The Follow Back Problem in a Hyper-Partisan Environment

Many social media users try to obtain as many followers as possible in a social network to gain influence, a challenge that is often referred to as the follow back problem. In this work we study different strategies for this problem in the context of politically polarized social networks and study how political partisanship affect social media users' propensity to follow each other. We test how contact strategy (liking, following) interacts with partisan alignment when trying to induce users to follow back. To do so, we conduct a field experiment on Twitter where we target N=8,104 active users using bot accounts that present as human. We found that users were more than twice as likely to reciprocally follow back bots whose partisanship matched their own. Conversely, when the only form of contact between the bot and the user was the bot liking the user’s posts, the follow rate was extremely low regardless of partisan alignment – and liking a user’s content and following them led to no increase in follow-back relative to just following the user. Finally, we found no partisanship asymmetries, such that Democrats and Republicans preferentially followed co-partisans to the same extent. Our results demonstrate the important impact of following users and having shared partisanship – and the irrelevance of liking users’ content – on solving the follow back problem.

Bridging Political Divides by Correcting the Basic Morality Bias

Efforts to bridge political divides often focus on navigating complex and divisive issues. However, nine studies suggest that we should also focus on a more basic moral divide: the erroneous belief that political opponents lack a fundamental sense of right and wrong. This “basic morality bias” is tied to political dehumanization and is revealed by multiple methods, including natural language analyses from a large Twitter corpus, and a representative survey of Americans with incentives for accuracy. In the US, both Democrats and Republicans substantially overestimate the number of political outgroup members who approve of blatant wrongs (e.g., child pornography, embezzlement). Importantly, the basic morality bias can be corrected with a brief, scalable intervention. Providing information that just one political opponent condemns blatant wrongs increases willingness to work with political opponents and substantially decreases political dehumanization.

Climate Change as a National Security Issue: Examining Framing Effects Across Party

Research suggests that framing climate change as a national security issue can shape opinion about climate change. This research is less clear about what exactly constitutes a “national security frame” and what aspects of this frame are most persuasive. We use a survey experiment to compare the relative effects of three types of national security frames we identify. Results show that a frame centered on energy dependence had the strongest effect and was the most consistent across partisanship. Surprisingly, the effects ran in the opposite direction for Democrats and Republicans on both outcomes—negative for Democrats and positive for Republicans. We also show that the energy dependence frame moderated the influence of respondents’ affect toward political candidates and parties on their climate change attitudes. The results suggest that the energy dependence frame can shape public opinion, but that it must be tailored to particular audiences to avoid backfire effects.

Party Food: A Partisan History of Food & Farming in America

“Voting with your fork” is a common mantra for those concerned with food politics. However, real voting requires one to choose between Democrats and Republicans—and most food voters do not know the partisan history of food politics. Party Food is written for farmers and foodies who want to understand the political history of food policy, and it offers a primer on each party’s approach to food policy. As a political scientist who is also a commercial farmer, Harris offers fresh, professional insight into the lay of the land in American food politics. In Party Food, Harris unpacks the political foundations of contemporary farm policy and expertly explains the “team sport” of partisan politics as it plays out in the food politics landscape. Party Food introduces the Democratic and Republican Heroes (and Villains!) of food politics, offering an accessible insight into each political party’s policy “menu” and team play in Presidential and Congressional politics.

Preventing extreme polarization of political attitudes

Extreme polarization can undermine democracy by making compromise impossible and transforming politics into a zero-sum game. “Ideological polarization”—the extent to which political views are widely dispersed—is already strong among elites, but less so among the general public [N. McCarty, Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know, 2019, pp. 50–68]. Strong mutual distrust and hostility between Democrats and Republicans in the United States, combined with the elites’ already strong ideological polarization, could lead to increasing ideological polarization among the public. The paper addresses two questions: 1) Is there a level of ideological polarization above which polarization feeds upon itself to become a runaway process? 2) If so, what policy interventions could prevent such dangerous positive feedback loops? To explore these questions, we present an agent-based model of ideological polarization that differentiates between the tendency for two actors to interact (“exposure”) and how they respond when interactions occur, positing that interaction between similar actors reduces their difference, while interaction between dissimilar actors increases their difference. Our analysis explores the effects on polarization of different levels of tolerance to other views, responsiveness to other views, exposure to dissimilar actors, multiple ideological dimensions, economic self-interest, and external shocks. The results suggest strategies for preventing, or at least slowing, the development of extreme polarization.

When election expectations fail: Polarized perceptions of election legitimacy increase with accumulating evidence of election outcomes and with polarized media

The present study, conducted immediately after the 2020 presidential election in the United States, examined whether Democrats’ and Republicans’ polarized assessments of election legitimacy increased over time. In a naturalistic survey experiment, people (N = 1,236) were randomly surveyed either during the week following Election Day, with votes cast but the outcome unknown, or during the following week, after President Joseph Biden was widely declared the winner. The design unconfounded the election outcome announcement from the vote itself, allowing more precise testing of predictions derived from cognitive dissonance theory. As predicted, perceived election legitimacy increased among Democrats, from the first to the second week following Election Day, as their expected Biden win was confirmed, whereas perceived election legitimacy decreased among Republicans as their expected President Trump win was disconfirmed. From the first to the second week following Election Day, Republicans reported stronger negative emotions and weaker positive emotions while Democrats reported stronger positive emotions and weaker negative emotions. The polarized perceptions of election legitimacy were correlated with the tendencies to trust and consume polarized media. Consumption of Fox News was associated with lowered perceptions of election legitimacy over time whereas consumption of other outlets was associated with higher perceptions of election legitimacy over time. Discussion centers on the role of the media in the experience of cognitive dissonance and the implications of polarized perceptions of election legitimacy for psychology, political science, and the future of democratic society.

Sorry, not sorry

Right-wing populism emboldens its members to publicly challenge those they find threatening to white conservative frameworks, e.g. progressive female politicians of colour. I critically analyse how Republican Ted Yoho uses discursive agency to deliver infelicitous statements in response to the diatribe he directed at Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in July 2020. Guided by the principles of citationality (Derrida 1988), I utilise image repair theory (Benoit 1997) to reveal how Yoho minimises the alleged offences he committed by redirecting his rant at policy, not person. This allows Yoho to issue non-apologies and – in line with right-wing populism – villainize Ocasio-Cortez and elevate himself and his party. Both Democrats and Republicans deemed Yoho’s apology ‘appropriate’, resulting in unfavourable perlocutionary effects for female politicians of colour. The dismissal of Yoho’s offences highlights the normalisation of violent language directed at women of colour, revealing how white supremacy and toxic masculinity are normalised aspects of US media ecology.

Democracy in Darkness

Chapter 1 discusses the rise of political secrecy amid intensifying political, social, and geographic polarization. It introduces readers to CWG, the secret political organization at the heart of this book, and the contexts in which this group was formed. The existence of CWG and the prominence of political secrecy evident in national survey data suggest that political polarization and prejudice have driven even mainstream Democrats and Republicans to hide their political beliefs. In turn, this chapter argues that if and how people express their political beliefs depends very much on the context they are in, a phenomenon the author calls “networked silence.” Finally, the chapter details why studying political secrecy is important and how this book will approach this topic.

Durably Reducing Americans’ Dehumanization of Rival Partisans

Dehumanization, the belief that other people are less than fully human, dampens empathy, increases animosity, and catalyzes conflict between groups. Research has revealed that a troubling number of American partisans blatantly dehumanize members of the other party. Nonetheless, this research has also found that partisans substantially overestimate the extent to which members of the rival party dehumanize them. Here, we predict that partisans’ perceptions of being dehumanized by rival partisans (or meta-dehumanization) leads them to respond with reciprocal dehumanization. By implication, partisans’ own dehumanization of rival partisans could be reduced by correcting their exaggerated meta-dehumanization. We test this hypothesis in a pre-registered, nationally-representative survey experiment of Democrats and Republicans (N = 2,127). We find that a brief, informational intervention correcting partisans’ exaggerated perceptions of how much rival partisans dehumanize them reduced levels of partisan dehumanization by 45%, and this effect persisted in a follow-up survey conducted approximately one week later. We also investigated the effects of our intervention on additional outcomes, finding that it reduced desire for social distance from, and negative affect toward, rival partisans, and that these effects also persisted a week later. Together, these results suggest that correcting inaccurate perceptions of the extent of partisan dehumanization can be a tool for durably mitigating partisan enmity.

We Need to Talk

Americans today are affectively polarized: they dislike and distrust those from the opposing political party more than they did in the past, with damaging consequences for their democracy. This Element tests one strategy for ameliorating such animus: having ordinary Democrats and Republicans come together for cross-party political discussions. Building on intergroup contact theory, the authors argue that such discussions will mitigate partisan animosity. Using an original experiment, they find strong support for this hypothesis – affective polarization falls substantially among subjects who participate in heterogeneous discussion (relative to those who participate in either homogeneous political discussion or an apolitical control). This Element also provides evidence for several of the mechanisms underlying these effects, and shows that they persist for at least one week after the initial experiment. These findings have considerable importance for efforts to ameliorate animus in the mass public, and for understanding American politics more broadly.