Preaching to the Choir: Americans Prefer Communicating to Copartisan Elected Officials

Abstract

Past work suggests that partisan attachments isolate citizens from encountering elite messages contrary to their points of view. Here, we present evidence that partisan attachments not only serve to filter the information citizens receive from political elites; they also work in the other direction, isolating politicians from encountering potentially contrary perspectives from citizens. In particular, we hypothesized that Americans prefer expressing their opinions to politicians who share their party identification and avoid contacting outpartisan politicians. Three studies-drawing on a mixture of observational, field experimental, and natural experimental approaches-support this hypothesis: Citizens prefer to "preach to the choir," contacting legislators of the same partisan stripe. In light of evidence that contact from citizens powerfully affects politicians' stances and priorities, these findings suggest a feedback loop that might aggravate political polarization and help explain how politicians of different parties could develop different perceptions of the same constituencies.

Bias in Perceptions of Public Opinion among Political Elites

“…This would still result in the consequence that Republican legislators hear from Republican citizens especially often. With this said, Broockman and Ryan (2016) find that citizens tend to prefer contacting legislators who share their partisanship and demonstrate this pattern with other forms of evidence as well. It may be that there is a partisan asymmetry in the effects they documented, perhaps because of the greater salience of partisanship as a social identity for Republican citizens.…”

Shot To Win: Electoral Prospects and Republicans' Openness to the COVID-19 Vaccine

“…4 Thus, Republican public officials may be able to employ "Shot to Win" (STW) messaging to successfully encourage their Republican constituents to be more open to COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine information-an urgent public health priority, and one that will likely remain so for years to come given the likelihood that new variants of the virus continue to emerge. Helping facilitate vaccine promotion among Republican elites is vital for boosting Republican vaccination rates, as rank-and-file voters are increasingly attentive to co-partisan message senders (Broockman and Ryan 2016).…”

Do Republican and Democratic legislators have polarized views of their district’s demographics?

“…Just as voters use informational shortcuts to make complex voting decisions (Popkin, 1991;Lupia, 1994), legislators also use shortcuts on decisions involving legislative proposals (Kingdon, 1981). However, cues can lead people to reach the wrong conclusion (Dancey and Sheagley, 2012), and prior research shows that politicians regularly rely on biased cues to learn about their constituents, including information from interest groups (Hertel-Fernandez et al, 2018) and communication from constituents who may not be representative of their district at large (Broockman and Ryan, 2016). These cues can be strong enough to change politicians' votes (Bergan and Cole, 2015) and could affect their perceptions about their district's demographics, leading officials to believe their district is more like the nonrepresentative sample of constituents who contact them.…”