The Fundamentals and Vote Choice: How Long Term Attitudinal Forces Shape Affect

• In Event: Economic Considerations and the Vote

Abstract

Affective partisanship has become more prominent in recent years, largely due to the sharp increase in emotional responses to partisan polarization in the public. Just as there is rarely affect without cognition, it seems unlikely that there is affective partisanship without partisan political content. However, current literature on affective partisanship and emotion often overlooks the role of substantive factors. We aim to bridge this gap by demonstrating the interconnectedness of affect and substantive political opinions in shaping political choices. In our forthcoming book, "The Fundamental Voter" (2023), we argue that contemporary American elections can be understood by incorporating four other fundamental forces (ideology, issue opinion, racial resentment, and retrospective economic evaluation), in addition to Campbell et al.’s (1960) partisanship, which represent long-term attitudes determining short-term attitudes. In this paper, we first show that affective partisanship and polarization increases in alignment with the growth of these fundamentals over time, as observed in their ability to explain presidential vote choices using the ANES data from 1980 to 2020. Second, we demonstrate that the relationship between these fundamentals and vote choice is mediated by affect across the years. In summary, our analyses point towards the fundamentals, or long-term attitudes, contributing to increase in affect. These results highlight that affective partisanship and polarization are functions of long-term attitudes and products of substantive political content. The implications of this study create room for thinking about affect and cognition in dynamic interplay with each other, encouraging a shift from isolating affect to considering its connection with substantive political fundamentals.

Authors

• John H. Aldrich, Duke University

• Suhyen Bae, Duke University