Browsing by Subject "Partisanship"

This study seeks to describe the political profiles of Army officers through data scraping the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) and LinkedIn platforms. After creating and analyzing a database of 500 Army officers, the thesis finds that (1) the majority of Army officers on Twitter are not partisan and are not extreme in its political views; (2) most Army officers on Twitter appear to tilt to the Republican Party over the Democratic Party; (3) a slight majority of field grade officers on Twitter, specifically majors and lieutenant colonels, appear to tilt to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party; (4) politically interested officers express more politically liberal sentiments than conservative sentiments; (5) female officers appear to tilt to the Democratic Party and express more liberal sentiments compared to male officers.

These findings were the result of data scraping the number of Democratic or Republican politicians each officer follows and the political content of what each officer tweets to determine partisan tilt and ideological preferences. These findings demonstrate little evidence of a politicized and partisan Army officer corps. Army officers are also unaware of how much political and personal information they expose on social media platforms. Army organizations and officers may benefit from reconsidering their use of social media as the information they provide may degrade the leadership of their units and bolster our adversaries’ information operations capabilities.

I develop and justify a measure of polarization based on pairwise differences between and within groups, which improves on previous approaches in its ability to account for multiple dimensions and an arbitrary number of partitions. I apply this measure to a roll-call based ideological mapping of U.S. legislators to show that while the contemporary Congress is polarized relative to mid-century levels, the current state is not historically unprecedented.

I then estimate the ideology of public opinion using survey respondent thermometer evaluations of political elites and population subgroups. I find that party affiliation is polarizing in this space, but that alternate partitions of the electorate, along racial, educational, and other socio-demographic lines, are de-polarized.

Finally, I estimate a two-dimensional latent space based on social identity trait co-occurrence. I show that positions in this space are predictive of survey respondent ideology, partisanship, and voting behavior. Further, I show that when conceived in this way, we do observe a polarization of the social space over the last half-century of American politics.

This thesis explains the role universal values play in several aspects of American political life.

A commonly accepted model of public attitudes toward election rules assumes that citizens follow the cues of their preferred party’s elites and support rules that would benefit that party in elections. However, a separate literature on procedural fairness suggests that the public places a high priority on the fairness of democratic institutions. This dissertation tests which model predominates in the public’s decisions on election rules across a variety of policies and political contexts. It finds that most citizens prefer fair electoral institutions at the expense of partisan interest when that choice is made explicit, and a minority of committed partisans are driven by partisanship. While most partisans are unwilling to manipulate election rules to benefit their own party, they react negatively to attempts at manipulation by the other party. Citizens are susceptible to influence from elite messaging on election law issues but are resistant to attempts to influence their core democratic principles.