Partisan Social Norms in American Politics

I could say all of this, but you still wouldn't understand how important my friends and mentors were. In the concluding chapter, I discuss some open questions about partisan norms and how they might be studied in future work.

What are Partisan Social Norms?

In fact, psychologists seem to agree that stereotypes and descriptive norms are the same thing. According to Bicchieri (2016), social norms are personal beliefs plus normative expectations plus empirical expectations.

How Norms Develop and Change

Norms and Functionalism

As the coming chapters will show, some partisan norms are relatively divorced from specific policies, but others exist in a gray area where it is difficult to disentangle norms from issue positions. Because the well-being of the group is endangered when these norms are broken, those who deviate from them can be particularly severely punished (Feldman, 1984).

Norms and Positive Distinctiveness

This theory argues that strong negative emotions toward norm violators make group members willing to "altruistically punish" them. For example, civic participation rates in the United States partly explain why many citizens perform the costly act of voting, and people are much more likely to turn out when they think their peers might find out they didn't (Gerber et al. , 2008; Gerber and Rogers, 2009).

Norms and Elite Influence

How Norms are Enforced

Social Sanctions

We have all sorts of names for social sanctions - we can "blacklist" someone, give them the silent treatment, or make them persona non grata. For example, Williams et al. 2000) argue that in the workplace, ignoring e-mails from a particular person or deliberately excluding them from e-mail chains constitutes "cyberostracism".

Social Rewards

As Dwight Schrute explained on the TV show The Office, avoidance is "like slapping someone with silence." Clearly, these feelings are powerful motivators and should reduce the likelihood that the deviant will violate norms in the future. Facebook also seems to think its users are motivated by these social rewards — in the last few elections, the site allowed users to announce their voter status to their network of friends, who could “like” the post or use comments to marked their approval.

Roadmap for the Dissertation

Do Democrats and Republicans have separate norms for how their group members should behave politically. Drawing on work in social psychology on social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1986), as well as on the differentiated organizations of parties (Grossmann and Hopkins, 2016) and Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt, 2013), I argue that Democrats and Republicans have a range different beliefs about what a "good" partisan does.

Partisanship and Social Norms

Scholars have long attributed the motivating power of norms to the fear of social sanctions or the desire for social reward. Gerber et al. 2008) find that because there is a norm of citizen participation in the United States, citizens who thought their neighbors would know if they were voting would turn out to be much more likely to vote.

Partisan Norms Among Party Elites

Political Participation — A Universal Norm?
Norms in the Republican Party
Norms in the Democratic Party
Policing Party Norms

Because of the great diversity of norms in the Republican Party, there is some internal disagreement about what it means to be a good Republican. Asked what makes a "bad" Democrat, Emma began by saying that the Democratic Party is a "big tent" - a wide range of different ideas are welcome in the party.

Do Ordinary Democrats and Republicans Share These Norms?

What Makes a “Good” Party Member?

For example, one respondent writes that good Republicans "would recognize the sovereignty of God and what He reveals in His Word (aka the Holy Bible)." To identify the "Country" norm, I looked for mentions of patriotism, the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, or anything about national pride, etc. First, Democrats and Republicans have very different ideas about what it means to be a good party member.

Figure 2.1: What Makes a “Good” Partisan? Proportion of respondents who mentioned a given norm when asked what makes a good partisan.

What Makes a “Bad” Party Member?

Third, some respondents said bad partisans do not adhere to socially conservative values such as opposing abortion and gay marriage. Finally, about 11% of Republican respondents said bad Republicans are those who don't adhere to fiscal conservatism.

Figure 2.2: What Makes a “Bad” Partisan? Proportion of respondents who mentioned that “bad” partisans break a given norm.

Sanctioning “Bad” Partisans

Approach-based and Avoidance-based Sanctions

The bulk of the approach-avoidance literature focuses on whether an individual is more likely to seek rewards or avoid punishment themselves rather than whether they tend to use approach or avoidance when someone else violates the rules. In addition, there is some evidence that women tend to be more conflict avoidant than men (Coffe and Bolzendahl, 2017), so we can expect that women are more likely to use social avoidance compared to men. Republicans were also less likely to advocate social approach and more likely to advocate social avoidance.

Figure 2.3: Proportion of Respondents Mentioning Each Type of Sanction

Individual Differences in Norm Perception

Using these measures, I separately model the relationship between individual-level norm salience and network homogeneity and attention to political news. Republicans who pay more attention to political news are also more likely to mention Republican norms than Republicans who don't pay attention to political news when asked what makes a good partisan. For democratic norms, the results are reversed - Democrats mention democratic norms much more often, and those who paid more attention to political news among Democrats mention democratic norms slightly more often.

Figure 2.4: Relationship between norm salience and attention to political news

Discussion

Third, social norms should influence what members of the public are willing to say to their fellow partisans. The purpose of this chapter is to explore one of the ways in which partisan social norms can influence political elites. First, I argue that social norms permeate how political candidates communicate with the public, especially during primaries.

Social Norms and Primary Elections

On the one hand, some group members are assumed to be prototypical, while others have to work harder to prove their belonging (Platow and van Knippenberg, 2001). Descriptive norms are essentially stereotypes, although stereotypes are often assumed to be imposed by. If stereotyped candidates are assumed to be more committed to upholding group norms, then drawing attention to those norms is a solid strategy.

Use of Partisan Norms in Primary Debates

Unsupervised Model of Norm-Related Rhetoric

The most prevalent themes included references to self, other candidates, and political figures (themes 24 and 28). So Romney faced a choice; go with the court or go with the Constitution. Pete Buttigieg argued that "the black voters who know me best are supporting me," and Joe Biden showed his support from the black caucus and the black community in South Carolina.

Table 3.1: Qualitative Interpretations of Each Topic

Supervised Model of Norm-Related Rhetoric

Among the Democratic candidates, the most common topic (Topic 14) was health care debate, and just over 5% of Democratic candidates' statements used this topic. Among the Republican candidates, the most common topic (Topic 2) was the discussion of government spending, and about 4.5% of Republican candidates' statements used this topic. 12 Prevalence may not even be the most important metric for assessing the importance of a norm.

Table 3.3: Percentage of all statements that included normative rhetoric (probability > .25)

Candidate-Level Norm Use

Gingrich uses the word Conservative seven times in this quote and associates himself with Ronald Reagan - the most prominent and popular figure of conservatism. Second, the use of general care rhetoric was not always accompanied by group-specific care rhetoric. White Republicans tended to appeal more to conservatism in a general sense—the top three candidates in this category were Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul.

Table 3.4: Use of Democratic Norms Among 2020 Candidates

Norm Use and Debate Performance

Above, I predicted that candidates who used more normative rhetoric would experience higher debate performance among copartisan debate viewers. Candidates who used more generic care rhetoric had similar debate performance as candidates who used less generic care rhetoric. According to the model, candidates who used both types of care rhetoric tended to have their debate performance rated slightly higher, although the effects are not statistically significant.

Discussion

This chapter makes a number of contributions despite the descriptive nature of most analyses. This can be useful for any number of subfields within political science and beyond. In this short chapter, I explore another way partisan norms can affect primaries—through norm violation.

When Elites Violate Partisan Norms

On the one hand, high-status group members are less likely to be punished for mild norm violations. In the second chapter, I argued that certain types of group members are more likely to adhere to group norms. Group members are more likely to enforce norms if they are aware of them, so the negative effects of norm violations should be particularly pronounced among voters who have homogeneous political networks and voters who pay attention to political news.

Figure 4.1: Approval Ratings for Senator Bob Corker Over Time

Do Voters Punish Candidates Who Violate Norms?

First, the candidate who violates the leader standard consistently outperforms the candidate who violates the care standard. When Democrats were presented with a pair of candidates where one candidate was said to be unqualified and the other violated the standard of care, Democrats, on average, chose the unqualified candidate, while Republicans did not. On the other hand, the care standard appears to be more powerful overall: When asked to choose between a candidate who violated the leadership norm and a candidate who violated the care standard, even Republicans were much more likely to choose the former.

Figure 4.2: Example of Republican Candidate Profiles

What Types of Group Members Sanction Norm-Breakers?

Similar to Republican respondents, Democrats with high network homogeneity were less likely to vote for an unqualified candidate than for one who violated the leadership norm. When asked to choose between a candidate who violated the leadership norm and one who violated the care norm, all Democrats, on average, chose the candidate who violated the leadership norm; Among Republican respondents, those who paid more attention to political news were more likely to choose an unqualified candidate over one who violated the leadership norm.

Figure 4.4: Difference in probability of selection for each pair of candidates.

Discussion

In other words, what we thought were stable values actually look a lot like social norms. In the second chapter, I argued that just as social norms differ between different religious or ethnic groups, they also differ between political groups. In chapter four, I began to consider the main mechanism through which social norms exert their influence—social sanctions.

Temporal Norm Change

Changes in American Political Parties, 1980-2016

Perhaps the next major shift in the Republican Party came in the form of George W. In the early 1980s, Southern conservative Democrats still existed, labor unions were still a powerful force in American politics, and the Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and the "New Democrats" responded to the popularity of Reaganomics by combining conservative economic policies with more liberal views on social issues.

Exploring Norm Change in the ANES

In particular, Clinton campaigned for affirmative action and (initially) for the right of gay individuals to serve in the armed forces. To determine whether the patterns discovered in chapter two hold in the ANES data, I first plot the proportion of respondents who used each norm, by party (figure 5.1). The patterns in the ANES data look very similar to the patterns found throughout the first three empirical chapters—Democrats mentioned generic and group-specific care a lot, and barely mentioned country or God norms.

Figure 5.1: Proportion of respondents who used words from each dictionary.

Partisan Norms and Social Sanctions in the Mass Public

The Importance of Social Sanctions

Because they can have extremely negative effects on a group member's life, social sanctions are powerful deterrents. Despite the importance of social sanctions to theories of group norms, there seems to be no consensus on how best to measure social sanctions. The creation of a standard measure of social sanctions would be a valuable contribution to the field.

Enforcing Norms on Social Media

Conversely, I expected that Democratic respondents would be less likely to like or retweet the tweet about blackface, and more likely to cancel the user compared to Republican users. Second, Democrats were less likely to like or retweet the statement about Governor Northam wearing blackface and more likely to unfollow the user who made the statement. Most Democrats believe it is unacceptable to wear blackface; but, if respondents were shown a tweet from a prominent Democrat defending Governor Northam, and the tweet had many supportive likes and comments, the respondent might be less likely to follow norm enforcement.

Conclusion: Why Study Partisan Norms?

What are some things you think members of your party do better than members of the other party. What are some things you think members of the opposing party do better than your party. The Oprah Factor: The Effects of a Celebrity Endorsement in a Presidential Primary Campaign. The International Journal of Press/Politics.