Generically partisan: Polarization in political communication

Abstract

American political parties continue to grow more polarized, but the extent of ideological polarization among the public is much less than the extent of perceived polarization (what the ideological gap is believed to be). Perceived polarization is concerning because of its link to interparty hostility, but it remains unclear what drives this phenomenon. We propose that a tendency for individuals to form broad generalizations about groups on the basis of inconsistent evidence may be partly responsible. We study this tendency by measuring the interpretation, endorsement, and recall of category-referring statements, also known as generics (e.g., "Democrats favor affirmative action"). In study 1 (n = 417), perceived polarization was substantially greater than actual polarization. Further, participants endorsed generics as long as they were true more often of the target party (e.g., Democrats favor affirmative action) than of the opposing party (e.g., Republicans favor affirmative action), even when they believed such statements to be true for well below 50% of the relevant party. Study 2 (n = 928) found that upon receiving information from political elites, people tended to recall these statements as generic, regardless of whether the original statement was generic or not. Study 3 (n = 422) found that generic statements regarding new political information led to polarized judgments and did so more than nongeneric statements. Altogether, the data indicate a tendency toward holding mental representations of political claims that exaggerate party differences. These findings suggest that the use of generic language, common in everyday speech, enables inferential errors that exacerbate perceived polarization.

Keywords: American politics; generic language; political communication; political polarization; psychological research.

Fig. 1.

From study 1, for each item, the true proportion for each party expressing agreement (as estimated by national opinion polls), the average perceived prevalence as estimated by the participants in our experiment, and the average rate of generic acceptance of our participants. Issues are ordered in increasing size of the true gap in opinion between the two parties (where red denotes a Republican item and blue denotes a Democratic item).

Fig. 2.

From study 1, true and average perceived prevalence estimates for each of the 124 issue items. The green dots represent prevalences among the target party, and the orange dots represent prevalences among the opposite party.

Fig. 3.

From study 1, proportions of generic acceptance for each item, averaging over respondents. In the top line, each dot represents an issue question, with red and blue corresponding to issues that are relatively more associated with Republicans or Democrats, respectively. In the bottom line, each dot represents the average generic acceptance at a given perceived prevalence level, across all items and respondents.

Fig. 4.

From study 3, the average of six prevalence estimates that respondents provided for both named and unnamed parties across three different statement types (generic, “many”, and “some”).