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The Aggregated Consequences of Motivated Reasoning and the Dynamics of Partisan Presidential Approval
Author(s) -
Lebo Matthew J.,
Cassino Daniel
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
political psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.419
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1467-9221
pISSN - 0162-895X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2007.00601.x
Subject(s) - presidential system , politics , political science , political psychology , motivated reasoning , social psychology , positive economics , psychology , test (biology) , law , economics , paleontology , biology
Research in political psychology has shown the importance of motivated reasoning as a prism through which individuals view the political world. From this we develop the hypothesis that, with strong positive beliefs firmly in place, partisan groups ignore or discount information about the performance of political figures they like. We then speculate about how this tendency should manifest itself in presidential approval ratings and test our hypotheses using monthly presidential approval data disaggregated by party identification for the 1955–2005 period. Our results show that partisan groups generally do reward and punish presidents for economic performance, but only those presidents of the opposite party. We also develop a model of presidential approval for self‐identified Independents and, finally, a model of the partisan gap , the difference in approval between Democrat and Republican identifiers.