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Party Foul: The Effectiveness of Political Value Rhetoric is Constrained by Party Ownership

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Abstract

Politicians use political value rhetoric to win elections or persuade constituents towards policy positions, but the effectiveness of this rhetoric is unclear. I argue that partisan forces constrain the effectiveness of this rhetoric and that this constraint is conditional based on the value evoked and the match between the politician’s and message recipient’s partisanship. To examine this, I conduct a survey experiment with a diverse U.S. national population and show that politicians’ value rhetoric is disproportionately evaluated based on the value evoked as well as whether the politician is in-party or out-party: in-party politicians are punished—and out-party politicians rewarded—for trespassing on the other party’s values. I then use individual-level variables to examine what drives this result, finding that both party-congruent value endorsements and affective polarization levels moderate the asymmetric responses to political value trespassing. Lastly, I replicate this experiment and reproduce the same findings. The results speak to political values, the effectiveness of political rhetoric, party betrayal signaling, and the true object of out-party distaste, which seems to be more about the party than the party member.

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Notes

  1. Political values are related to, but distinct from, human values, where the latter are broader, more durable, and perhaps even shape the former (see Schwartz et al. 2014 for discussion). Because of these differences, it is unclear if findings here on political values would replicate with human values.

  2. When evoking the expected values, the partisanship of the speaker did not predict attitudes or behavioral intentions (see Nelson and Garst 2005, pg. 506).

  3. Dynata is an online market research firm that recruits participants to take surveys for compensation and prides itself on data quality (see https://www.dynata.com/dynatas-world-class-quality/). See Appendices E and F for demographic comparisons to nationally-representative data.

  4. This was done using block randomization by party.

  5. Because gender could matter here (see, e.g., Bauer 2019; Herrnson, Lay, and Stokes 2003), I kept gender constant as male.

  6. This design used deception in that respondents were told about a candidate and slogan that did not exist. This deception was low risk and was necessary in order to have control over various factors in the study. Participants (in both studies) were debriefed at the end of the survey.

  7. See Appendix E for details.

  8. Either because of deeply held beliefs (e.g., Lupton and McKee 2020) or social influence (Connors 2020).

  9. 16 respondents did not answer questions about affective polarization and/or value endorsements and were thus dropped from this analysis. 52 respondents did not answer questions about age or interest—I imputed these responses using multiple imputation.

  10. The value endorsement questions had four response options, but integrating whether endorsement was party-congruent or conflicting leads to eight values—where 8 represents a partisan endorsing a party-congruent value to the greatest extent and 1 represents a partisan endorsing a party-conflicting value to the greatest extent.

  11. This interaction is significant when run without the other two interactions but with the same controls (α=-1.82, p = .000), suggesting multicollinearity. Nonetheless, even if standard errors are inflated due to multicollinearity, this interaction’s coefficient is rather small—especially in comparison to the other two. Either way, I urge caution in interpreting this null result.

  12. Because this variation (an added cue) did not significantly change the means of the conditions, I group those without and those with the cue into the same condition. Full survey in Appendix F.

  13. 40 respondents did not answer questions about ideology or affective polarization and were dropped from this analysis. Two respondents did not answer questions about age—I imputed these responses using multiple imputation.

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Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this paper have received valuable feedback from Yanna Krupnikov, Jennifer Jerit, Peter DeScioli, Vin Arceneaux, David Darmofal, and extremely helpful anonymous reviewers.

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  1. University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

    Elizabeth C. Connors

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  1. Elizabeth C. Connors
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Correspondence to Elizabeth C. Connors.

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Research was conducted under the approval of Stony Brook University Institutional Review Board and was funded internally by Stony Brook University’s political science department. It was not pre-registered. Replication data for this paper can be found at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/U5GT7X.

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Connors, E.C. Party Foul: The Effectiveness of Political Value Rhetoric is Constrained by Party Ownership. Polit Behav 46, 707–726 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09821-2

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