Does Social Disagreement Attenuate Partisan Motivated Reasoning? A Test Case Concerning Economic Evaluations

Abstract

Research on partisan motivated reasoning shows that citizens perceive the world differently based upon their partisan allegiances. Here we marshal evidence from several national surveys to investigate whether partisan motivated reasoning is attenuated among partisans situated within disagreeable political discussion networks. While our analyses suggest that exposure to interpersonal disagreement is associated with weaker partisan identities, we find limited evidence that disagreement attenuates partisan differences in knowledge or retrospective evaluations of the economy. This suggests that interpersonal disagreement is unlikely to help reduce partisan motivated reasoning. Our results thus speak to important debates concerning the influence of social discussion on political attitudes, the nature of partisan motivated reasoning and the ability of citizens to hold elites accountable.

The Partisan Next Door

“…The benefits extend beyond intergroup attitudes, as wellperspective-takers display more positive behaviors in interactions with outgroup members, who are themselves more likely to perceive those interactions favorably (Todd et al, 2011). These findings align with research in political science concerning exposure to partisan disagreement within social networks; people exposed to the viewpoints of opposing partisans prove less likely to place importance on their partisan identities (Robison, 2020; c.f., Levendusky, Druckman, & McLain, 2016), a commonly recognized source of affective and other polarization (e.g., Iyengar, Sood, & Lelkes, 2012). The kind of interparty perspective-taking that our results imply could go a long way toward improving social, if not political, relations between party supporters.…”

Partisan Biases among the Unemployed

“…Partisanship's ability to assuage the reported personal costs of unemployment is striking, precisely because an inability to find a job has such clear consequences for household finances. Beliefs about national-level economic outcomes are, however, also often of interest for political behaviour (Bailey 2019;Robison 2020). Since these sociotropic perceptions do not always have the same sources as do preferences at the personal level (Baird and Wolak 2021;Yağcı and Oyvat 2020), it is worth examining whether the tendency for partisanship to mediate unemployment's effects extends to beliefs about aggregate economic outcomes.…”

With a little help from my friends? The impact of social networks on citizens' forecasting ability

“…(2020) have focused more specifically on the effect of network partisan (dis)agreement on forecasting skills. According to these authors, ‘[a]bsent the power of disagreement, [individuals] have little reason to doubt that their preferred outcome is inevitable, affecting the reliability of the forecast’ (Leiter et al., 2020, p. 1; but see Robison, 2020), on the limited debiasing power of disagreeable interactions). Furthermore, political disagreement has been found to ‘depolarize emotional reactions toward in‐ and out‐group political candidates’ in the United States (Parsons, 2010).…”