Issue Salience and Political Stereotypes

Pedro Bordalo, Marco Tabellini and David Yang

No 27194, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: US voters exaggerate the differences in attitudes held by Republicans and Democrats on a range of socioeconomic and political issues, and greater perceived polarization is associated with greater political engagement and affective polarization. In this paper, we examine the drivers of such perceived partisan differences. We find that a model of stereotypes, where distortions are stronger for issues that are more salient to voters, captures important features of the data. First, perceived partisan differences are predictable from the actual differences across parties, in particular from the relative prevalence of extreme attitudes. Second, perceived partisan differences are larger on issues that individuals consider more important. Third, issue salience increases the tendency to over-weigh extreme types. Exploiting nationally representative survey data, we show that the end of the Cold War in 1991, which shifted US voters’ attention away from external threats, increased perceived, relative to actual, partisan differences on domestic issues. The rise was stronger for issues with more stereotypical partisan differences. The reverse pattern occurred after the terrorist attacks in 2001, when attention swung back towards external threats. Consistent with the mechanism of salience-modulated stereotyping, beliefs about political groups can shift dramatically even when the underlying partisan differences change little.

JEL-codes: D03 D8 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
Note: POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27194.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27194

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27194

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().