Party hacks and true believers: The effect of party affiliation on political preferences

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of party affiliation on an individual's political views. To do this, we exploit the party realignment that occurred in the U.S. due to abortion becoming a more prominent and highly partisan issue over time. We show that abortion was not a highly partisan issue in 1982, but a person's abortion views in 1982 led many to switch parties over time as the two main parties diverged in their stances on this issue. We find that voting for a given political party in 1996, due to the individual's initial views on abortion in 1982, has a substantial effect on a person's political, social, and economic attitudes in 1997. These findings are stronger for highly partisan political issues, and are robust to controlling for a host of personal views and characteristics in 1982 and 1997. As individuals realigned their party affiliation in accordance with their initial abortion views, their other political views followed suit.

Self-Persuasion: Evidence from Field Experiments at Two International Debating Competitions

“…While our dataset does not allow investigation of long-term dynamics, we conjecture that persuasion goals help explain instances of polarization in a range of contexts where debate and persuasion play a role. For instance, self-persuasion offers a reason why polarization is more severe in the US congress than it is in the American public (Fiorina and Abrams, 2008), why it is so strong on social media platforms, especially if people are exposed to opposing views (Bail et al, 2018), and why people who joined the Republican party exclusively for their view on abortion then saw their other beliefs fall in line with the party (Gould and Klor, 2019). It also suggests alternative motives for political behavior than are commonly assumed.…”