While political scientists have studied citizens' reactions to political disagreement in their social networks, there have been only a handful of attempts to empirically investigate how citizens react to public political disagreements. This research uses a nationally representative Web survey over 1000 citizens, to examine how citizens' reactions to political disagreement affect voter turnout and political participation.
This project tackles a question of central importance in the study of democracy and the implications of an informed citizenry. This research will expand and deepen our understanding of how citizens experience political engagement.
This project investigates how citizens interpret partisan conflict in Congress. While pundits and scholars warn that partisanship, incivility, and gridlock are creating a crisis of representation, such warnings raise more questions than they answer. Why should partisanship, incivility, and a lack of legislative accomplishment be taken to indicate that representatives are doing a bad job? Do citizens actually react negatively to these features of the political process? What kind of incentives do such reactions create for elected officials? Finally, if we wish to increase citizens’ political trust and confidence in Congress, which features of the process should we strive to change? Many scholars have investigated how polarization and the ideological content of partisan disagreement affect representation in Congress, and shape the behavior and attitudes of citizens and elected officials. In contrast, only a handful of studies have directly examined how the process of visible partisan disagreement between elected officials affects citizens’ evaluations of elected officials and attitudes towards government. Moreover, previous work tends to conflate the effects of partisanship, incivility, and gridlock, making it difficult to determine when, how, and why citizens might react negatively to these features of the legislative process. Thus, before we can start to address citizens’ discontent with Congress, we need to disentangle exactly what role partisanship, incivility, and gridlock play in creating this discontent. To this purpose, we gather data through a new nationally representative survey experiment (funded by a National Science Foundation dissertation improvement grant) in which we independently manipulate bipartisanship/partisanship, civility/incivility, and bill passage/bill failure in a fictionalized news story about a Congressional debate.[1] Our results show that bipartisanship has a significant positive impact on confidence in Congress (see Figure 1). However, partisan respondents only react positively to an individual representative who engages in bipartisan behavior or civil behavior when that representative is from the opposite party (see upward sloping "Opposite Party" line in Figure 2, illustrating the difference between the partisan and bipartisan conditions). Additionally, although independents say they prefer bipartisan decision-making processes to partisan processes, they do not adjust their evaluations of Congress and individual representatives accordingly. (See Figures 2 and 3.) These findings help explain why partisan conflict in Congress persists: a representative’s decision to act in a bipartisan or partisan way does not affect how he is perceived by citizens from his own party or independents, the two groups most likely to vote for him. Similarly, whether a representative acts in a civil or uncivil fashion has no effect on how he is rated by citizens who share his party affiliation or who are independents (Figure 4). Only when citizens are from the opposite party as the representative do bipartisanship and civility increase ratings of and stated willingness to vote for the representative (Figures 2 and 4). The finding that independents do not react positively to bipartisanship challenges the conventional wisdom that independents strongly value cooperation between the parties. What, then, do independents care about when it comes to the political process? We find that in assessing an individual representative, independents react most positively when the representative is able to get his bill passed, all else equal. This suggests that independents may have a pragmatic attitude towards politics, focusing on productivity rather than cooperation between the parties. One important implication of these findings is that incentives facing representatives vary significantly with the constituency to which they aim to appeal. Representatives aiming to gain the support of citizens from the opposite party should seek out opportunities for bipartisan cooperation, and ensure that they maintain a civil tone towards opponents. Because independents tend to evaluate individual representatives on the basis of legislative accomplishment, representatives targeting independent voters would be wise to sponsor bills that are likely to pass easily. Finally, representatives in safe districts, and those who are primarily concerned with shoring up their base, have little to gain or lose from their behavior during the legislative process. Thus, if we wish to promote bipartisanship or civility, we ought to consider electoral reforms (such as open primaries) that would create a greater need for representatives to obtain votes from citizens from the other party. We also find that different factors shape political trust among partisans and independents. Partisans only become more trusting when they see representatives from the other party acting in a bipartisan way (Figure 5), while independents only become more trusting when they see representatives engaging civilly with each other (Figure 6). Thus, reform proposals designed to increase political trust and citizen satisfaction must promote both bipartisanship and civility if they are to have a wide-ranging impact. [1] The survey also contains the question, "Generally speaking, do you think of yourself as a [Democrat/Republican/independent]?" Those answering Democrat or Republican are classified as partisans, and those answering independent are classified as independents.
