Nostalgia Isn't What it Used to Be: Partisan Polarization in Views on the Past*

Abstract

Objective In this article, we seek to extend our understanding of the partisan lenses through which Americans view politics by investigating if there is partisan polarization in views of the past. Current political issues are frequently contextualized with references to the past. Despite these frequent evocations of the past, public opinion scholars’ knowledge of how citizens view earlier eras is incomplete. Methods We evaluate competing explanations of the effect of the past on present political attitudes: generational effects, partisanship, and ideology. To do this, we administered a novel battery of questions to a nationally representative sample drawn from the 2012 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project. Results The data show evidence of generational effects, but also of partisanship in the case of opinions of governmental performance, and of ideology in the case of evaluations of culture and quality of life. Conclusion This study suggests that Americans are divided not just in their views of the present, but also in their views on the past. To the extent that peoples’ evaluations are shaped by how well government is performing relative to some past era of good performance, polarization in views of the past could have long‐lasting effects on how Americans evaluate the government.

Nostalgic Voting? Explaining the Electoral Support for the Political Left in Post-Soviet Moldova

“…While the strong association between nostalgia and the Left falls in line with previous research in the post-Soviet region (White 2007;White 2010), it appears to contradict arguments demonstrating that nostalgic voters support populist and extreme right parties in the West (Farrall et al 2020;Norris and Inglehart 2019;Steenvoorden and Harteveld 2018;Kang 2018;Rensmann 2018;Hibbing, Hayes, and Deol 2017;Kenny 2017). A key theoretical insight concerns the weakness of class-based and economic voting (Pacek 1994;Harper 2000;Tucker 2006).…”

“…Mutz (2018) observes that the nostalgic appeals in the 2016 US elections were not aimed at the "left behind" working-class Americans, but rather sought to attract those who viewed their dominant status under threat and regretted the loss of America's superpower status. Another study reveals that the US Republicans and conservatives yearn for bygone eras more than Democrats and liberals, detecting a nostalgia effect on presidential approval ratings (Hibbing et al 2017). In other Western contexts, political nostalgia has been used to explain the Brexit vote (Kenny 2017) and the electoral support for Die Linke and the Alternative for Germany in Germany (Campbell 2018;Rensmann 2018).…”

Personality traits, democratic support, and authoritarian nostalgia

“…People around the world have also developed nostalgia for the past: Stalin's old house has become a major tourist attraction in Georgia 1 ; the exhumation of former Spanish dictator, Franco, gathered his supporters in Madrid 2 ; and the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has been bolstered by the nostalgia for Marcos Sr. in the Philippines. 3 These examples of political nostalgia share a common feature, where politicians or voters idealize the past, evoking positive memories of previous political leaders or a dictatorship without equally evaluating negative aspects (Hibbing, Hayes, and Deol 2017). People feel nostalgic for certain political periods from the past, which are often clearly demarcated by critical events in history, such as changes in administration through democratic elections or regime transition to a new political system (Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004).…”

“…These examples of political nostalgia share a common feature, where politicians or voters idealize the past, evoking positive memories of previous political leaders or a dictatorship without equally evaluating negative aspects (Hibbing, Hayes, and Deol 2017). People feel nostalgic for certain political periods from the past, which are often clearly demarcated by critical events in history, such as changes in administration through democratic elections or regime transition to a new political system (Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004).…”

“…Studies on political/authoritarian nostalgia have displayed three general limitations in measuring the elusive concept. First, many studies have depended on indirect proxy instruments for measuring nostalgic sentiment, including measures for political system support, general historical ratings, and voting behavior (Chang, Zhu, and Pak 2007; Hibbing, Hayes, and Deol 2017; Prusik and Lewicka 2016). Second, other studies have focused on a single country or region, limiting the scope of measures to certain cultural or historical backgrounds (Elçi 2021; Nikolayenko 2008).…”