Hostname: page-component-65b85459fc-hn4tn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-15T17:19:10.315Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Testing the Robustness of the ANES Feeling Thermometer Indicators of Affective Polarization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2023

MATTHEW TYLER Open the ORCID record for MATTHEW TYLER [Opens in a new window]  and
SHANTO IYENGAR Open the ORCID record for SHANTO IYENGAR [Opens in a new window]
MATTHEW TYLER*
Affiliation:
Rice University, United States
SHANTO IYENGAR*
Affiliation:
Stanford University, United States
*
Corresponding author: Matthew Tyler, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Rice University, United States, mdtyler@rice.edu.
Shanto Iyengar, William Robertson Coe Professor and Professor of Political Science and of Communication, Department of Political Science, Stanford University, United States, siyengar@stanford.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Affective polarization (AP)—the tendency of political partisans to view their opponents as a stigmatized “out group”—is now a major field of research. Relevant evidence in the United States derives primarily from a single source, the American National Election Studies (ANES) feeling thermometer time series. We investigate whether the design of the ANES produces overestimates of AP. We consider four mechanisms: overrepresentation of strong partisans, selection bias conditional on strong identification, priming effects of partisan content, and survey mode variation. Our analysis uses the first-ever collaboration between ANES and the General Social Survey and a novel experiment that manipulates the amount of political content in surveys. Our tests show that variation in survey mode has caused an artificial increase in the mixed-mode ANES time series, but the general increase in out-party animus is nonetheless real and not merely an artifact of selection bias or priming effects.

Information

Type
Letter
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 118 , Issue 3 , August 2024 , pp. 1570 - 1576
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Bem, Daryl J. 1972. “Self-Perception Theory.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 6, 1–62. New York: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Iyengar, Shanto, Lelkes, Yphtach, Levendusky, Matthew, Malhotra, Neil, and Westwood, Sean J. 2019. “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States.” Annual Review of Political Science 22: 129–46.Google Scholar
Kalmoe, Nathan P., and Mason, Lilliana. 2022. Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lin, Winston. 2013. “Agnostic Notes on Regression Adjustments to Experimental Data: Reexamining Freedman’s Critique.” Annals of Applied Statistics 7 (1): 295–318.Google Scholar
Palmer, Harvey D., and Duch, Raymond M.. 2001. “Do Surveys Provide Representative or Whimsical Assessments of the Economy?” Political Analysis 9 (1): 58–77.Google Scholar
Rivers, Douglas, and Nail, Stephanie A.. 2020. “Partisan Polarization and Retrospective Voting.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.Google Scholar
Tyler, Matthew, and Iyengar, Shanto. 2023. “Replication Data for: Testing the Robustness of the ANES Feeling Thermometer Indicators of Affective Polarization.” Harvard Dataverse. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/G9OKGB.Google Scholar
Westwood, Sean J., Grimmer, Justin, Tyler, Matthew, and Nall, Clayton. 2022. “Current Research Overstates American Support for Political Violence.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (12): e2116870119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2116870119.Google ScholarPubMed
Supplementary material: File

Tyler and Iyengar supplementary material

Tyler and Iyengar supplementary material
Download Tyler and Iyengar supplementary material(File)
File 334.2 KB
Supplementary material: File

Tyler_and_Iyengar_Dataset

Dataset

Download Tyler_and_Iyengar_Dataset(File)
File
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.