How Negative Partisanship Causes Citizens to Shift Their Policy Preferences

Abundant evidence shows that citizens often adapt their opinions to be congruent with the viewpoints of the political party they like. Explanations are found in social identity theory (Tajfel, 1982): feelings of group identity—here: identification with a political party—make people change their minds because they do not like it to be out of touch with the relevant in-group. Interestingly, recent research shows that this mechanism also works the other way around and that citizens, when learning that they agree with a political party they dislike, turn away from their previously held viewpoints (Aaroe, 2012; Nicholson, 2012). In other words, not only positive partisanship but also negative partisanship causes citizens to shift their opinions and, as a consequence, to polarize. The current paper refines our insight into this important finding in two ways. Using data from a survey-experiment on a representative sample of Flemish citizens (N = 816), it first attempts to grasp the mechanisms underlying the effect of negative partisanship. It shows that learning about disliked parties’ positions actually makes citizens (incorrectly) update their assumptions of what their own party, and co-partisans, think about an issue—and that this (at least partly) explains their subsequent opinion change. Second, the paper explores to what extent the degree of dislike matters. In a multiparty system like the Belgian one, the relationship between some parties is more hostile than the relationship between others; and individual citizens differ in the extent to which they experience negative partisanship. This allows to tease out how much aversion is needed for the electorate to polarize. We believe this paper would possibly fit well in the panel “United We Stand: group identities, attachments, and the political psychology of cohesion”, or alternatively in “Who Shall You Follow? citizens and the political psychology of leadership”.