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This paper discusses the epistemic value of political parties and other partisan associations from the standpoint of epistemic democracy. It examines whether political parties contribute to the quality of democratic deliberation, thus increasing the epistemic value of democratic decisionmaking procedures, or represent a threat that polarizes the society and impedes and distorts the public deliberation. The paper introduces several arguments that support the epistemic value of partisanship. Partisan associations empower otherwise marginalized social groups or groups that have disproportionally small political influence by facilitating political education or by connecting citizens and experts who share the same values. Partisan associations also help us resist the epistemically damaging effects of hermeneutical (epistemic) injustice by enabling marginalized citizens to construct alternative discourses. However, though partisanship might facilitate the transmission of knowledge, this deliberative tool will only be used in a group of like-minded citizens (i.e. within a political party), thus increasing the polarization between the parties and citizens alike, and decreasing the epistemic value of such collective decision-making procedures. The paper analyses some epistemic strategies (like red-teaming or building a critical thinking culture) that can help us avoid or (at least) reduce the epistemically damaging effects of polarization. However, internal action (from within a deliberative group) might not be enough. Making the deliberation on political issues public and spreading it through different forms of citizens' organizations will ensure that political deliberation is not closed within a single homogenous deliberating group (i.e. the party). These practices should significantly reduce the damaging effects of group polarization.

(Thesis) Thesis--University of Florida. ; (Bibliography) Bibliography: leaves 132-136. ; Typescript. ; Vita. ; (Statement of Responsibility) by Margaret Allen Aiesi.

It is a truism that public school teachers should not take partisan stands in the classroom in ways that discourage students from considering or adopting alternative reasonable perspectives. At least three arguments support this widespread belief. (DIPF/Orig.)

When the Supreme Court first entered the political thicket with the "one person, one vote" cases of the 1960s, contemporaneous polls showed the Court to be on the right side of public opinion. In 1966, 76% of Americans called the Supreme Court decision "rul[ing] all Congressional Districts had to have an equal number of people in them so each person's vote would count equally" "right" (Louis Harris and Associates Poll, The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research). Few, if any, innovations from the Warren Court years met with such deep approval by the public or have had comparable staying power. Indeed, majorities continue to support redistricting based on population equality (see Ansolabehere and Persily 2009). Beyond the easy-to-grasp concept of "one person, one vote," however, the public has little knowledge or opinion concerning the redistricting process. Polling on redistricting has been done sporadically and locally. As a consequence, only a few published articles attempt to describe or account for public attitudes concerning the complicated and low salience modern controversies surrounding redistricting on such issues as partisan or incumbent-protecting gerrymandering. This article analyzes survey data with the hope of gauging where Americans stand on various controversies surrounding the redistricting process. Part I briefly presents the public opinion surveys utilized and the questions most central to the analysis. Part II begins by examining the extent to which the public is uninformed and lacks opinions about redistricting. In short, Americans exhibit both characteristics"must have neither heard much about the debate nor have opinions about it. Part III analyzes the structure of public opinion where it does exist. We begin by considering the impact of demographics on public opinion. Breaking up our discussion into subsections on fairness, satisfaction, and institutional actors, we then analyze variables related to partisanship and incumbency protection. We analyze, for instance, whether respondents feel differently about the process if their party controls their state's government than if they identify with the party out of power. We look at whether, in states with divided government, respondents are any more likely to view the results redistricting outcome as fair or satisfactory than in unified governments. And we distinguish between states with maps that are biased in one party's favor and those that are not. Overall, we find that respondents hold rational opinions. Winners are happier than losers, and voters generally desire a fair process achieved through methods muting the potential influence of partisanship in the line-drawing process. Part III concludes by briefly illustrating the strong relationship that opinions on redistricting have with opinions about politicians more generally.

This article offers a new theoretical explanation of the relationship between religion and the demand for redistribution. Previous literature shows that religious individuals are less likely to favour redistribution either because (a) religion provides a substitute for state welfare provision, or (b) it adds a salient moral dimension to an individual's calculus which induces them to act contrary to their economic interests. In this article, it is argued that the effect of religion on an individual's redistributive preferences is best explained by their partisanship, via a process of partisan motivated reasoning. In contexts where parties are able to combine religion with pro-redistribution policies, religious individuals are more likely to favour redistribution as doing so reinforces their partisan identity. In advanced democracies, religious individuals are more likely to be supporters of centre-right parties that oppose redistribution. However, in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the historical and political context leads to the opposite expectation. The nature of party competition in CEE has seen nationalist populist parties adopt policy platforms that combine religion and leftist economic programmes. They are able to credibly combine these two positions due to the way in which religion and the welfare state became linked to conceptions of the nation during the inter-war state-building years. Using data from 2002–2014, the study shows that religiosity is associated with pro-redistribution attitudes in CEE. Furthermore, religious supporters of nationalist populist parties are more likely to favour redistribution than religious supporters of other parties. The results of this research add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between religiosity and economic preferences.

Canadians are said to have weaker partisanship than Americans. Most particularly, many Canadians identify with different parties at the federal and provincial level. To what extent does this dual identification form part of a syndrome of weak partisanship, as institutionalist theories of Canadian partisanship would suggest? LISREL modeling of attitudes toward parties in the 1974-1979 panel of the Canadian National Election Studies finds little support for such an institutionalist view. Instead, Canadians have complex schemata for evaluating parties. Dual identification forms a distinct dimension. There are four other factors: temporal stability for both party identification and voting behavior, the strength of identification at both the federal and provincial levels, and separate dimensions for federal and provincial partisanship. These results provide support for a cultural/historical account, especially given the distinctiveness of schemata for Quebec and British Columbia.

One intention of American federalism, according to Madison, was to provide different contexts into which politics might be organized. Segmented partisanship is a reflection of and a response to the differentiation of power, roles and opportunities that federalism made possible. Accepting partisanship as a collection of schemata, choice among which is contextually determined, permits us to see a greater consistency among performance evaluations and electoral decisions, on the one hand, and partisanship on the other, than a single, global schema allows.

The European Parliament has called for he creation of a European cross-border constituency, a transnational list of candidates from across the continent. This idea, recently popularised by French president Emmanuel Macron, has been gutted by the European People's Party, though – a move which could itself be seen as a powerful manifestation of the importance of transnational partisanship in the EU.

This paper examines a voter model for the US which is interconnected with the partisan theory. In our model, voters are rational and forward-looking. They are perfectly informed about the preferences of political parties and about the state of the economy. The predictions of our voter model differ from the predictions of conventional voter models, according to which the incumbent benefits from low unemployment and low inflation, irrespective of its political colour. In a partisan setting, the democratic party benefits from high unemployment and the republican party benefits from high inflation. Regressions of presidential approval rates indicate that the predictions of both the partisan voter model and the conventional model are consistent with the data.

This paper uses joint scaling methods and similar items from three large-scale surveys to place voters, parties and politicians from different Latin American countries on a common ideological space. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the findings reveal that the "median" voter in Latin America is located to the left of the ideological spectrum, and that voter's ideological locations are highly correlated with their partisan attachments. The location of parties and leaders suggests that three distinctive clusters exist: one located at the left of the political spectrum, another at the center, and a third to the right. The results also indicate that legislators in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru tend to be more "leftist" than their voters. The ideological drift, however, is not large enough to substantiate the claim that a representation gap exists in those countries.

Italy's 2016 referendum represents an opportunity to discuss the main hypotheses posited by current literature as to the determinants of referendums. The issue-voting of this constitutional referendum was too technical to arouse great passions in the voters. This provided room for second-order determinants, and the referendum campaign became a competition between Government and Opposition. In such a scenario, political partisanship is expected to play a significant role in the voter's choice. This paper intends to test the impact of partisanship on the vote, versus that of further possible determinants: intra-party dissent, the voters' dissatisfaction with the government, as well as the referendum turnout. Particular attention has been paid to the latter, also because the impact of turnout on referendums is understudied. Correlations and linear regression models, based on data of all the Italian provinces, revealed that, apart from partisanship, other second-order features impacted on the referendum outcome: in particular, it emerged that, where the turnout had been higher, the "No" share was lower. However, the turnout was intertwined with other determinants, first of all, partisanship. To disentangle the turnout from its correlates, a lagged instrument, namely the turnout of the previous referendum held in 2006, was introduced. The Two-Stage Least Squares model proved the instrument to be a robust predictor of the 2016 referendum vote. The result of a mediation model further supported these findings, which suggest that the turnout—as an expression of civic commitment—is not independent of the voters' decision.

The recognition of question-order problems has prompted a reexamination of theory and data in several areas of political behavior. The possibility of question-order effects is of special concern to the study of party identification, the original conceptualization of which has been criticized for disregarding multi dimensionality. We have yet to discover whether the sequence and/or proximity of items measuring multiple, related dimensions may influence findings. An area of research in which results may be especially susceptible to reactivity is that of multiple partisan identification. Most of the studies in this literature asked respondents a context-differentiated sequence of items about their partisan identification in national and state and (infrequently) local politics, respectively, separated only by the usual probes for intensity and direction. The responses obtained logically risk contamination by either consistency or contrast effects, as well as by salience or frame-of-reference effects generated by intervening or antecedent, nonrecursively-related items. In this study, we report the results of two experiments used to control for potential question-order effects in the measurement of multiple party identification. In the first, national and state partisan identification items were alternated in sequence in order to test whether responses to national partisan identification items structure responses to state (and local) partisan identification items. In the second, party thermometer items, national, state, and local partisan identification items, and national, state, and local retrospective evaluations of party governing performance were rotated sequentially. Generally, responses to these three measures of partisanship did not differ significantly as the order of appearance changed.

In the scope of this paper I present the bill in two ways. First, I will show the most recent energy bill as a product of the length of historical debate on energy. I review the history of energy policy, and review the successes and failures of previous Congresses and Presidential administrations. I have broadly reviewed each Presidential administration as a time period for energy policy. This historical perspective is intended to show how energy and environmental policy became simultaneously considered issues when drafting legislation, and how the Waxman-Markey bill evolved from its predecessors. Secondly, I will analyze the bill itself using, both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Using three theories of Congressional decision-making, I will analyze how the House Energy and Commerce Committee drafted the bill, and how the subsequent vote was a reflection of partisan politics. It will prove that the increase in polarity scores since the mid-1970s have led to a partisan vote on the Waxman-Markey legislation.

The purpose of this project is to explore the following research question: do same day (i.e. concurrent) provincial-federal elections exhibit a higher degree of cross-level partisanship than non-concurrent elections? This paper proposes that concurrent elections lead to a convergence in voters evaluations of federal-provincial co-partisans, and that this results in a higher degree of cross-level partisanship than in non-concurrent elections. Using 2011 Canada Election Studies (CES) data on federal party vote choice and provincial party preference, this paper will project the results of concurrent federal-provincial elections for three Canadian provinces. The results of these projected concurrent elections will be compared to actual party vote shares received in the first provincial election held following the 2011 Canadian federal election. The comparison of these data will be used to test the hypothesis that concurrent elections have a higher degree of cross-level partisanship than non-concurrent elections. This paper consists of five sections. First, I introduce the aims of this research and discuss its theoretical and substantive significance by referencing relevant literature. Second, a comprehensive theoretical framework is developed to explain why cross-level partisanship is expected to be higher in a concurrent election. Third, I outline the research design and methodology used to test this causal hypothesis. Fourth, I report and interpret my findings which show that overall cross-level partisanship was slightly higher in projected concurrent elections. I conclude by discussing the implications and limits of this study.

The dominant theories in the study of political partisanship and policy attitude formation tend to focus on the role of either individual-level processes or large-scale political events. The series of studies that comprise this dissertation project seek to bridge that divide -- highlighting the interaction of individual variation in social identities with external political events -- to explain differences in partisanship and policy attitudes among members of three groups: white Catholics, Latinos, and Jewish Americans. The three studies show that the strength with which a person identifies as a member of each group is consequential to their issue priorities, and subsequently to their partisanship under conditions of partisan differentiation. Taken together, these studies provide a well-supported theoretical framework that connects and builds on research from political science, psychology, and communication studies.