What Motivates Voters More Than Loyalty? Loathing
'Hostility to the opposition party and its candidates has now reached a level where loathing motivates voters more than loyalty.
The building strength of partisan antipathy — “negative partisanship” — has radically altered politics. Anger has become the primary tool for motivating voters. Ticket splitting is dying out. But perhaps the most important consequence of the current power of political anger is that there has been a marked decline in the accountability of public officials to the electorate.
How bad is this problem? In “The Strengthening of Partisan Affect,” Shanto Iyengar and Masha Krupenkin, political scientists at Stanford, note that
We find that as animosity toward the opposing party has intensified, it has taken on a new role as the prime motivator in partisans’ political lives.
Iyengar and Krupenkin argue that
the impact of feelings toward the out-party on both vote choice and the decision to participate has increased since 2000; today it is out-group animus rather than in-group favoritism that drives political behavior.
Along parallel lines, Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster, political scientists at Emory University, argue that
one of the most important trends in American politics over the past several decades has been the rise of negative partisanship in the electorate.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/opinion/negative-partisanship-democrats-republicans.html?
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