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Objective: Recent academic work on the coronavirus (COVID‐19) pandemic has established a persistent difference between Democrats and Republicans in social distancing behaviors. We uncover a potential explanation for this difference—social norms and beliefs. Methods: We use a series of ordinary least squares regression specifications on novel survey data collected in April through June of 2020. Results: We find that Democrats are more likely to report social distancing than are Republicans, even after controlling for a range of demographic variables that might otherwise account for differences in social distancing and that these differences are found in partisans' norms and beliefs around social distancing. Our main analysis shows that the partisan difference in social distancing disappears when we control for social norms and beliefs, suggesting their salience in changing social distancing behaviors. Conclusion: Our results contribute to current research focused on mitigating the spread of COVID‐19 by highlighting a mechanism, norms and beliefs, for interventions to target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partisans often offer divergent responses to survey items ostensibly unrelated to politics. These gaps could reveal that partisanship colors perception or, alternatively, that in answering survey questions, individuals communicate partisan proclivities by providing insincere, or "expressive" responses, to send a partisan message. This study tests two techniques for reducing expressive responding that (1) avoid criticisms about using monetary incentives for accuracy, which have reduced measured partisan differences for objective facts; and (2) can be used in contexts where incentives are infeasible, such as when objective benchmarks for correct responses are unavailable. This study experimentally tests these techniques in replicating a study that found that partisanship affected attractiveness evaluations. These interventions, which allow partisans to express their partisan sentiments through other survey items, substantially reduce apparent partisan differences in beauty evaluations and show that standard survey items likely confound sincere partisan differences with elements of expressive responding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does candidate ideology affect donors' contribution decisions in U.S. House elections? Studies of donor motivations have struggled with confounding of candidate, donor, and district characteristics in observational data and the difficulty of assessing trade-offs in surveys. We investigate how these factors affect contribution decisions using experimental vignettes administered to 7,000 verified midterm donors. While ideological congruence influences donors' likelihood of contributing to a candidate, district competitiveness and opponent extremity are equally important. Moreover, the response to ideology is asymmetric and heterogeneous: donors penalize more moderate candidates five times more heavily than more extreme candidates, with the most extreme donors exhibiting the greatest preference for candidates even more extreme than themselves. Republicans also exhibit a greater relative preference for extremism than Democrats, although partisan differences are smaller than differences by donor extremism. Our findings suggest that strategic considerations matter, and donors incentivize candidate extremism even more than previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research finds that House majority members and members in the president's party garner additional federal spending in their districts. Using federal spending data in individual districts, we implement two research designs to distinguish elected officials enacting policies that benefit like-minded voters-the party in the electorate-from those that benefit same-party elected officials- the party in government. We find robust evidence that presidential partisanship is associated with large differences in spending correlated with voter preferences, but little evidence that presidents favor areas represented by their party in the House. By contrast, control of the House is associated with differences in spending by voter preferences and with modest increases in spending in districts held by members of the majority. These findings have important implications for understanding presidential influence, as well as the role of parties in the House and in coordinating between elected branches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the associations between personality traits and the strength and direction of partisan identification using a large national sample. We theorize that the relationships between Big Five personality traits and which party a person affiliates with should mirror those between the Big Five and ideology, which we find to be the case. This suggests that the associations between the Big Five and the direction of partisan identification are largely mediated by ideology. Our more novel finding is that personality traits substantially affect whether individuals affiliate with any party as well as the strength of those affiliations, effects that we theorize stem from affective and cognitive benefits of affiliation. In particular, we find that three personality traits (Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Openness) predict strength of partisan identification ( p < 0.05). This result holds even after controlling for ideology and a variety of issue positions. These findings contribute to our understanding of the psychological antecedents of partisan identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent political science research on the effects of core personality traits--the Big Five--contributes to our understanding of how people interact with their political environments. This research examines how individual-level variations in broad, stable psychological characteristics affect individual-level political outcomes. In this article, we review recent work that uses the Big Five to predict political attitudes and behavior. We also replicate some of these analyses using new data to examine the possibility that prior findings stem from sampling error or unique political contexts. Finally, we discuss several of the challenges faced by scholars who are currently pursuing or are interested in pursuing this line of inquiry. These challenges include refining theoretical explanations of how the Big Five shape political outcomes, addressing important measurement concerns, and resolving inconsistencies across studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partisanship is strongly correlated with attitudes and behavior, but it is unclear from this pattern whether partisan identity has a causal effect on political behavior and attitudes. We report the results of a field experiment that investigates the causal effect of party identification. Prior to the February 2008 Connecticut presidential primary, researchers sent a mailing to a random sample of unaffiliated registered voters who, in a pretreatment survey, leaned toward a political party. The mailing informed the subjects that only voters registered with a party were able to participate in the upcoming presidential primary. Subjects were surveyed again in June 2008. Comparing posttreatment survey responses to subjects’ baseline survey responses, we find that those reminded of the need to register with a party were more likely to identify with a party and showed stronger partisanship. Further, we find that the treatment group also demonstrated greater concordance than the control group between their pretreatment latent partisanship and their posttreatment reported voting behavior and intentions and evaluations of partisan figures. Thus, our treatment, which appears to have caused a strengthening of partisan identity, also appears to have caused a shift in subjects’ candidate preferences and evaluations of salient political figures. This finding is consistent with the claim that partisanship is an active force changing how citizens behave in and perceive the political world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Survey data regularly show that assessments of current and expected future economic performance are more positive when a respondent's partisanship matches that of the president. To determine if this is a survey artifact or something deeper, we investigate whether partisanship is associated with behavioral differences in economic decisions We construct a new data set of county-level quarterly taxable sales to examine the effect of partisanship on consumption. Consumption change following a presidential election is correlated with a county's partisan complexion, a result consistent with partisans acting outside the domain of politics in accordance with the opinions they express in surveys These results support an expansive view of the role of partisanship in mass politics and help validate surveys as a method for studying political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do most winning candidates adhere to partisan orthodox positions? While some prior work has examined how issue positions signal candidate ideology, this paper instead focuses on how candidate issue positions affect evaluations of valence. In light of important inferential limitations in using the correlation between observed candidate positions and electoral performance to assess voter responses, we present a large-scale candidate vignette experiment that reveals issue positions affect perceptions of non-ideological characteristics. Candidates with only one of three positions that stray from the "typical" position for their party – being too extreme, bipartisan, or ideologically unusual – are perceived as less effective legislators. This suggests party-consistency may be reinforced by the electorate through changes in perceived valence, and that the observed correlation between candidate performance and issue positions might arise for reasons apart from ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]