Perception, memory, and partisan polarization on the Iraq war

Political Science Quarterly

Volumn 125, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 31-56

  Jacobson, Gary C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77953000202     PISSN: 00323195     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1002/j.1538-165X.2010.tb00667.x     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. Gary C. Jacobson, A Divider, Not a Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People, 2d ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2010), Figure 1.4.
2. The presidential approval data monthly averages are from 412 CBS News/New York Times and Gallup polls
3. Iraq war support data are from monthly averages from 719 individual surveys, data gathered by 16 national media and academic survey organizations
4. For details see Appendix II and Jacobson, Divider, Appendix.
5. The gap was lowest in the most-controversial of these earlier ventures, Vietnam, averaging 5 percentage points
6. Party differences over actions in Korea and Kosovo averaged 11 to 12 points, over the 1991 Gulf War, 21 points
7. Partisans were in full agreement on supporting the action in Afghanistan in 2001, although after Democrats had soured on the Iraq war, they also became less supportive, producing a partisan gap averaging 40 points during Bush's second term
8. See Jacobson, Divider, Figures 6.2 through 6.8.
9. The consistency measures come from the 215 surveys currently available for secondary analyses
10. Data sources are described in Appendix II.
11. Larry M. Bartels, "Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions," Political Behavior 24 (June 2002): 117-150, at 138.
12. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957)
13. Ziva Kunda, "The Case for Motivated Reasoning," Psychological Bulletin 108 (1990): 636-647
14. Milton Lodge and Charles S. Taber, "Three Steps toward a Theory of Motivated Political Reasoning," in Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. McCubbins, and Samuel L. Popkin, eds., Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds ofRationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 183-213
15. Charles S. Taber and Milton Lodge, "Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs," American Journal of Political Science 50 (July 2006): 755-769.
16. Taber and Lodge, "Motivated Skepticism," 756.
17. Matthew J. Lebo and Daniel Cassino, "The Aggregated Consequences of Motivated Reasoning and the Dynamics of Partisan Presidential Approval," Political Psychology 28 (2007): 722.
18. Danielle Shani, "Know Your Colors: Can Knowledge Correct Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions?" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, 20-23 April 2006), 4.
19. Lodge and Taber, "Three Steps," 211.
20. Taber and Lodge, "Motivated Skepticism," 757
21. Shani, "Know Your Colors," 13
22. See also John Zaller, The Nature and Origin of Mass Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
23. Jacobson, Divider, Figures 5.5 and 5.6.
24. Stephen Ansolabehere, COOPERATIVE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION STUDY, 2006: COMMON CONTENT. [Computer File] Release 2: 14 November 2007, Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. [producer]
25. Stephen Ansolabehere, COOPERATIVE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION STUDY, 2007: COMMON CONTENT. [Computer File] Release 1: 13 February 2008, Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. [producer]
26. Stephen Ansolabehere, COOPERATIVE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION STUDY, 2008: COMMON CONTENT. [Computer File] Release 1: 2 February 2009, Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. [producer]
27. Gary C. Jacobson, COOPERATIVE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION STUDY, 2006: UCSD CONTENT. [Computer File] Release 2: [2007], UCSD [producer]
28. Gary C. Jacobson, COOPERATIVE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION STUDY, 2008: UCSD CONTENT. [Computer File] Release: 5 February 2009, UCSD [producer]
29. Gary C. Jacobson, "Question Order Effects on Reported Memories and Perceptions Regarding the Iraq War," TESS Research Report, October, 2009.
30. Citizens who said they were not registered to vote were seriously underrepresented in the 2006 CCES. The substantive findings reported here do not change appreciably when the full samples are analyzed instead.
31. Jacobson, Divider, Figure 6.10.
32. Steven Kull, "The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters," The PIPA/Knowledge Networks Poll: The American Public on International Issues, 2004, accessed at http://zzpat.tripod.com/cvp/pipa.html, 24 November 2004.
33. "Report: Hundreds of WMDs found in Iraq," Fox News, 22 June 2006, accessed at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2006/06/22/report-hundreds-wmds-iraq/, 10 July 2009. The claim was based on the discovery of pre-1991 ordnance contaminated with degraded chemical nerve agents.
34. U.S. Department of Defense, News Transcript, 2 June 2002, accessed at http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3490, 15 January 2006.
35. The ranges were 15-21 percent and 63-67 percent across the three CCES; there was no evidence of any trend over the 2006-2008 time period.
36. The ranges were 26-32 percent for Republicans, 11-17 percent for independents, and 11-14 percent for Democrats.
37. Jacobson, Divider, Figures 6.15 and 6.16.
38. See, for example, the comments of Ralph Reed quoted in Howard Fineman and Martha Brant, "This is Our Life Now," Newsweek, 3 December 2001, 29.
39. In the 2006 CCES, about 60 percent of respondents said they were very interested in politics; in the 2007 CCES, the figure was about 35 percent; in 2008, it was 68 percent; these percentages were consistent across partisan categories in each survey; the 2006 CCES did not ask the interest question of all respondents (about 26 percent were missed), hence the reduced number of cases for 2006 in Table 3; the TESS survey did not include a political interest question.
40. Estimates were made by using Clarify
41. See Michael Tomz, Jason Wittenbert, and Gary King, "Clarify: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results," 5 January 2003, accessed at http://www.stanford.edu/̃tomz/software/clarify.pdf, 10 November 2008.
42. Data are from five CBS News/New York Times, an ABC News/Washington Post, and two Gallup surveys taken between September 2002 and February 2003.
43. The TESS study included a split-half experiment to determine whether question order-memory questions before or after current belief question-made any difference in the distribution of responses; it did not
44. See Jacobson, "Question Order Effects," 7-13.
45. Data are from three CBS News/New York Times and two Gallup surveys taken between August 2002 and March 2003.
46. Data are from ABC News/Washington Post, CBS News/New York Times.
47. Gallup, Time/CNN, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Pew, and NBC News/Wall Street Journal surveys taken between 1 February and 18 March 2003.
48. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, "News Audiences Increasingly Polarized," news release, 8 June 2004, accessed at http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=215, 11 May 2009
49. Natalie Jomini Stroud, "Media Use and Political Predispositions: Revisiting the Concept of Selective Exposure" Political Behavior 30 (September 2008): 341-366.
50. Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, and Evan Lewis, "Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War," Political Science Quarterly 118 (Winter 2003-2004): 575-590.
51. Jacobson, Divider, Figure 9.7 and Table 9.2.
52. Fox watchers were also about twice as likely as other respondents to believe Saddam had been complicit in September 11 (28 percent to 13 percent), although all of the difference here is accounted for by Democrats and independents; among Republicans, belief in Saddam's complicity was about the same-around 28 percent-regardless of primary television news source.
53. Estimated using Clarify with the other variables set at their means for the respondent's party.
54. The 2008 CCES included questions on beliefs about evolution and creationism; 75 percent of those who said that God had chosen Bush also said they believed that God had created the world in six days
55. See David C. Barker, Jon Hurwitz, and Traci L. Nelson "Of Crusades and Culture Wars: 'Messianic' Militarism and Political Conflict in the United States," Journal of Politics 70 (April 2008): 207-322.