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"Partisanship and Political Cognition" published on by Oxford University Press.

Despite the long-standing and prominent place of partisan identification (PID) in many aggregate- and individual-level models of voting behavior and political cognition in the United States, several basic features of this attachment remain poorly understood and significant controversies persist. The research presented here seeks to build upon the recent conceptualization of PID as a social identity (Green, Palmquist & Schickler, 2002; Greene, 1999, 2000, 2004; Huddy, Mason & Aaroe, 2010) in order to increase our knowledge of the ways in which it may function as such and to expand our understanding of partisan intensity and PID's biasing effects. This conceptualization is one that has been put to surprisingly limited use in political science. This work draws upon new data I have generated during my time as a doctoral student, making use of survey experimental paradigms and a new implicit measure. I call upon foundational and cutting-edge concepts and methods from social psychology in addressing several active research programs in political behavior. The first essay presents the most direct evidence to date regarding the presence of an affective identity component of PID (the way in which Campbell, Converse, Miller & Stokes (1960) conceived of the attachment), which sheds light on partisan intensity and measurement of it. Using data from a survey fielded among subjects in the Project Implicit research pool, it introduces a novel measure of implicit PID that directly measures the identity component as it is defined in balanced identity theory (Greenwald, Banaji, Rudman, Farnham, Nosek & Mellott, 2002), and compares it to standard PID measures. Among other things, the findings offer some confirmation that the traditional two-item, seven-point PID measure largely captures respondent identity levels. This is arguably the strongest evidence to date that the measure does, for the most part, what it was designed to do. I also find that Republican partisans, in the current political environment, are significantly stronger partisan identifiers than their Democratic counterparts. The second essay brings new data from embedded survey experiments to bear, assessing, in the case of political party, the presence of the kind of group-based bias often associated with social identities. The manipulation and measure are designed to avoid the confounders present in prior studies that have allowed some to question the biasing effect of PID. Consistent evidence suggestive of group-based bias emerges. These findings establish a new benchmark in this research program by demonstrating, at a micro level, the extent to which partisans are susceptible to a set of standard mechanisms for rationalization, information dismissal and motivated processing. Beyond adding evidence to the debate regarding perceptual bias, though, this paradigm allows for more nuanced analysis of the nature of that bias and heterogeneity in its expression. The final essay uses the notion of "rooting interest" to link this perceptual bias with a social identity model of PID. A manipulation was used to vary the relative salience of an individual's personal and collective self-concepts (Ambady, Paik, Steele, Owen-Smith & Mitchell, 2004), the interplay between which is at the heart of psychological conceptualizations of identity. The effects of this manipulation on the level of bias observed suggest that the strength of rooting interest may vary somewhat, but that the nature of the variation depends upon the political saturation of the context and differs between Republicans and Democrats in the current political environment. The results 1) demonstrate that manipulation of self-concept salience and variations in background politicization can alter the magnitude of bias; 2) provide evidence that this bias is pronounced even in less politicized contexts and when the personal self-concept is made more salient; and 3) suggest that bias is asymmetric across the two parties, with Republicans showing a higher baseline level, but some propensity to have their bias level manipulated downward, and Democrats starting at a lower point, but with the potential to be manipulated upward. Taken together, these new data (from both the experimental and measurement work) demonstrate two important points that were not as apparent in prior studies using other methods. To begin with, it appears that partisans of various intensities (strong Democrat versus strong Republican, for instance) should not be thought of or analyzed as mirror images of each other. Furthermore, it appears that a meaningful "Identity Gap" may exist between Republicans and Democrats in the current political moment. These emergent findings suggest future areas of inquiry, ways in which we might reexamine prior findings, and new potential research programs.

BY FAILING TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF THE POLITICAL CONTEXT, ALL THREE MAJOR COMPETING APPROACHES TO DECISION-MAKING, ANALYTICAL, COGNITIVE, AND MOTIVATED, EXHIBIT SERIOUS DEFICIENCES IN EXPLAINING DECISIONMAKING BEHAVIOR IN THE POLITICAL ARENA. IN PARTICULAR, FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND THE DECISION-MAKER'S PERCEPTION OF THE CONSTRAINTS OF THE POLITICAL CONTEXT MAY RESULT IN LABELLING AS ERROR OR DISTORTION BEHAVIOR WHICH IS QUITE REASONABLE WHEN VIEWED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THAT CONTEXT. IN ORDER TO REMEDY THESE DEFICIENCIES, PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES ABOUT DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES MUST BE COMBINED WITH THE INSIGHTS OF POLITICAL SCIENTISTS INTO THE NATURE OF THE POLITICAL PROCESS TO DEVELOP A SPECIFICALLY POLITICAL THEORY OF DECISION-MAKING. SUCH A GENUINELY INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION BETWEEN POLITICAL SCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY COULD RESULT IN A THEORY OF POLITICAL DECISIONMAKING WHICH TRULY BELONGS IN THE REALM OF POLITICAL COGNITION.

The CPS 1972-1976 panel is employed to test numerous principles of balance theory on Americans' political cognitions. Evidential support is found for Heider's original formulation of balance theory pertaining to dichotomous variables comprising a triad and extensions of this theory to structures of more than three cognitions, and variables measured at the interval level. Political reality effects, rational policy evaluation processes, and alternative psychological perspectives cannot adequately explain our data patterns. Other findings are: people attain balance in diverse ways by changing any of their cognitions; the more politically sophisticated are more affected by balance processes; balance theory has implications for the vote decision. The implications of the study for the nature of American democracy are also addressed.

This paper introduces a novel framework for understanding the relationship between implicit and explicit preferences and political cognition. Existing work in political psychology focuses primarily on comparing the main effects of implicit versus explicit attitude measures. This paper rethinks the role of implicit cognition by acknowledging the correspondence between implicit and explicit preferences (i.e., the distance between implicitly and explicitly measured attitudes). Data from the 2008 American National Election Study are used to examine implicit racial ambivalence, or the gap between one's implicit and explicit racial preferences, as it exists in the United States. Results indicate implicit racial ambivalence, which has been shown to yield effortful thinking related to race, is negatively related to education and Need for Cognition, and predicts race-related policy attitudes as well as vote choice in the 2008 election. Furthermore, implicit ambivalence moderates the influence of ideology on political attitudes, including attitudes toward outcomes that are only covertly related to race and cannot be predicted directly by implicit or explicit racial attitudes alone.

The U.S., like much of the world, has been in the throes of political instability. Our aim is to attempt to account for the differences in beliefs that may be responsible for such impasses through a correlational study. Using the Open-Minded Cognition scale as a measure of open-mindedness, syllogistic reasoning problems to determine Belief-Bias effects, and diverse measures of political beliefs and attitudes, we were able to yield preliminary correlations of the Belief Bias items with P-OMC ( r = .144, p < .05), Openness and Intellect ( r = .150, p < .05), and the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale ( r = -.144, p < .001). However, these data are pending further review due to participants' accuracy rates on Belief Bias syllogisms.