Rune Slothuus

How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation

Competition is a defining element of democracy. One of the most noteworthy events over the last quarter-century in U.S. politics is the change in the nature of elite party competition: The parties have become increasingly polarized. Scholars and pundits actively debate how these elite patterns influence polarization among the public (e.g., have citizens also become more ideologically polarized?). Yet, few have addressed what we see as perhaps more fundamental questions: Has elite polarization altered the way citizens arrive at their policy opinions in the first place and, if so, in what ways? We address these questions with a theory and two survey experiments (on the issues of drilling and immigration). We find stark evidence that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions. Specifically, polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements on opinions, decreases the impact of substantive information and, perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those—less substantively grounded—opinions. We discuss the implications for public opinion formation and the nature of democratic competition.

Political Parties, Motivated Reasoning, and Issue Framing Effects

Issue framing is one of the most important means of elite influence on public opinion. However, we know almost nothing about how citizens respond to frames in what is possibly the most common situation in politics: when frames are sponsored by political parties. Linking theory on motivated reasoning with framing research, we argue not only that citizens should be more likely to follow a frame if it is promoted by “their” party; we expect such biases to be more pronounced on issues at the center of party conflicts and among the more politically aware. Two experiments embedded in a nationally representative survey support these arguments. Our findings revise current knowledge on framing, parties, and public opinion.

Issue Importance as a Moderator of Framing Effects

A growing amount of research is devoted to the question of which individual and contextual variables enhance, limit, or obliterate news framing effects. However, the fundamental question whether framing effects vary depending on the issue at stake has not been addressed. Based on two experimental studies (total N = 1,821), this article investigates the extent to which framing effects differ in magnitude as well as process, depending on how important an issue is. The studies show that a high-importance issue yields no effects and a low-importance issue large effects. This moderating function of issue importance operates both at the contextual and at the individual levels. The implications for future framing effects research are discussed.

Assessing the Influence of Political Parties on Public Opinion: The Challenge from Pretreatment Effects

Despite generations of research, political scientists have trouble pinpointing the influence of political parties on public opinion. Recently, scholars have made headway in exploring whether parties in fact shape policy preferences by relying on experimental designs. Yet, the evidence from this work is mixed. I argue that the typical experiment faces a design problem that likely minimizes the extent to which parties apparently matter. Because parties have policy reputations, experimental participants may already know from real-world exposure to political debate where the parties stand before they are told in the experiment—they are “pretreated.” This study investigates how real-world political context interferes with party cue stimulus in experiments. In two experiments I show that two types of “pretreatment” from outside the experiment—exposure-based and reputation-based—dramatically moderate the effects of party cues in experiments. Moreover, the politically aware participants—who are most likely to have been pretreated before entering the experiment—are the most sensitive to this interference from real-world context. Paradoxically, experimenters are most likely to find no effect of parties at the very time that their influence is strongest outside the experiment. These findings emphasize the importance of keeping real-world context in mind when designing and analyzing experiments on political communication effects and might help reconcile disparate results of previous party cue experiments.

Freedom for All? The Strength and Limits of Political Tolerance

Most research on political tolerance relying on the ‘least-liked’ group approach has painted a bleak picture of low and feeble levels of tolerance. An alternative approach, permitting an evaluation of the breadth of tolerance, is combined with the use of survey experiments to demonstrate that tolerance varies considerably across target groups. Specifically, the formation of tolerance judgements is shown to differ depending on a group’s association with violent and non-democratic behaviour. Thus, tolerance is high and resilient towards groups that themselves observe democratic rights – even if these groups are disliked or feared. The theory suggests that this is caused by norms of reciprocity and, contrary to extant research, this article shows that within the limits set by these norms, tolerance is strong.

Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy: Islam, Western Europe, and the Danish Cartoon Crisis

List of Illustrations ix Preface xiii Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 A Clash of Rights 10 Chapter 3 The Covenant Paradox 52 Chapter 4 Flash Point: The Ideological Bases of Anti-immigration Politics 82 Chapter 5 The Concept of Inclusive Tolerance 117 Chapter 6 The Democratic Impulse 141 Appendix A Timeline of the Cartoon Crisis 155 Appendix B Description of the Main Data Set 157 Appendix C Comparison of Respondents from the Height and Aftermath of the Crisis 159 Appendix D Scaling and Measurement of Core Variables 163 References 167 Index 177

Do voters learn? Evidence that voters respond accurately to changes in political parties’ policy positions

Abstract A premise of the mass–elite linkage at the heart of representative democracy is that voters notice changes in political parties’ policy positions and update their party perceptions accordingly. However, recent studies question the ability of voters accurately to perceive changes in parties’ positions. The study advances this literature with a two-wave panel survey design that measured voters’ perception of party positions before and after a major policy shift by parties in the government coalition in Denmark 2011–2013. Two key findings extend previous work. First, voters do indeed pay attention to parties when they visibly change policy position. Second, voters update their perceptions of the party positions much more accurately than would have been expected if they merely relied on a ‘coalition heuristic’ as a rule-of-thumb. These findings imply that under some conditions voters are better able to make meaningful political choices than previous work suggests.

Political Taste as a Marker of Class: A Bourdieu Approach to the Study of Public Opinion Formation

Even rough groupings of individuals according to education and occupation reveal marked differences in opinions. What explains the relation between position in the social structure and political views? Building on the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieus theory on social praxis and his three-dimensional class concept, the article answers this question. A Bourdieu-inspired analysis reveals larger social differences in opinion formation than previous studies. Even within an apparently homogenous group of political science students there are clear and systematic differences in opinions that can be traced back to the individual students social background. The article also shows that the ability to articulate an opinion is socially conditioned.