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Dawkins, Ryan and Christina Farhart. "Democratic Danger: System Identity Threat, Authoritarian Populism, and Affective Polarization. Working Paper.
Dawkins, Ryan and Christina Farhart. "Democratic Danger: System Identity Threat, Authoritarian Populism, and Affective Polarization. Working Paper.
Why are some people more willing to support the violation of democratic norms and undemocratic behavior than others? Over the last decade, scholars of American politics have grown weary of the potential danger affective polarization poses in causing democratic erosion. However, despite the concern among scholars, evidence for it has been mixed. We argue that the connection between affective polarization and democratic decline is not so straightforward. Using the 2024 Cooperative Election Study, we show preliminary evidence that a potentially more nuanced account of democratic erosion is that it involves two separate, albeit related, processes running in parallel. The first process is the transformation of the Republican Party by populist forces who exploit the perceived threat some Americans believe rapid social and demographic change poses to the fabric of American society. The second process is the rise of affective polarization. Populist candidates exploit fear of demographic change and then, once elected, use their power to undermine democratic institutions when they interfere with their consolidation of power. Once those democratic institutions are politicized, moreover, affective polarization exacerbates the asymmetrical partisan response to the rhetoric and behavior of populist leaders.
Dawkins, Ryan. "How Place-Based Attitudes Drive Affective Polarization across Partisan and Racial Identities." Under Review
Dawkins, Ryan. "How Place-Based Attitudes Drive Affective Polarization across Partisan and Racial Identities." Under Review
Scholars claim that the rural-urban divide, which separates the base of the Democratic and Republican parties, is a significant driver of affective polarization. Geographic distance, the argument goes, creates a disconnect between parties already divided across racial, ethnic, and partisan lines. However, with few exceptions, this relationship among place, race, and partisanship for understanding affective polarization has not been rigorously tested empirically. Using the 2020 ANES, I explore how racial and partisan identities moderate how place-based attitudes explain affective polarization. I demonstrate three key findings. First, while rural resentment exacerbates affective polarization among Republicans, it ameliorates it among Democrats. Second, these partisan differences are driven primarily by White partisans. For Black partisans, rural resentment has no discernable effect on affective polarization. Third, the relationship between rural resentment and polarization among Latinos mirrors White Americans, albeit in nuanced ways. This research sheds new light on how place-based attitudes intersect with complex and overlapping identity structures.
Drawing on the theory of affective intelligence and intergroup emotions theory, we articulate a theory of affective representation in Congress where lawmakers vary the emotional content of their communications to match the emotional experience of rank-and-file co-partisans. In a nationalized political environment where control of the presidency is central, belonging to the presidential party influences the emotions lawmakers convey more than events inside the legislature. We test our theory by analyzing discrete emotions in congressional e-newsletters derived from the disposition system and show that newsletters’ affective content depends on whether MCs are members of the president’s party in Congress, but not on whether they belong to the majority or experience legislative success. These results mirror the emotions rank-and-file co-partisans feel toward the incumbent president. Finally, we validate the causal mechanisms using a survey experiment showing that partisans evaluate lawmakers more favorably when lawmakers express congruent negative emotions, but positive emotions don’t produce the same benefits.
Dawkins, Ryan, Zoe Nemerever, Kal Munis, and Francesca Verville. "The Puzzle of Rural Resentment: Place, Race, and the Politics of White Grievance." Political Behavior
Dawkins, Ryan, Zoe Nemerever, Kal Munis, and Francesca Verville. "The Puzzle of Rural Resentment: Place, Race, and the Politics of White Grievance." Political Behavior
Rural resentment is a form place-based grievance politics that has been used by scholars to explain the growing urban-rural divide that is increasingly driving our politics. However, recently available data suggests that rural resentment is not confined to only those people who embrace a rural identity. If geography is not the sole source of rural resentment, what else explains this ostensibly place-based identity? We argue that rural consciousness is partially an expression White grievance politics because the stereotypes White Americans have in the heads about the proto-typical rural resident is that of other White Americans suffering from relative deprivation at the hands of government officials who are privileging non-white constituents over them. Using the 2020 American National Election Time-Series, we show that White consciousness predicts rural resentment among non-rural identifiers, but not rural identifiers. For rural identifiers, racial animus is a better predictor of rural resentment.
Featured in a New York Times column, titled "Meet the People Working on Trying to Hate Each Other Less" by Tom Edsall
White Americans are more affectively polarized today than at any point since at least the 1870s—and the trend shows no sign of abating any time soon. Recent work using the Common In-group Identity Model (CIIM) suggests that appealing to a super-ordinate identity—in this case, American national identity—holds the potential of bridging the social distance between partisans (Levendusky 2018). However, CIIM assumes that the normative content—i.e. the norms and stereotypes—that people associate with being an American are the same across subordinate groups. Using the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Studies cross-sectional surveys, as well as the 2016-2020 ANES panel survey, we demonstrate three key findings. First, White Democrats and White Republicans have systematically different ideas about what attributes are essential to being a member of the national community. Second, the association between partisanship and these competing conceptions of American identity among White Americans has gotten stronger during the Trump Era. Lastly, appeals to American identity only dampen out-partisan animosity when the demographic composition of the opposing party match their racialized conception of American identity. When there is a mismatch between people’s racialized conception of American identity and the composition of the opposition party, American identity is associated with higher levels of partisan hostility.
The electoral connection incentivizes representatives to take positions that please most of their constituents. However, on votes for which we have data, lawmakers vote against majority opinion in their district on one out of every three high-profile roll calls in the U.S. House. This rate of “incongruent voting” is much higher for Republican lawmakers, but they do not appear to be punished for it at higher rates than Democrats on Election Day. Why? Research in political psychology shows that citizens hold both policy specific and identity-based symbolic preferences, that these preferences are weakly correlated, and that incongruous symbolic identity and policy preferences are more common among Republican voters than Democrats. While previous work on representation has treated this fact as a nuisance, we argue that it reflects two real dimensions of political ideology that voters use to evaluate lawmakers. Using four waves of CCES data, district-level measures of opinion, and the roll-call record, we find that both dimensions of ideology matter for how lawmakers cast roll calls, and that the operational-symbolic disconnect in public opinion leads to different kinds of representation for each party.
Covered in Roll Call & The Washington Post
Featured on the Niskanen Center's Science of Politics Podcast, hosted by Matt Grossmann.
Promoted on the Reddit Science subreddit, making the Reddit homepage on Dec. 21, 2020
Anger is a common feature of the mass electorate in contemporary American politics. Through the process of affect linkage, we argue that one way the electorate becomes angrier about politics is by observing angry displays from political elites. Affect linkage occurs when a person changes their emotional state-of-mind to match the emotions displayed by someone else. Using an online experiment in which subjects are randomly exposed to an angry or unemotional debate between a Democrat and Republican running for Congress, we show that exposure to an angry in-party politician significantly increases the amount of anger, disgust and outrage expressed by co-partisans. This increase in aversive emotions, moreover, increases the likelihood that citizens report the intention to vote, and this affect linkage effect is most pronounced in those who are most likely to stay home on election day: the weakest partisans. Interestingly, angry rhetoric by political elites does not have any effect on out-partisans, suggesting that anger doesn't cross party lines.
Why do some people evaluate state supreme courts as more legitimate than others? Conventional academic wisdom suggests that people evaluate courts in nonpartisan ways, and that people make a distinction between how they evaluate court outputs—i.e. the decisions they make—and how they evaluate the court’s legitimacy more broadly. We challenge this idea by arguing that people’s partisan identities have a strong and pervasive influence on how people evaluate their political world, including how they evaluate the impartiality of the courts. Using a combination of experimental and observational survey data, we show that people evaluate the impartiality of state supreme courts more favorably when courts produce output that corresponds with—and serves the needs of—the political party to which they identify, while court outputs at odds with the goals of their party erodes their belief that courts are impartial. We also show that the effects of citizen perceptions of impartiality spillover in how they assess the very legitimacy of state courts themselves.
What effect does privatization have on people’s attitudes toward local government? I design a survey experiment that tests how public-private collaborations alter how people attribute responsibility to government for the successes and failures of the delivery of goods and services. I show that private contracting makes it less likely that people will connect public services to government, which erodes their evaluations of government performance and the feeling that local government represents their interests. I show that citizens are less likely to praise government for private service delivery successes than they are to blame it for private service delivery failures. This asymmetry in responsibility attribution makes it difficult for local governments to build support among its citizens.
In this paper, we ask why are some Americans more patriotic than others? The project exploits state-level measures of diversity to identify the contextual roots of patriotism in the United States, especially its civic and ethnic pathways. Using multi-level random-coefficient models, we find that people who live in environments that match their values and approach to citizenship are more likely to feel a love of country. Our findings suggest that patriotism is more than just a blind, immutable love of country; rather, it ebbs and flows with one’s political environment. While past work has highlighted how national identity is often associated with political exclusion, one implication of this paper is that patriotism behaves differently. Diverse environments actually foster greater love of country for racial and ethnic minorities.
This project examines the way people's core personality traits condition how they respond to campaign mobilization efforts. Using negative binomial and logit models, I show that some people are more responsive to campaign mobilization as a function of their core personality than others, and those heterogeneous responses vary systematically based on the type of political participation for which they are being mobilized,i.e. voting vs. non-voting participation. This paper demonstrates that despite the possible ameliorative effect mobilization has on unequal patterns of political participation, an enduring source of participatory inequality may very well be rooted in a person’s core psychological structure.
This project was part of a series geared toward introducing advanced undergraduates to the methods used to carry-out real political science research. This particular volume examined the various approaches that E. Scott Adler and John D. Wilkerson utilized in writing their book, Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving.
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