Tides of Disagreement: How Reality Facilitates (and Inhibits) Partisan Public Opinion

Abstract

Research on American mass behavior finds that party identifiers discount policy-relevant facts and interpret the same facts differently. Both findings imply enduring differences in the opinions that direct policy change. What this research does not consider, however, is that partisans confront the burden of evidence when they interpret facts about policy conditions. And thus, because policy-relevant evidence is always changing, the information environment could facilitate or inhibit partisan-directed rationalization. Employing national survey data and a Bayesian multilevel model, this study tests whether the distribution of economic facts moderates partisan disagreement about the U.S. economy. The results indicate that, when economic facts move in the positive and negative direction simultaneously, disagreement about the economy grows. When these facts move in one direction, however, disagreement recedes. In general, this study contributes theory and evidence on the tides of disagreement in partisan public opinion.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 110 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.