An Asymmetrical “President-in-Power” Effect

Davide Morisi · John T. Jost

73 citations0/0 files storedAmerican Political Science Review

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Electoral Systems and Political Participation American Constitutional Law and Politics Political Theory and Democracy

Abstract

When political polarization is high, it may be assumed that citizens will trust the government more when the chief executive shares their own political views. However, evidence is accumulating that important asymmetries may exist between liberals and conservatives (or Democrats and Republicans). We hypothesized that an asymmetry may exist when it comes to individuals’ willingness to trust the government when it is led by the “other side.” In an extensive analysis of several major datasets (including ANES and GSS) over a period of five decades, we find that in the United States, conservatives trust the government more than liberals when the president in office shares their own ideology. Furthermore, liberals are more willing to grant legitimacy to democratic governments led by conservatives than vice versa. A similar asymmetry applies to Republicans compared with Democrats. We discuss implications of this asymmetrical “president-in-power” effect for democratic functioning.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

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

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 73 citations exist upstream.

References

2012Affect, Not Ideology 2008Political Ideology: Its Structure, Functions, and Elective Affinities 2008Political Polarization in the American Public 2007Polarized America: the dance of ideology and unequal riches 2015Tweeting From Left to Right 2007Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches 2009The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans 2015Conspiracy Endorsement as Motivated Reasoning: The Moderating Roles of Political Knowledge and Trust

Cited by

2019Trust in Government and the American Public’s Responsiveness to Rising Inequality 2023Public trust is earned: Historical discrimination, carceral violence, and the COVID ‐19 pandemic 2022COVID-19 and the Culture of American Federalism 2025Liberals and conservatives share information differently on social media 2025Boosting Public Confidence in U.S. Agency Policymaking

Explore the map →

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

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.