Hi everyone,

This Friday (April 23) from 15:00 – 16:00 we will have another lab meeting. In this session of the Online Hot Politics Lab, Liz Connors (University of South Carolina) will give a talk titled "Partisan Social Pressure and Affective Polarization." See the abstract of her talk below.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A, and everybody is welcome to join via Zoom: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/96492065253  at 3pm (CET).

Partisan Social Pressure and Affective Polarization
American politics today is affectively polarized—partisans report disliking and distrusting out-partisans while liking and trusting in-partisans. I examine if this climate could encourage partisans to report higher levels of affective polarization. I test this with two survey experiments (one with a convenience sample and one with a nationally representative sample from NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel) and a set of analyses of 2008 American National Election Studies (ANES) data. My findings demonstrate that there is partisan social pressure to report affective polarization and that this could inflate survey responses, suggesting implications for the measurement of polarization, greater nuance in our understanding of polarization, and the potential for a “snowball effect” of political climates—where a climate of polarization could beget more polarization. Future work is needed for a broader understanding of how social context shapes expressions of partisanship.

If you missed any of the previous online hot politics lab meetings, or just want to watch them again, you can find all video and audio recordings of our last online meetings in our Online Hot Politics Lab Meetings archive here: http://www.hotpolitics.eu/lab-meetings-archive/.

Have a great rest of the week and hope to see you all Friday!

Best,

Maaike Homan

PhD Candidate at the Political Science Department

Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research

University of Amsterdam

Room B10.01