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AbstractPopular psychological accounts argue that successful candidates address their appeals to citizens' "hearts" rather than their "heads." Yet research on campaigns shows that candidates win elections by getting voters to think about particular issues—especially issues that create ambivalence in the minds of opposition supporters. This article helps to reconcile these "heart‐centered" and "head‐centered" accounts of preference formation during campaigns. An original experiment and ANES data analyses (1980–2004) show that a "good gut feeling" toward a candidate helps citizens to overcome the paralyzing effect of ambivalence on attitude formation and turnout. And, since turnout is most tenuous among those with lower income, this is where the effect is most pronounced. Since Democratic candidates rely disproportionately on support from these lower‐income voters, it is particularly important that they inspire positive affect among latent supporters.

According to the polarization literature, the electorate has sorted into more ideologically homogenous partisan groups, and this increase in cohesion within parties has fueled animosity between partisans. But, are mass parties really as cohesive as we think? If not, what else might be helping to drive up antipathy between partisans? Building on the dual motivations theory of party identification (Groenendyk, ), I theorize that elite polarization has amplified partisans' often competing motivations: People want to be good citizens but also good partisans. Consistent with this theory, American National Election Studies (ANES) data suggest that partisans are not just evaluating the other party more negatively, but they are also reporting less positive evaluations of, and greater ambivalence toward, their own party. This suggests substantive responsiveness. On the other hand, they appear to be rationalizing continued identification with their party in the face of this ambivalence by reporting even more negative feelings toward the other party. In other words, they seem to be engaging in the "lesser of two evils" identity defense (Groenendyk, , ). Overall, these results suggest that parties need not be internally cohesive to be divided against one another, making partisan dynamics more fluid than many accounts imply.

Despite the centrality of party identification to our understanding of political behavior, there remains remarkable disagreement regarding its nature and measurement. Most scholars agree that party identities are quite stable relative to attitudes. But do partisans defend their identities, or does this stability result from Bayesian learning? I hypothesize that partisans defend their identities by generating "lesser of two evils" justifications. In other words, partisan identity justification occurs in multidimensional attitude space. This also helps to explain the weak relationship between attitudes toward the two parties observed by proponents of multidimensional partisanship. I test this hypothesis in an experiment designed to evoke inconsistency between one's party identity and political attitudes. To establish generalizability, I then replicate these results through aggregate level analysis of data from the ANES. Adapted from the source document.

Party identification is generally considered the most powerful predictor of voting behaviour. Yet, after 50 years of research, scholars continue to disagree over the implications of this well-known finding. Some argue that party identification constitutes a stable affective attachment that voters are motivated to defend, whereas others argue that party identification constitutes a running tally of voters' objective evaluations. This book seeks to advance the literature beyond this impasse by relaxing the motivational assumptions underlying the literature's two dominant models