According to legend, Ben Franklin informed a Philadelphia lady in 1787 that the Constitutional Convention had created a republic rather than a monarchy—“if you can keep it.” But what can individual citizens do to “keep” a republic? In his Farewell Address nine years later, George Washington offered a potential answer: resist extreme partisanship.

This presentation considers whether partisanship in America today poses a threat to the Republic. Ideological and policy disagreement among American partisans is modest, but feelings toward opposing partisans is curdling from dislike into hatred. A major foundation for this hatred is a distorted perception of opposing partisans, which means that we may be fighting phantoms rather than adversaries.

There are many ways to mitigate the most corrosive elements of our politics, but they will be difficult to implement insofar as we—the individuals who make up America’s body politic—prize partisan victory over democratic norms.

Many scholars doubt that televised partisan media’s audience is large enough, persuadable enough, or sufficiently isolated from cross-cutting sources for partisan media to meaningfully influence public opinion. However, limitations of survey measures of media consumption have left such doubts difficult to assess. We report findings from four novel data sources which each link behavioral measures of television consumption to political administrative and survey data. First, approximately 1 in 7 Americans consume over 8 hours/month of partisan television, outnumbering the US Black population. Second, consistent with selective exposure, about two-thirds of partisan media viewers are aligned partisans; however, partisan media viewers have fairly similar attitudes to partisans generally, suggesting partisan media’s audience is not likely to be less persuadable than partisans generally. Finally, few partisan media consumers consume cross-cutting television channels, consistent with partisan echo chambers. Concerns about partisan media’s potential to further polarize Americans cannot be easily dismissed.

Joshua Kalla is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University with a secondary appointment in Statistics and Data Science. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. His research studies political persuasion, prejudice reduction, and decision-making among voters and political elites, primarily through the use of randomized field experiments.

A popular explanation for rising partisan animosity and declining faith in democracy in the United States is that Republicans and Democrats misperceive each other to hold extreme policy attitudes. Yet, perceptions of group attitudes vary along other dimensions, and these perceptions are likely as important to democracy. In particular, Americans may underestimate the diversity of Democrats’ and Republicans’ attitudes to harmful effect. This paper uses surveys and pre-registered experiments with representative and convenience samples (N = 6,158) to assess the extent to which Americans misperceive that each party holds “all the same” attitudes and, furthermore, the consequences of these perceptions. Contrary to existing research, we find that American partisans do not consistently overestimate how radical the “average” Republican or Democrat is. However, Republicans and Democrats do vastly underestimate the diversity of each party’s attitudes. Correcting these misperceptions of within-party attitude diversity reduces partisan animosity and the perceived threat posed by the opposing party.