Arguments about national tax policy have taken center stage in U.S. politics in recent times, creating acute dilemmas for Democrats. With Republicans locked into antitax agendas for some time, Democrats have recently begun to push back, arguing for maintaining or even increasing taxes on the very wealthy in the name of deficit reduction and the need to sustain funding for public programs. But t...

Partisanship seems to affect factual beliefs about politics. For example, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that the deficit rose during the Clinton administration; Democrats are more likely to say that inflation rose under Reagan. What remains unclear is whether such patterns reflect differing beliefs among partisans or instead reflect a desire to praise one party or criticize ...

“Mohammedans are Mohammedans because they are born and reared among that sect, not because they have thought it out and can furnish sound reasons for being Mohammedans; we know why Catholics are Catholics; why Presbyterians are Presbyterians; why Baptists are Baptists; why Mormons are Mormons; why thieves are thieves; why monarchists are monarchists; why Republicans are Republicans and Democrat...

In light of ever-present partisan division in the US political system, it is critical that researchers gain a better understanding of potential biological differences that exist between self-professed Democrats and Republicans. In the current pilot experiment, we examined differences within the human mirror neuron system (hMNS), a network linked to a host of social and emotional abilities, in a...

Two studies examined misperceptions of disagreement in partisan social conflicts, namely, in the debates over abortion (Study 1) and politics (Study 2). We observed that partisans tend to exaggerate differences of opinion with their adversaries. Further, we found that perceptions of disagreement were more pronounced for values that were central to the perceiver’s own ideology than for values th...

Research has documented the decline of trust in science among Republicans, ideological conservatives, and fundamentalist religious groups. However, less is known about nature party polarization these trends: did only increase because changes Republicans? In this study, author tests a two-sided thesis using data from General Social Survey (1974–2018). The findings show that significant share gro...

The sorting paired features (SPF) task measures four associations in a single response block. Using four response options (e.g., good-Republicans, bad-Republicans, good-Democrats, and bad-Democrats), each trial requires participants to categorize two stimuli at once to a category pair (e.g., wonderful-Clinton to good-Democrats). Unlike other association measures, the SPF requires simultaneous c...

The present study reveals that Election Day differentially affects the color preferences of US Republicans and Democrats. Voters' preferences for Republican red and Democratic blue were assessed, along with several distractor colors, on and around the 2010 interim and 2012 presidential elections. On non-Election Days, Republicans and Democrats preferred Republican red equally, and Republicans a...

Abstract Two parallel processes structure American politics in the current moment: partisan polarization and increasing linkage between racial attitudes issue preferences of all sorts. We develop a novel theory that roots these two trends historical changes party coalitions. Changing compositions major parties led to formation racialized images about Democrats Republicans people’s minds—and now...

This paper quantifies the impact of environmentally-concerned constituents, as measured by original data on environmental group membership by district, on congressional voting. The new measure of constituency interest enables us to assess the role of constituents in a particular policy area for the first time. In general, members of Congress vote more pro-environmental when they have more membe...