Political Research Fridays

One of the most popular segments of this blog was “Political Science Fridays”. It was a blog post each Friday that presented a quick hit of academic research in the areas of political science, political psychology, and/or voting behavior.

At some point, I stopped doing the posts. I was recently asked to start doing them again. So, consider this the first, new “Science Friday”.

The Influence of Identity Salience on Framing Effectiveness: An Experiment.

This is a survey experiment exploring the importance of identities on framing effectiveness.

As the author explains, we all have a few social identities. For example, I am a “father”, “a brother”, “an owner of a small business”, and “an evil political consultant” to name a few. At different points in my life / day those identities will rise and fall in importance to me (salience) depending on the context around me.

The experiment explores priming a frame(s) – “parental identity” or “partisan identity”- and the effect, if any, on the highly polarized issue of climate change.

In this experiment, if you were in the parental frame group, it simply asked you questions about your family – How many children do you have? What ages are your children? “How important is it for you, personally, to make the world a better place for your children?” and “Some parents are worried that priorities that they have as a parent are being threatened by current policies. What about you? When you make political decisions, how important is it to protect your priorities as a parent?” That is it. Four questions.

For the partisan group, one was asked about their political party registration, length of party registration, “How important is it for you, personally, to see the policies supported by your political party implemented?” and “Some voters are concerned that the principles that underlie their party affiliations are being threatened by current policies. What about you? When you make political decisions, how important is it to protect your party’s principles?” That is it. Four questions.

Then each group was presented “neutral” information on climate change, and finally each group was asked questions about climate change – specifically “level of concern about climate change, likelihood of undertaking personal and political behavior in support of climate change mitigation, and support for climate change policies.”
As you can see, fairly simple in design.

Results

“Among Republicans, both the Frame Only and the Parent Prime + Frame treatments significantly increased climate change concern and likelihood to undertake proclimate behaviors, while the partisan prime eliminated this framing effect.”

“The results for the Democrats in the sample were fairly consistent with the hypotheses, with the important difference that priming a partisan identity seemed to increase framing effectiveness more than priming a nonpartisan (parental) identity. “

“Through a survey experiment, I found evidence that identity salience does matter to framing effectiveness. Specifically, presenting a frame about the impact of climate change on future generations increased climate concern and intended proclimate behaviors among Republican parents, but first priming a partisan identity eliminated this framing effect. For Democrats, priming a partisan identity increased climate change concern compared to the control, while priming a parental identity did not lead to any increase in attitudes. Priming partisan identities resulted in significantly more polarized policy support, while priming parental identities resulted in significantly less polarized policy support between Republicans and Democrats.”

Conclusion

As you would guess, our identities at any given time are intertwined. One is never ‘only’ a Republican or ‘just’ a parent. This study suggests our immediate frame of reference activates what information we are receptive to listening to. If we are in a Republican frame of mind, we will think like …. a Republican.

The biggest take away? If you want to talk politics – especially about polarized topics – maybe start by talking about anything other than politics.

DOWNLOAD PAPER.

Type of Paper: Survey Experiment, n=978
four subgroups:
• Frame only group, n=213
• Parent Prime + Frame Group, n=234
• Partisan Prime + Frame Group, n=234
• control group, n=297

Finding(s):
“suggest that political communication on polarized issues is likely to be more effective at building bipartisan agreement when nonpartisan identities are salient.”

Discussion / Additional Questions:

Additional research is needed to measure duration of effects.

Study omitted Independents and No Party Affiliations.

The author used UNICEF as a nuetral presenter of information on climate change – stating “UNICEF is largely viewed positively by the public due to its generally nonpolitical work in promoting the welfare of children around the world (Quesnel, 2004). It was therefore chosen as a neutral message source.” This could be problematic in exploring partisans – in that anything affiliated with the United Nations could be seen as anything other than neutral to a segment of political partisans.

citation: Diamond, Emily P. “The Influence of Identity Salience on Framing Effectiveness: An Experiment.” Political Psychology, 22 June 2020, 10.1111/pops.12669. Accessed 17 Sept. 2020.

Digital Media

The acceleration of TV to Online. Far too many people have been saying “TV is Dead” for far too long – ignoring the actual amount of television people watch. Americans watch, on average, an astounding nearly 8 hours of television a day. (Nielsen). We watch as much TV now as we did before Facebook, Netflix, and YouTube. However, we are observing accelerated changes to HOW people are watching television. In the most recent Nielsen Total Audience Report – we observe adults 18+ spending 50% of their daily time on digital devices and only 40% on Live+Time Shifted TV. One of the accelerators of this trend appears to be people shifting to work from home models, and with a number of workers preferring to continue to work from home, this will have profound effects on reaching political audiences.

 Download the report:

https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2020/the-nielsen-total-audience-report-august-2020/

Political Research

It is no secret that some in the polling industry had a rough couple of cycles. While we are still collecting data, we are finding evidence that the conventional wisdom that the polling was catastrophically off is wrong. One reason conservatives may be so down on the polling industry and quick to disregard it – there is growing evidence that our political biases are leading to a biased evaluation of polls and pollsters.

“Respondents viewed polls as more credible when majority opinion matched their opinion.”, a study in Political Behavior (2020) by researchers Gabriel Mason and Sunshine Hillygus of Duke University finds “evaluations of polls are biased by motivated reasoning.”

In an online survey experiment, participants were shown polling results from one of three conditions:   a roughly even split, one with a clear majority (61% to 34%), or one with the opposite support (34% to 61%).  The question was on a registration for immigrants from Muslim countries.    Respondents were then asked questions about perceived accuract, trustworthiness, and informativeness.

In addition, there was a pre-treatment of the participants asking them their opinions prior to seeing the “polling results.”  The expectation was the “perceieved polling credibility depends on the respondent’s prior opinion towards the issue.”

In addition, the authors conducted a second study using a horse race question between Trump and Clinton.

Using these two experiments, they find “evidence that the American public evaluates the credibility of a poll based on the extent to which the poll’s results offers support to the predispositions.”

Simply put the starting point matters.   We understand this in political communication – the more you care and the stronger your opinion – the more difficult to change your mind – again, the strength of priors matter.   What this is demonstrating is the same effects at work on receiving information.

For me this is a difficult read, because we pride ourselves on using polling to get us out of our bubbles and to test our critical assumptions.  The day will allow polling and research to be soley used to confirm our biases is the day polling ceases to be a worthy tool.

Madson, G.J., Hillygus, D.S. All the Best Polls Agree with Me: Bias in Evaluations of Political Polling. Polit Behav 42, 1055–1072 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09532-1

Political Data

In my 2020 year in review, I spoke of the death of third party cookies and what that may mean for political adversting.  Where is ad tech going? Monopoly cases!  As of now, several antitrust cases are working their way through the court system – against Google, Facebook, and likely soon to be Amazon and Apple.    Nothing is likely to be decided this year – the gears of justice turn slowly; however, we are likely to see effects this year as big tech begins to change in response to the suits.   For this year, while important, it is not how they respond in court it is how they respond in privacy and ad markets.