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Testing the Robustness of the ANES Feeling Thermometer Indicators of Affective Polarization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2023

MATTHEW TYLER Open the ORCID record for MATTHEW TYLER [Opens in a new window]  and
SHANTO IYENGAR Open the ORCID record for SHANTO IYENGAR [Opens in a new window]
MATTHEW TYLER*
Affiliation:
Rice University, United States
SHANTO IYENGAR*
Affiliation:
Stanford University, United States
*
Corresponding author: Matthew Tyler, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Rice University, United States, [email protected].
Shanto Iyengar, William Robertson Coe Professor and Professor of Political Science and of Communication, Department of Political Science, Stanford University, United States, [email protected].
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Abstract

Affective polarization (AP)—the tendency of political partisans to view their opponents as a stigmatized “out group”—is now a major field of research. Relevant evidence in the United States derives primarily from a single source, the American National Election Studies (ANES) feeling thermometer time series. We investigate whether the design of the ANES produces overestimates of AP. We consider four mechanisms: overrepresentation of strong partisans, selection bias conditional on strong identification, priming effects of partisan content, and survey mode variation. Our analysis uses the first-ever collaboration between ANES and the General Social Survey and a novel experiment that manipulates the amount of political content in surveys. Our tests show that variation in survey mode has caused an artificial increase in the mixed-mode ANES time series, but the general increase in out-party animus is nonetheless real and not merely an artifact of selection bias or priming effects.

Type
Letter
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 118 , Issue 3 , August 2024 , pp. 1570 - 1576
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

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References

REFERENCES

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Tyler, Matthew, and Iyengar, Shanto. 2023. “Replication Data for: Testing the Robustness of the ANES Feeling Thermometer Indicators of Affective Polarization.” Harvard Dataverse. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/G9OKGB.Google Scholar
Westwood, Sean J., Grimmer, Justin, Tyler, Matthew, and Nall, Clayton. 2022. “Current Research Overstates American Support for Political Violence.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (12): e2116870119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2116870119.Google ScholarPubMed
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