Political Behaviour/Sociology

Session: F11(b) - Deconsolidation Panels: Citizens, Security and Partisanship

Date: Jun 1, 2017 | Time: 08:45am to 10:15am | Location: VIC-508 (Victoria Building)| iOS / Outlook

Chair/Président: Robert Hinckley (State University of New York - Potsdam)

Discussant/Commentateur: Charles Breton (University of British Columbia)

Participants & Authors/Auteurs:

Timothy Gravelle (University of Strathclyde) : Time, Space, and Attitudes toward US–Mexico Border Security
Abstract: The tumultuous 2016 US Presidential Election cycle featured a range of policy proposals to address the issue of illegal immigration. Channeling anxieties around the economic and social consequences of illegal immigration with claims of porous, unsecured borders, Republican candidate Donald Trump notably committed to building a wall the length of the US–Mexico border. At the same time, border security is not a new issue on the policy agenda, and its salience has risen and fallen over time. Drawing on multiple surveys over the period 2006 to 2016 and spatial analytic tools, this paper explores two questions. First, how have attitudes toward border security shifted over time in response to changes in the partisan political environment? Second, how does spatial context – namely proximity to the US–Mexico border – shape attitudes toward the proposed border wall? Findings point to both time and space, in conjunction with individual-level political factors, as key factors shaping attitudes toward US–Mexico border security.

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Christopher Liu (University of Pennsylvania) : Why Do Publics Rally Around The Flag? An Experimental Assessment of Rally Mechanisms
Abstract: Diversionary war theory argues that leaders have an incentive to engage in aggressive foreign policies when facing domestic discontent. A crucial assumption is that leaders can benefit from a ‘rally 'round the flag,’ as publics increase their support for leaders under the presence of foreign threats. However, the rally literature remains divided on the question of whether leaders who initiate foreign conflict can elicit similar rallies as leaders who merely respond to conflict initiated by a foreign adversary. I attempt to address this question by manipulating initiation status in the context of a survey experiment. Results suggest heterogeneous rallies across partisanship. Given a Republican executive, self-identified Republicans rally to the leader regardless of initiation status. Democrats on the other hand only rally when the leader is responding to a foreign adversary. The findings suggest a qualification to current understanding of how and for whom rally effects operate.

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Cameron Anderson (University of Western Ontario), Michael McGregor (Ryerson University) : National Identity and the Two sides of Partisanship: The Case of the 2015 Canadian Federal Election
Abstract: Despite a longstanding tacit assumption that territorial identities are relatively invariant over time, recent scholarship (Anderson & McGregor 2016) has shown that a sense of national identity can be affected by election outcomes, and that such changes hinge, in part, upon the partisan identities of electors. At the same time, the literature on partisan identities has evolved as of late to include a more complete conceptualization of partisanship. In particular, recent work (Medeiros and Noel 2014; Caruana et al. 2015; Abramowitz & Webster 2016) highlights the behavioural effects of negative partisan attitudes in contrast to the more established positive dimension of partisanship. The current study considers the impact of the outcome of the 2015 Canadian federal election, which saw the governing Conservative Party replaced by the Liberal Party, upon the national identities of electors. Using data from the panel component of the 2015 Canadian Election Study, our analysis reveals that the change of government affected levels of identification with Canada, depending on the presence and type partisan identities held by electors. In particular, positive partisan ties are more likely to be associated with changes in national identity than are negative ones. Additionally, these effects vary by party and whether partisan attitudes are cognitive or affective in nature.

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Randy Besco (University of Toronto) : Instant Recognition or a Slow Socialization? Immigrants and the Nature of Partisan Identity
Abstract: The "political life-cycle" of adult immigrants is quite different then other citizens: they enter a new political context lacking the experience and knowledge that other citizens of their age have. While political knowledge and behaviour of immigrants and people born in Canada converge over time, what about party identification? The rate at which immigrants become partisans is an important measure of social incorporation in its own right, but it can also give insight into the nature of partisan identities. Do partisan identities take decades to socialize, or can people quickly learn which party they fit into? This paper examines how immigrants acquire partisanship in four countries: Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

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