Negative Patrtisanship In The United States

In the past six decades,the United States electorate has witnessed increasing political negativity with a context of resurgent partisanship;it has been exposed to a growing amount of negative partisan media and enjoyed an increasing negative view of the opposing party.Previous scholarship recognized negative partisan identification without substantiation of its nature and how it functions in the American electorate.Negative partisanship was largely considered affiliated to positive partisanship or part of partisanship until the 1990s.Recent work with a focus on the United States put slight emphasis on negative partisanship itself and discussed mostly the nationalization of politics on both the state and federal level.This paper-hereby comprehensively reviews existing academic work on negative partisanship,presents the historical development of its conceptualization in a chronological fashion,and builds a definitional framework.Negative partisanship in the context of the United States is negative spectrum of sentiments,feelings,or affiliation which individuals develop towards political parties.It is part of individuals' self-identification,independent from positive partisanship.Using data retrieved from American National Election Studies,this paper quantitatively confirms several assumptions by the research questions.It firstly confirms the existence of negative partisanship,the historical trend and its nature of independence from partisanship in general.In the U.S.,feeling toward one's own and opposing party has been on the decline with that towards the disliked party far more significant from 1980 to 2016.Average feeling towards two maj or parties has been overall going down,both reaching the lowest in 2016;yet there is no significant downfall of public attitudes toward their own party whilst there being an obvious decrease in what voters feel about the opposing party.Even though voters are growing to be evermore partisan in a historical sense,their feelings toward their own party/candidates and feelings toward the opposing party/candidate are largely independent of each other.Both findings concur with declining rate of weak partisan identifiers,increasing independent voters,and resurgent strong identifiers.The second bulk of tests demonstrate detailed trends analysis.From 1978 to 2016,both democratic identifiers and Republican identifiers gradually rated their respective opposing party on a decreasing scale.Specifically,both Republicans and Democrats have experienced gradual and even sharp decreases in the average feeling from voters,with a historical low in 2016.A scrutiny into more detailed partisan affiliation shows that weak identifiers(including both parties)have been in general decreasing from 1952 to 2016,while strong partisan identifiers decrease from 1952 to 1976,and then reverted to growth ever since with the highest in 1958.An interesting observation here is that since around 1978,the number of both independents and strong identifiers began to grow overall while weak identifiers kept shrinking.Lastly,on average,partisan identifiers appear to be voting more for parties;partisan identifiers have either grown more affiliated to their own parties or chosen to transform to independent.Among them,Republican identifiers would more or less vote for the Republican Party,probably less affected by the increasing negative sentiments against the Democratic Party.From 1980 to 2012,a steadily growing number of democratic identifiers voted for the Democratic Party in these three decades.Democratic identifiers again appear to be far more "swing" than Republican identifiers.