The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. elections in the 21st century

19 Things We Learned from the 2016 Election

“…Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe (2015) found, through a series of experiments, that citizens are more powerfully motivated by messages about threats to their partisan identity ("this election will be a bad one for Democrats") than about issues (messages like, "this election is about healthcare"). Partisanship is also growing more negative over time, with Abramowitz and Webster (2016) finding that partisans are both increasingly loyal and increasingly likely to express negative feelings about the other party. Studies like these help illustrate how Republicans who did not initially like Trump were unwilling, in the end, to abandon their party's nominee and risk a Clinton presidency.…”

Assessing the contextual stability of moral foundations: Evidence from a survey experiment

“…Recent research indicates that the "forgotten" side of partisanship-negative partisanship-is also important to public opinion and various forms of political behavior (Caruana et al, 2015;Medeiros and Noël, 2014). In the US context, negative partisanship has a profound effect on the partisan composition of both the House and the Senate (Abramowitz and Webster, 2016). Furthermore, it is suggested that many Americans now dislike the opposing party more than they like their own party (p. 21).…”

How negative partisanship affects voting behavior in Europe: Evidence from an analysis of 17 European multi-party systems with proportional voting

“…Second, Abramowitz and Webster (2016) recently showed that negative partisanship increases loyal voting of partisans in the United States: party adherents with a NPID are more likely to vote for their own identification party. This is in line with previous studies; Maggiotto and Piereson (1977: 747) found that NPID increases the likelihood of voting for the identification party.…”

“…The few existing studies indicate that NPID has its own unique effect on vote choice (e.g. Abramowitz and Webster, 2016;Caruana et al, 2015;Maggiotto and Piereson, 1977;Medeiros and Noël, 2014;Richardson, 1991;Vlachová, 2001). However, this socalled "hostility hypothesis" coined first by Maggiotto and Piereson (1977), has been analyzed almost exclusively in countries with majority vote systems, where voters mainly vote for (district) candidates, but not for party lists.…”

“…Related to this research on NPID, several recent studies have pointed to a growing antipathy between Democratic and Republican adherents in the United States (e.g. Abramowitz and Webster, 2016;Iyengar et al, 2012;Mason, 2015).…”