The Power of Partisanship

ISBN-13: 9780197623794 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023 / 248 str.

Joshua J. Dyck; Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz

Opis

In The Power of Partisanship, Joshua J. Dyck and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz argue that the growth in partisan polarization in the United States, and the resulting negativity voters feel towards their respective opposition party, has far-reaching effects on how Americans behave both inside and outside the realm of politics. In fact, no area of social life in the United States is safe from partisan influence. As a result of changes in the media landscape and decades of political polarization, voters are stronger partisans than in the past and are more likely to view the opposition party with a combination of confusion, disdain, and outright hostility. Yet, little of this hostility is grounded in specific policy preferences. Even ideology lacks meaning in the United States: conservative and liberal are what Republicans and Democrats have labeled "conservative" and "liberal." Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz show how partisanship influences the electorate's support for democratic norms, willingness to engage in risk related to financial and healthcare decisions, interracial interactions, and previously non-political decisions like what we like to eat for dinner. Partisanship prevents people from learning from their interactions with friends or the realities of their neighborhoods, and even makes them oblivious to their own economic hardship. The intensity and pervasiveness of partisanship in politics today has resulted in "political knowledge" becoming an endogenous feature of strong partisanship and a poor proxy for anything but partisan behavior. Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz present evidence that pure independents are, in fact, very responsive to information because they are not biased by partisan elite cues and important and relevant political information is often local, contextual, and personal. Drawing on a series of original surveys and experiments conducted between 2014 and 2020, Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz show how the dominance of partisanship as a decision cue has fundamentally transformed our understanding of both political and non-political behavior.

Recenzje

In this groundbreaking book, Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz go beyond the well-tread domain of how partisanship affects politics to document how deep the influence of affective attachments to parties has become. The pair make two key contributions. First, they document that partisanship has become so toxic that the ameliorative power of positive intergroup contactDLlong thought to reduce intergroup animosityDLhas little impact on how we view out-partisans. Second, they question the value of measures of political knowledge. As what we know about politics has become endogenous to partisanship, the political science canon about how political knowledge affects political preferences becomes upended and in need of revision. A must-read for students of American politics today.

O autorze

Joshua J. Dyck is Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department and Director of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is co-author of Initiatives without Engagement. Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz is Saul I. Stern Professor of Civic Engagement and Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.