American politics is contentious, but the public is not as polarized as it thinks it is

Few would disagree that there is little apparent common ground remaining between Democrats and Republicans in Congress, but is the American public just as polarized? Douglas J. Ahler sampled over 2,000 respondents on their own political leanings and their judgments of how liberal and conservative others are. He finds that respondents tended to overestimate polarization in the mass public, including that of those on their, and on the other side, of the ideological spectrum. He also finds that overestimating polarization among one’s peers leads individuals to adopt more extreme political attitudes

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months

Political Perception in the Polarized Era

“Self-Fulfilling Misperceptions of Public Polarization”Mass media convey deep divisions among citizens despite scant evidence for such ideological polarization. Do ordinary citizens perceive themselves to be more extreme and divided than they actually are? If so, what are the ramifications of such misperception? A representative sample from California provides evidence that voters from both sides of the state’s political divide perceive both their liberal and conservative peers’ positions as more extreme than they actually are, implying inaccurate beliefs about polarization. A second study again demonstrates this finding with an online sample and presents evidence that misperception of mass-level extremity can affect individuals’ own policy opinions. Experimental participants randomly assigned to learn the actual average policy-related predispositions of liberal and conservative Americans later report opinions that are 8-13% more moderate, on average. Thus, citizens appear to consider peers’ positions within public debate when forming their own opinions and adopt slightly more extreme positions as a consequence.“The Parties in Our Heads: Misperceptions About Party Composition and Their Consequences” (co-authored with Gaurav Sood)We document a consequential and heretofore unnoted perceptual phenomenon in American politics and public opinion: people considerably overestimate the share of party-stereotypical groups in the mass-level parties. For instance, people think that 32% of Democratic sup- porters are LGBT (6% in reality) and 38% of Republican supporters earn over $250,000 per year (2%). We demonstrate that these perceptions are genuine and party-specific, not artifacts of expressive responding, innumeracy, or ignorance of base rates. These misperceptions are relatively universal across partisanship and positively associated with political interest. With experimental and observational evidence, we document consequences of this perceptual bias: misperceptions are associated with partisan affect and attitudinal polarization, and when provided information about the actual share of various party-stereotypical groups in the out-party, partisans see supporters of the out-party as less extreme and feel less socially distant from them. Thus, people’s skewed mental images of the parties appear to fuel intense partisanship.“Irresponsible Partisanship and Democratic Accountability: How Citizens Understand Party Conflict”American citizens resent contemporary party conflict largely for its “process consequences.” These include incivility, gridlock, and government dysfunction. This is puzzling because political science generally concludes that such “irresponsible partisanship” is strategic. That is, Democratic and Republican politicians manipulate and intensify conflict as an electoral and messaging strategy. I evaluate potential resolutions for this puzzle, namely that citizens perceive party conflict as affectively-driven rather than strategic—and, importantly, that their tendency to see their own party as motivated by in-group love and the out-party by out- group hate impedes their ability to hold elites accountable for its process consequences. With data from the 2015 IGS-California Poll, I find citizens see both parties as significantly more motivated by strategy than emotion, especially when conflict is presented in less abstract, more policy-related terms. However, I also show that citizens generally oppose or lack strong attitudes toward reforms that could potentially curb process consequences. This suggests that blindness to institutional externalities, rather than to elite strategy, sustains irresponsible partisanship

Replication Data for: December 2015 Monkey Cage Trump Post

This provides the replication data for our Monkey Cage post on Donald Trum

Online appendix for: "Measuring Shares of Salient and Stereotypical Groups"

This is the Online Appendix for "Measuring Shares of Salient and Stereotypical Groups," which appears in Misinformation and Mass Audiences (eds. B.G. Southwell, E.A. Thorson, and L. Scheble)

Replication Data for: The Parties in our Heads: Misperceptions About Party Composition and Their Consequences

Replication Scripts and Data for "The Parties in our Heads: Misperceptions About Party Composition and Their Consequences" (Ahler & Sood, 2017

Replication Data for: The Delegate Paradox: Why Polarized Politicians Can Represent Citizens Best

Many advocate for political reforms intended to resolve apparent disjunctures between politicians' ideologically polarized policy positions and citizens' less-polarized policy preferences. We show these apparent disjunctures can arise even when politicians represent their constituencies well, and that resolving them would likely degrade representation. These counterintuitive results arise from a paradox whereby polarized politicians can best represent constituencies comprised of citizens with idiosyncratic preferences. We document this paradox among U.S. House Members, often criticized for excessive polarization. We show that if House Members represented their constituencies' preferences as closely as possible, they would still appear polarized. Moreover, current Members nearly always represent their constituencies better than counterfactual less-polarized Members. A series of experiments confirms that even ``moderate'' citizens usually prefer ostensibly polarized representatives to many less-polarized alternatives

Why Voters May Have Failed to Reward Proximate Candidates in the 2012 Top Two Primary

 An experiment conducted by the authors (2014) found that the top-two primary first used in California in June 2012 failed to achieve its sponsors’ goal of helping ideologically moderate candidates win. This paper explores why. A primary reason is that voters are largely ignorant about the ideological orientation of candidates, including the moderates they would choose if proximity voting prevailed. We document this in congressional races, focusing on competitive contests with viable moderate candidates. Our results have a straightforward implication: for the top-two primary to mitigate polarization, moderate congressional candidates would have to inform voters about their moderation to a far greater degree