Tuesday lunch seminar: Dominik Duell

Dominik Duell, University of Essex will give a talk at the Tuesday lunch-seminar.

Title: "Identity and Political Polarization: Evidence on the Instrumental Impact of Partisan Identity"

Abstract:
Recent empirical studies in the US have found that citizens vote in an increasingly partisan manner and display higher degrees of social polarization. In this paper, we utilize a novel experimental approach to show that affective (social) polarization -- i.e. a divergence of affective preferences towards in-group and out-group individuals -- leads to the expectation of partisan behavior by candidates, and causes an increase in partisan voting. In turn, this suggests that affective polarization has a detrimental effect on social efficiency, since, on average, it leads to the election of lower-valence candidates. Importantly, we also find that the effect of affective polarization on partisan voting is conditional on the degree of underlying policy polarization: while some voters vote for a lower-ability, in-group candidate even when policy polarization is low, socially costly in-group voting increases by 70\% when policy polarization is high. This strategic response to the underlying policy polarization strongly suggests that social polarization has an instrumental effect on voters' preferences over candidates, and illustrates that affective polarization has a higher negative impact on social efficiency in cases when policy polarization is high. Our findings are also emarkably stable: we find a similar instrumental impact of affective polarization regardless of whether groups are randomly determined (minimal-group intervention), based on a politically-neutral natural identity (german subjects), or based on a republican/democrat partisan identity (american subjects). 

A light lunch will be served.