest to my own work: his contributions to the study of (1) partisanship and retrospective voting, and (2) political polarization, particularly mass polarization. Even with just a focus on these particular questions, my essay will be a broad overview more so than a literature review of either area. This too is a testament to Fiorina’s influence on the field: this work has been so important and influential that I cannot review it all in one place (for excellent literature reviews on retrospection, I refer the reader to Ashworth 2012; Healy and Malhotra 2013; for excellent literature reviews on polarization, I refer the reader to Layman, Carsey, and Horowitz 2006; Hetherington 2009).

How group discussions create strong attitudes and strong partisans

Group discussions matter in politics—they affect individuals’ attitudes as well as their political participation. But how do discussions influence the strength of attitudes? This is a question that has received scant attention, despite its relevance to both empirical and normative theories of democracy. We argue that group discussion generates strong attitudes via psychological elaboration. For many, this is a positive outcome. But we also show that discussion has a downside. Specifically, homogenous group discussions—which are the norm—strengthen partisan identities, which can increase partisan bias and motivated reasoning. Using an original experiment, we find strong support for our predictions. Our results, then, underline a tension in the political effects of group discussion: while it produces normatively desirable strong attitudes, it also creates more entrenched and potentially biased partisans.