scholarly journals Party Competition and Cooperation Shape Affective Polarization: Evidence from Natural and Survey Experiments in Israel

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chagai M. Weiss ◽  
Lotem Bassan-Nygate
Keyword(s):  
Party Competition ◽  
Competition And Cooperation ◽  
Survey Experiments

Party Competition and Cooperation Shape Affective Polarization: Evidence from Natural and Survey Experiments in Israel

2021 ◽  
pp. 001041402110242
Author(s):  
Lotem Bassan-Nygate ◽  
Chagai M. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity Theory ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Electoral Competition ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Competition And Cooperation ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
Election Studies ◽  
Do So

Does electoral competition increase affective polarization? Can inter-party cooperation depolarize voters? Addressing these questions is challenging since both competition and cooperation are endogenous to political attitudes. Building on social identity theory and leveraging a natural experiment unfolding over seven Israeli election studies, we demonstrate that the enhanced salience of electoral competition increases affective polarization. We then consider whether inter-party cooperation can depolarize the electorate. To do so, we further build on theories of coalition ambivalence and party brands and leverage the ambiguity around coalition building following elections of Israel’s 22nd Knesset, to implement a survey experiment where we credibly shape respondents’ perceptions regarding the likelihood that a unity government will form. We find that priming party cooperation in the form of a unity government promotes tolerance across partisan lines. Our studies contribute to the affective polarization literature by identifying institutional causes and remedies of polarization in a comparative context.

The Logic of Inter-Party Competition and Cooperation

2021 ◽  
pp. 8-26
Author(s):  
Fernando Casal Bértoa ◽  
Zsolt Enyedi
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Competition And Cooperation ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Party System Institutionalization ◽  
Three Components

The first chapter lays the foundation for a cooperation-focused way of thinking about party politics. It provides reasons why its analysts should go beyond individual parties and consider blocs of parties. It introduces the concept of poles, as distinct from blocs, and builds a party system typology around them. The second part of the chapter elaborates the concept of party system closure, relating it to the wider notion of party system institutionalization, and identifies its three components: alternation, innovation, and access. The chapter ends by considering the most likely causes and most important political consequences of closure.

scholarly journals How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation

2013 ◽  
Vol 107 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES N. DRUCKMAN ◽  
ERIK PETERSON ◽  
RUNE SLOTHUUS
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Partisan Polarization ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

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.

scholarly journals The European Parliament

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Trade Agreement ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
State Governments ◽  
National Parliaments ◽  
Third Stream ◽  
Competition And Cooperation ◽  
Extensive Body ◽  
The Eu

The European Parliament (EP) has experienced an unprecedented transformation since its first direct elections in 1979 and developed into one of the most powerful legislatures in the world. It started as a talking shop assembly of legislators seconded from the national parliaments of the European Communities’ member states who met twice a year. Now it co-decides on nearly all European Union (EU) legislation, approves the EU budget together with member state governments represented by the EU Council, scrutinizes the EU executive (i.e., the European Commission), and needs to give its consent for any new international trade agreement of the EU. This spectacular evolution has stimulated prolific research on the EP’s elections, internal organization, relations with other EU institutions, and policy impact. This bibliographical review does not purport to include all the important contributions but rather offers a map of this rich scholarly work. This article summarizes EP research into four streams. First, scholars have investigated the ability of the EP election to effectively link the EU to its citizens and increase its legitimacy and accountability. Second, an extensive body of work analyzes party competition and cooperation in the EP. A related third stream of literature studies the parliamentary organization and committees. Fourth, scholars have developed elaborate theoretical models and empirical tools to investigate the power relations between the EP and other EU institutions. These debates are discussed after a brief review of major data sources used in EP studies as well as key textbooks and journal venues for research on the EP.

Undermining a Rival Party’s Issue Competence through Negative Campaigning: Experimental Evidence from the USA, Denmark, and Australia

2020 ◽  
pp. 003232172091616
Author(s):  
Henrik Bech Seeberg ◽  
Alessandro Nai
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Crime Rate ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Issue Ownership ◽  
Negative Campaigning ◽  
The Us ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
The Usa

Much party communication encourages voters to lower issue-related evaluations of rival parties. Yet, studies of such influence are rare. Drawing on research on political parties’ negative campaigning, this article starts to fill this gap. We triangulate evidence from four survey experiments across six issues in Denmark, the US, and Australia, and show that a party’s negative campaigning decreases voters’ evaluations of the target party’s issue-handling competence (i.e. issue ownership), but does not backlash on voters’ evaluations of the sponsor. Such attack on the target party does not have to be tied to a negative policy development like the crime rate to undermine the target party’s competence evaluations. At the same time, a negative policy development only undermines a party’s evaluations when it is accompanied by a rival party’s negative campaigning attack. The implications for party competition and the mass-elite linkage are important.

A Unified Theory of Party Competition

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Adams ◽  
Samuel Merrill III ◽  
Bernard Grofman
Keyword(s):  
Party Competition ◽  
Unified Theory

What Can We Learn From Factorial Surveys About Human Behavior?

Methodology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knut Petzold ◽  
Tobias Wolbring
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Behavioral Intentions ◽  
Actual Behavior ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Factorial Survey ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Intended Behavior ◽  
The Social ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
High Level

Abstract. Factorial survey experiments are increasingly used in the social sciences to investigate behavioral intentions. The measurement of self-reported behavioral intentions with factorial survey experiments frequently assumes that the determinants of intended behavior affect actual behavior in a similar way. We critically investigate this fundamental assumption using the misdirected email technique. Student participants of a survey were randomly assigned to a field experiment or a survey experiment. The email informs the recipient about the reception of a scholarship with varying stakes (full-time vs. book) and recipient’s names (German vs. Arabic). In the survey experiment, respondents saw an image of the same email. This validation design ensured a high level of correspondence between units, settings, and treatments across both studies. Results reveal that while the frequencies of self-reported intentions and actual behavior deviate, treatments show similar relative effects. Hence, although further research on this topic is needed, this study suggests that determinants of behavior might be inferred from behavioral intentions measured with survey experiments.

Endogenous Parties, Interaction of Different Decision Rules

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Laver ◽  
Ernest Sergenti
Keyword(s):  
Decision Rule ◽  
Decision Rules ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Competitive Environment ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Robert Axelrod

This chapter attempts to develop more realistic and interesting models in which the set of competing parties is a completely endogenous output of the process of party competition. It also seeks to model party competition when different party leaders use different decision rules in the same setting by building on an approach pioneered in a different context by Robert Axelrod. This involves long-running computer “tournaments” that allow investigation of the performance and “robustness” of decision rules in an environment where any politician using any rule may encounter an opponent using either the same decision rule or some quite different rule. The chapter is most interested in how a decision rule performs against anything the competitive environment might throw against it, including agents using decision rules that are difficult to anticipate and/or comprehend.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document