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This article urges a jolt in journalism theory commensurate with the urgent state of planetary affairs—including catastrophic climate change and spreading authoritarianism—that journalism's weaknesses have helped to precipitate and that its strengths might help to contain. The article explores three conceptual frameworks offering alternative approaches to conceiving news that might disrupt the stasis of our polarized societies: "existential journalism," or a call to radical independence; Buddhist news values, based on ontological and ethical commitments favoring interdependence and compassion; and nonrepresentational news, inspired by an epistemologically expansive style of social research privileging affect, immanence, and wide-eyed attention. Attending to journalisms of engagement, compassion, and everyday joys might disrupt the heuristic partisanship and protective avoidance that characterize citizens' contemporary relations with news, opening possibilities for more generative politics.

Measuring relative legislative influence is notoriously difficult, particularly in bicameral systems where two chambers have similar formal powers. Recent changes to the Canadian legislature offer a unique opportunity to understand how an upper house liberated from party constraints impacts that houses' legislative influence. I leverage an original panel data set matching lobbyist activity to parliamentarian characteristics and responsibilities and, using a difference-in-differences design, compare Members of Parliament to Senators, both independent and partisan. I find that independent Senators receive disproportionately more attention from lobbyists both after the changes and as the independent composition of the Senate grows. This article offers a time-variant measure by which perceived influence can be evaluated and contributes to the extant literature on intercameral relationships, partisanship, the legislative process, and party discipline and cohesion.

AbstractSignificant research indicates that attitude change is often a product of partisan learning. However, as the party system continues to rearrange around issues of race and immigration, and as new racial policy issues thrust onto the agenda, it is unclear whether voters learn to adopt racial policy attitudes more based on race/ethnicity or on party identification. We evaluate the partisan-learning model versus a racial-learning model with regards to public opinion on sanctuary cities/policies among survey respondents in CA and TX. Given President Trump's public antipathy toward sanctuary cities, we argue and show that negative partisanship is the most plausible vehicle for sanctuary city attitude change between 2015 and 2017. In this particular case, we find no support for a racial/ethnic-learning model.

While previously polarization was primarily seen only in issue-based terms, a new type of division has emerged in the mass public in recent years: Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party. Democrats and Republicans both say that the other party's members are hypocritical, selfish, and closed-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines. This phenomenon of animosity between the parties is known as affective polarization. We trace its origins to the power of partisanship as a social identity, and explain the factors that intensify partisan animus. We also explore the consequences of affective polarization, highlighting how partisan affect influences attitudes and behaviors well outside the political sphere. Finally, we discuss strategies that might mitigate partisan discord and conclude with suggestions for future work.

Abstract
Prior research finds that exposure to outgroup exemplars reduces prejudice, but it has focused on most-likely cases. We examine whether salient outgroup exemplars can reduce prejudice under more challenging conditions, such as when they are counter-stereotypical but not well-liked, and the audience is heterogeneous and holds strong priors. Specifically, we assess the impact of the Obama exemplar under the less auspicious conditions of the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign. Using panel data, we find that racial prejudice declined during the campaign, especially among Whites with the most exposure to Obama through political television. Liking Obama proved irrelevant to these effects, as did partisanship. Racial prejudice increased slightly after the campaign ended, but the effects remained largely intact weeks later.

This article contributes to a burgeoning literature on parliamentary war powers by investigating the case of the US Congress drawing on both International Relations (IR) research and traditional war powers studies. Applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and case study method, we examine the conditions shaping congressional assertiveness. The article shows that the lack of national security interests and divided government are important conditions for members of Congress to criticize presidential intervention policies. While previous US war powers studies focused on the influence of partisanship, this article holds that domestic as well as international factors influence congressional behavior. A short comparative case study of two US military interventions (Libya 2011, ISIS 2014–15) during the Obama presidency serves to illustrate the findings.

AbstractThe connections between narcissism and political orientations have been theorized by scholars and increasingly evoked by political parties, politicians, public intellectuals, and the media. Yet surprisingly little research has been undertaken to empirically asses the veracity of these claims. We address this lacuna by identifying the relationship between narcissism, political ideologies, and partisanship in a nationally representative sample taken days before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Overall, we find those on the left and right are equally narcissistic. However, liberals and conservatives differ in which dimensions drive their narcissism. Specifically, we find that the entitlement facet of narcissism is uniformly related to more conservative positions, whereas exhibitionism is related to more liberal values, including political party identification. Narcissism, as a complex multidimensional construct, has an important role in understanding political ideology.

Local law enforcement has dramatically increased its cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, while other localities refuse to cooperate. Although scholars have examined how sanctuary cities may differ from other places in terms of crime rates, attitudes toward local law enforcement's collaboration with federal immigration authorities remain understudied. We utilize original data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES) to study attitudes toward local/federal collaboration. Our results demonstrate that those who most recognize the racial advantage of Whites are significantly less likely to support collaboration between local police and federal authorities. Confirming prior work, our results also support the critical role of partisanship, nativity, and education in explaining attitudes toward sanctuary policies. Our findings have important implications for understanding attitudes toward immigration enforcement and policies.

AbstractThere is considerable debate about how election timing shapes who votes, election outcomes, and, ultimately, public policy. We examine these matters by combining information on more than 10,000 school tax referenda with detailed micro‐targeting data on voters participating in each election. The analysis confirms that timing influences voter composition in terms of partisanship, ideology, and the numerical strength of powerful interest groups. But, in contrast to prominent theories of election timing, these effects are modest in terms of their likely impact on election outcomes. Instead, timing has the most significant impact on voter age, with the elderly being the most overrepresented group in low‐turnout special elections. The electoral (and policy) implications of this effect vary between states, and we offer one explanation for this variation.

When casting a split-ticket ballot, voters in established democracies have strong political predispositions and electoral experience that influence their decision. However, voters in a new democracy, lacking long-term party attachment and experience with democracy, may instead be informed and motivated by their social networks. Using the 1990 Cross-National Election Project German Unification study, I examine which factors predict split-ticket voting for East and West Germans. I find that political disagreement within a social network is more influential for East Germans, while partisan predispositions, particularly party supporter type, play a greater role for West Germans. These findings indicate that, in absence of competition between long-term partisanship and democratic experience, network characteristics may have a profound impact on political decision-making.

Why has the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partisanship met with strong public resistance among some Europeans and in some European Union member states, but not in others? This article argues that one important perspective to explain the pattern of support for TTIP is the role of heuristic opinion formation and issue attention. Analysing multiple waves of Eurobarometer data, I find that views of the two treaty partners, the US and the European Union, shape attitudes towards TTIP and that the largely post-materialist concerns over TTIP resonated specifically in those European countries whose citizens' attention was less focused on economic issues. In showing how opinions towards concrete real-world trade policy proposals are shaped by the political context, these findings complement previous research on citizens' general stances towards trade.

To paint a fuller picture of economic voters, we combine personal income records with a representative election survey. We examine three central topics in the economic voting literature: pocketbook versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic evaluations, and voter myopia. First, we show that voters who appear in survey data to be voting based on the national economy are, in fact, voting equally on the basis of their personal financial conditions. Second, there is strong evidence of both partisan bias and economic information in economic evaluations, but personal economic data is required to separate the two. Third, although in experiments and aggregate historical data recent economic conditions appear to drive vote choice, we find no evidence of myopia when we examine actual personal economic data.

Although long privileged by scholarship in psychology, personality has only recently been considered as an influential factor for political orientations and actions. In this article, we consider personality's influence on another important tendency: the proclivity to engage in stereotyping and prejudicial thinking. Using a personality battery included for the first time on the 2012 American National Election Study (ANES), we examine the tendencies of particular personality types to stereotype. Results suggest that the two most politically relevant traits (Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness) are consistent predictors of authoritarian tendencies, which, in turn, produce indirect effects of personality on group-centric policy positions, over and above the effects through political predispositions such as partisanship. Our findings demonstrate the important role of group stereotyping in mediating the effects of personality on policy support.

In the United States, academic research on local polices for international migration remains predominantly descriptive, methodologically localist, and focused on anti-immigrant policies. By contrast, this study offers a relational perspective on local immigration policy, arguing that a convergence of efforts by local governments and by immigrant communities at upward social mobility favors the emergence of inclusionary local immigration policies. This effect is facilitated by the predominance of Democratic partisanship and the presence of a bifurcated ethnic composition in localities. This theory is developed through a strategic narrative of the immigration policies of Baltimore City in the context of the U.S. rustbelt. Covering the period from the late 1970s to 2015, the narrative is based on information from official documents, news articles, academic literature, and official statistics.

The nascent literature on the propensity to endorse conspiratorial views of President Barack Obama suggests that such sentiments may be grounded in racial animus or political partisanship. Yet to date, little attention has been paid to the religious elements that may underlie such claims. We extend the research in this area by using a national survey to assess the relationship between white conservative Protestant affiliation and an inclination to endorse the idea that Obama is a Muslim and/or a noncitizen. The results show that white conservative Protestant affiliation is associated with a greater tendency to support these characterizations of Obama. Importantly, this relationship is substantially mediated by racial resentment. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the United States' increasing ethnic and religious pluralism.