Jon Kingzette
Many people are alarmed at the extent to which Democrats and Republicans dislike each other. Partisan animosities may bias decision making, prevent people from working together to solve important public problems, and generally make life less pleasant due to rancorous interactions with people on the other side—from the Thanksgiving table to PTA meetings to the workplace. This pattern of partisan disdain for the other side is often referred to as “affective polarization.” However, though scholars and others are deeply concerned about partisan animosities in the American mass public, they often measure these animosities with survey items that ask respondents how they feel toward the Democratic and Republican Parties. When taking a survey about politics, respondents are likely to think of Democratic and Republican politicians when answering these items, because they are primed to think of them given the context of the survey.
This can cause problems for interpreting responses to these items as a measure of partisan animosity in the mass public. If partisans have more negative attitudes toward politicians in the opposing party than toward ordinary people in the opposing party, then these items could overstate ordinary Democrats’ and Republicans’ disdain for each other. Because Americans generally dislike political parties and their leaders, I hypothesized that partisans have significantly more negative attitudes toward politicians in the opposing party than toward ordinary people in the opposing party.
To test this hypothesis, I fielded a survey to a representative sample of Americans. On the survey, I asked people about their attitudes toward the Democratic and Republican Parties, Democratic and Republican politicians, and ordinary members of the Democratic and Republican Parties, randomizing question order to mitigate against potential anchoring effects. I used “feeling thermometer items” to measure these attitudes, which ask people how warmly or coldly they feel toward a group, with higher scores indicating more positive feelings. I then compared Democrats’ attitudes toward the Republican Party, Republican politicians, and ordinary Republicans; I also compared Republicans’ attitudes toward the Democratic Party, Democratic politicians, and ordinary Democrats.
I found that Democrats’ thermometer scores toward ordinary Republicans are 28% higher than their scores toward Republican politicians and 25% higher than their scores toward the Republican Party. Even more dramatically, I found that Republicans’ thermometer scores toward ordinary Democrats are 49% higher than their scores toward Democratic politicians and 43% higher than their scores toward the Democratic Party. In short, partisans have substantially more positive attitudes toward ordinary people in the opposing party than they do toward politicians in the opposing party and toward the opposing party itself.
These results indicate that research relying on measures of attitudes toward the opposing “party” vastly overstates levels of partisan animosity in the American public, as these measures conflate disdain for ordinary people on the other side with disdain for leaders of the opposing party. More generally, these results show that discussions surrounding “partisan animosity,” “affective polarization,” and “party tribalism” require more precision. People merely disliking politicians on the other side is quite different from people being unwilling to interact with ordinary people on the other side in their daily lives. Research and writing on these topics should reflect that distinction.