The forthcoming article “Ideology, Not Affect: What Americans Want from Political Representation” by Mia Costa is summarize by the author below. 

Research shows that partisan affect, or how Democrats and Republicans feel about one another, drives polarization more than ideology. Scholars suggest that the increasing loathing between partisans leads voters to desire representatives who inflame their partisan animus. Indeed, President Trump often attacks the other side and some voters respond favorably to his brazen, affective rhetoric. Other politicians denigrate their opposition with name-calling and party-polarizing language on social media. If voters did not support this behavior, then why would politicians engage in it?  

I use three unique survey experiments to answer whether Americans prefer a representational style based in affective partisanship rather than substantive representation. The conjoint approach, where multiple information is randomized at once, allows me to examine the relative impact of expressions of negative (or positive) partisan affect and policy (in)congruence on legislator evaluations. Across three studies, I find that affective partisan rhetoric is not rewarded and, in most cases, significantly harms citizens’ evaluations of legislators. Overall, people rate representatives the highest when they share their issue positions and priorities.  

In Study 1, people were asked to choose between two fictional members of Congress five times for who they would prefer to have as their representative. Each time, information about each legislator was randomized, such as whether they expressed out-party affect or agreed/disagreed with the respondent on a policy issue. I found that out-party affect was penalized; if a member expressed negative animus against the other party, they were significantly less likely to be selected than if they disagreed with the respondent on policy.  

In Study 2, people were simply asked to rate their approval of a fictional legislator instead of choosing between two. An additional component was randomized: whether the legislator expressed negative or positive partisan affect. Previous research demonstrates that loathing towards one’s out-party is stronger than positive affect towards the in-party, suggesting that out-party rhetoric should be evaluated more favorably than in-party rhetoric. However, I find that people rated legislators less favorably when they expressed out-party negativity than in-party cheerleading. Moreover, as in Study 1, policy agreement had a very large, positive effect compared to partisan affect and policy disagreement. This remains true even when people evaluate a legislator of their own party and even among primary voters.  

Finally, in Study 3, I take into account policy issue priorities rather than positions. The policies used in Study 1 and Study 2 (immigration, health care, gun control, income tax) were varied enough to provide some level of generalizability, but what happens if the issues prioritized by the legislator are more or less important to the respondent? The results indicate that respondents still care about policy issues over partisan affect. If legislators listed an issue priority, even if it was not the respondent’s top issue priority, their approval increased more than prioritizing an electoral loss for the other party. 

Overall, the paper demonstrates that affective polarization does not extend to preferences for representation. If policy issues form the basis of ideology, then voters indeed want representation based on ideology, not partisan affect. Concerns that Americans are only (or even primarily) driven by partisan animus when evaluating political leaders are overblown. And politicians who often take part in expressive partisanship may thus be out of line with what their constituents want.  

About the Author: Mia Costa is Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College. Her research “Ideology, Not Affect: What Americans Want from Political Representation” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “Bringing War Back in: Victory and State Formation in Latin America” by Luis L. Schenoni  is summarized by the author below. 

The notion that warfare and state formation are intimately linked is widely held across the social sciences and humanities, although the specific way in which they are connected is still contested.  

Two mechanisms have gathered attention recently. On the one hand, an evolutionary understanding of bellicist theory posits war acts mainly by out-selecting weaker states. On the other hand, an account that focuses on extraction and mobilization contends that war boosts state capacity as states prepare for it, independently of the war outcome. These two mechanisms, however, overlook classical bellicist theorists who pictured war outcomes as having enduring effects into a post-war phase. Scholars like Otto Hintze, Max Weber, and Franz Oppenheimer, used to emphasize how institutions were shaped by success or failure in the battlefield, and had lasting effects afterwards. 

In “Bringing War Back In: Victory and State Formation in Latin America” I set out to test the hypothesis that war outcomes produce effects on state capacity that linger on into a post-war phase. While most applications of bellicist theory build on the European experience, I note this region is far from an ideal testing ground for this particular argument for the simple reason that European states systematically died as a cause of war, causing selection bias. To compare post-war effects on both victors and losers it is necessary to look at environments where most or all losers survived. 19th century Latin America provides a much better laboratory, with no out-selection going on despite frequent and severe warfare. 

Building on a panel of Latin America during the height of state building (1865-1913) I use a difference-in-differences design to show that losing a war had long-term negative effects on two indicators of state capacity – revenue extraction and railroad extension – which in time overwhelmed the wartime state-building effort. I then delve into the two major wars between Latin American states in the 19th century: the Paraguayan War (1864-1870) and the War of the Pacific (1879-1884). Original archival material and further statistical analyses using the synthetic control method show that, although contenders were matched in state strength, the gap between losers and winners expanded significantly and consistently after these wars. 

This article puts into question a conventional wisdom according to which variation in state capacity across Latin America is unrelated to inter-state war. My findings suggest that the relative absence of war during the 20th century might account for the rigidity of the state capacity ranking in this region, which was much more fluid at the time of these early martial experiences. These conclusions make bellicist theory ever more enticing for scholars interested in contemporary world politics, yet another environment where wars almost never kill states. By incorporating war outcomes into the analysis future researchers should find war makes states in most regions of the world and well into the 20th century. 

About the Author: Luis L. Schenoni is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Chair of International Politics, Department of Politics and Public Administration at University of Konstanz. His research “Bringing War Back in: Victory and State Formation in Latin America” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “Mutual Optimism and War, and the Strategic Tensions of the July Crisis” by Alexandre Debs is summarized by the author below. 

Is mutual optimism a rationalist explanation for war?  

Leaders routinely express confidence in their odds of victory on the eve of battle. When Russia ordered the general mobilization of its troops during the July Crisis of 1914, a move which would certainly trigger a European war, both its French allies and its German enemies celebrated.  

It seems reasonable that if enemies are mutually optimistic, they may not find a peaceful compromise. But it is not clear how rational countries could be mutually optimistic in the first place. If a country attacks only when it receives a favorable signal about the balance of power, then a country’s enthusiasm for war should temper its enemy’s preference for conflict. It doesn’t seem possible for both countries to be optimistic about their odds of winning, while being aware of their enemy’s preference for war.  

Whether mutual optimism stands as a rationalist explanation for war has been hotly contested among International Relations scholars, with some of the seminal work published in the pages of the American Journal of Political Science (Fey and Ramsay 2007; Slantchev and Tarar 2011).  

I argue that a key solution to this strategic tension is to recognize that there are multiple reasons for a preference to attack: favorable information about the balance of power as well as a high resolve. A country may find it optimal to attack because it has a high resolve, even if it believes that it is unlikely to prevail. Because of these multiple motivations for an attack, countries cannot infer from their enemy’s eagerness to fight that they received favorable intelligence. Countries would also have reasons to discount their enemy’s public statements predicting a quick victory. Of the two reasons to fight, favorable information about the balance of power is politically more expedient, helping to preserve a leader’s honor and motivate troops. Countries may even celebrate the news of their enemy’s decision to attack, if it helps justify their own decision to attack. 

I present this logic in a game-theoretic model, and I argue that it captures important features of the July Crisis, shedding new light on the causes of the First World War. Russian officials arguably lacked confidence in their odds of victory, but they still preferred war due to their high resolve. German and French decisionmakers celebrated their enemy’s decision for war, convinced that it justified their offensive plans. 

In sum, mutual optimism does stand as a rationalist explanation for war, if we recognize the difficult inference problem that countries face when divining their enemy’s motivations. Looking ahead, there is great value in further investigating the complex strategic calculations that leaders make when choosing whether to go to war. When do leaders on opposite sides of a crisis both conclude that their enemy’s actions amount to a declaration of war, justifying their own aggressiveness? This is an important question for future research.  

About the Author: Alexandre Debs is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science at Yale University. Their research “Mutual Optimism and War, and the Strategic Tensions of the July Crisis” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science. 

The forthcoming article “What Motivates Reasoning? A Theory of Goal‐Dependent Political Evaluation” by Eric Groenendyk and Yanna Krupnikov is summarized by the author(s) below. 

Political science has long struggled with the question of motivation.  In the economic sphere, sound decisions pay off, so individuals have a clear incentive for accuracy. But, within the political sphere, decision-making occurs collectively, undermining democratic citizens’ motivation to devote effort to accurate evaluation (Downs 1957). To address this problem, scholars often look to motivated reasoning theory (Kunda 1990), but what we really need is a theory of what motivates reasoning in politics.   

We theorize that information processing is motivated by the goals salient in a given context.  What goals, then, are salient in the context of politics?  We argue that, if politics feels conflictual, like debate, the goal will be to “win” by counterargue against the opposition in defense of one’s own position. But, if politics feels cooperative, like deliberation, the goal will be to find consensus through open-minded discussion.   

We test our theory through three experiments. In the first experiment participants were each asked to describe what came to mind when they thought of a randomly assigned treatment word: politics, disagreement, debate, deliberation, democracy, or sports.  We find that, like disagreement and debate, and unlike deliberation and democracy, people associate politics with conflict and not consensus.  

While it may be common for people to defend their prior opinions in the context of politics, our theory suggests this motivation is not inherent to politics, but rather conditioned on this association between politics and conflict. Our second experiment tested this hypothesis by manipulating whether policy statements were labeled as potentially disagreeable information, “political” information, or simply “additional” information.  In the first two conditions, study participants argued against information that conflicted with their prior attitudes.  But, absent an expectation of conflict, participants in the third condition displayed no such effort.    

Given the lack of incentive to reach accurate evaluations in the political sphere, we designed our third experiment to test whether it is possible to motivate open-minded reasoning as an end unto itself, not simply as a means to achieve accuracy.  In our treatment group, participants were told about a (fictitious) study linking open-mindedness with various measures of life success, thereby providing a psychological incentive to want to believe they were open-minded.  The control group received no such information. Compared to the control group, participants told of the link between open-mindedness and life success devoted more effort to open-minded evaluation of counter-attitudinal information.  At the same time, however, they showed no increase in their ability to discern between strong and weak arguments, suggesting their goal was open-mindedness, not accuracy.      

These findings suggest that, while accuracy-motivated reasoning may not be common in politics, directional motivations need not lead people to reject counter-attitudinal information.  Rather, there is an important role for context: how people respond to new information depends on what they imagine politics to be.    

Works Cited
Downs, Anthony. (1957). An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper Row.
Kunda, Ziva. (1990). “The case for motivated reasoning.” Psychological Bulletin 108 (3):480-98. 

About the Author(s): Eric Groenendyk is an Associate Professor at University of Memphis and Yanna Krupnikov is an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University. Their research “What Motivates Reasoning? A Theory of Goal‐Dependent Political Evaluation” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.