Stephen N. Goggin

Seeing Red (or Blue): How Party Identity Colors Political Cognition

Abstract Many Americans associate themselves with their political party in a deep, visceral way. Voter identification with a political party has powerful implications for not just how voters behave, but how there are exposed to and receive information about the world. We describe how this tying of one’s self-concept to a party, which can be analogous to die-hard sports fandom, plays a central role in political cognition. It leads voters identifying with the two parties to perceive the political (and even seemingly apolitical) world in dramatically different ways. We detail the psychological mechanisms by which this party identity produces these distortions and offer examples of the bias that emerges. We conclude by discussing the implications of these phenomena for perpetuating our current hyper-polarized political discourse.

What Goes with Red and Blue? Assessing Partisan Cognition through Conjoint Classification Experiments

Political parties can provide valuable information to voters by cultivating distinct associations between their labels, issue priorities, policies and group traits. Yet, there is considerable debate over which associations voters incorporate, and whether these are accurate. In this study, we develop a novel conjoint classification experiment designed to map voters’ partisan associative networks. We ask respondents to ‘guess’ the party and ideology of hypothetical candidates given fully randomized issue priorities and biographical details. This inferential approach minimizes the biasing effects of partisan boosting in measuring the relative associations voters make between attributes and parties, and the impact these mappings have on candidate evaluations. We find voters consistently link many issues with party and ideological labels, but agree far less on associations with candidate attributes. Our study highlights important heterogeneity in the information value of party reputations, with implications for theories of democratic competence and empirical findings emerging from candidate-vignette designs.