Final Project Part 1

Code

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Code

library(dplyr)

Research Question

Affective polarization describes a heightened state of animosity between partisans that has steadily grown from the 1970s to today (Iyengar et al., 2019). Identifying antecedents of affective polarization is essential to creating intervention strategies into this negative state of politics. Levendusky (2009) proposes a social model where individuals making sense of simplified elite cues enables people to understand the relevant identities of the political landscape, which may lead to downstream affective polarization. I intend to expand on this model, testing a construct of construal level, or the level of abstraction to concreteness (Trope & Liberman, 2010) with which partisans perceive partisan groups and group cues. Prior studies suggest that lower construal may serve as an antecedent to affective polarization when partisans view issues in more concrete, group terms (Snyder, Unpublished). This study will expand these models into extant, large scale, political science datasets. Additionally, this project will employ supervised machine learning models to qualitatively code a large-n sample of free response questions.

Hypotheses

I hypothesize that partisans who are qualitatively coded as having a lower construal level will demonstrate higher levels of group/affective polarization, as measured on a feeling thermometer or measures of feelings about political groups - whichever is available in the datasets.

I hypothesize that using a sentiment analysis, these tendencies may be moderated by valence of their free response, with stronger valence enhancing the effect of construal level on affective polarization.

Datasets

I intend to use ANES and/or NAES free response data to provide an initial exploratory analysis. I will qualitatively code these data using a novel construal level paradigm (Snyder, unpublished). i will then use this qualitative coding process to train a supervised machine learning algorithm.

References

Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S. J. (2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science, 22(1), 129-146. Levendusky, M. (2009). The partisan sort: How liberals became Democrats and conservatives became Republicans. University of Chicago Press. Snyder, D. (2022). Keep It Simple Stupid: How Individual Differences in Cue Construal Explain Variations in Affective Polarization. Unpublished Manuscript Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological review, 117(2), 440.