KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— Politicians increasingly, and deliberately, seek to make voters angry.

— Eliciting voters’ anger comes at a cost. When voters are angry, they are more likely to express distrust in the national government. This distrust is problematic because trust in government can facilitate bipartisan cooperation and maintain support for social welfare programs.

— Nevertheless, incentives to elicit anger remain strong for political elites because voter anger helps politicians win elections. Absent a shift in the incentive structure that politicians face, expect voter anger to continue to rise.

American Rage

Contemporary American politics is, above all else, rage-inducing. This is due in large part to our politicians, those architects of anger who benefit from the public’s ire.

Donald Trump, in particular, is quite adept at stoking anger among his base. From his claims that immigrants from Mexico are “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists,” to his references of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus,” to his disparaging comments about Democratic-run cities, the president seeks to keep his base perpetually outraged. These messages are amplified by other Republican politicians and affiliated groups, some of whom have claimed that Democrats “don’t love” America and seek to silence those with whom they disagree.

Joe Biden, too, traffics in anger. Despite his claims about wanting to “restore the soul of the nation,” Biden has sought to arouse anger among his base by claiming that Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis was all about “making sure … his rich friends didn’t lose money,” and that the president “didn’t do a damn thing” to keep Americans safe. And, much like Republicans have buttressed Trump’s anger-inducing claims, prominent Democrats have echoed Biden’s remarks about Trump by calling the president “a threat to our democracy” and a would-be autocrat.

Why do politicians — both Democrats and Republicans — seek to make their voters angry? Research from my book, American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics, suggests that politicians seek to make their supporters angry because angry voters are loyal voters. Put simply, when a voter is angry, she is most likely to vote for her own party’s candidates at all levels of the federal electoral system. Crucially, anger can bind a voter to her party’s presidential candidate even when that candidate is not well liked. Anger, and not bonds of affection, is what drives political behavior in the United States.

This anger takes many forms. Americans are angry at the opposing party’s politicians and supporters. They are also angry with the opposing party’s policy ideas. Yet, while the specific nature of a voter’s anger may vary, anger often leads to a predictable outcome.

When voters are angry, they seek to take an action — or set of actions — that alleviates their anger. This action is usually aimed at the source of one’s anger. Because Americans’ political anger is often due to the opposing political party, they most typically channel their frustration into pursuing outcomes that benefit their own party — or, perhaps more accurately, harm the opposing party. Most commonly, this action is casting a vote for one’s party’s candidates up and down the ballot.

And, unlike many things in today’s political climate, anger is a bipartisan emotion. Both Democrats and Republicans are capable of experiencing anger, and both are increasingly outraged. According to data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), there has been a dramatic increase in the percentage of both Democrats and Republicans who reported feeling angry with the opposing party’s presidential candidate.

In 2008, 43% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans reported that they experienced anger with the other party’s standard bearer. By 2012, 56% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans indicated that they felt angry with the opposing party’s presidential candidate. In 2016, these numbers soared. Among Democrats, 90% of respondents to the ANES reported feeling angry with Donald Trump; 89% of Republicans reported feeling angry with Hillary Clinton. Not coincidentally, the 2016 election saw high rates of partisan loyalty at the ballot box.

Using data from the 2016 ANES, I calculated whether a voter felt positively or negatively toward their own party’s presidential candidate by examining their ratings of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on a measure known as a “feeling thermometer” scale. This measure, which ranges from 0-100, asks respondents to give their affective evaluations of candidates and parties on this 101-point scale, where higher values indicate a more positive feeling. Individuals who rated their own party’s candidate at 50 or below were classified as having a negative evaluation.

Among those with negative views of their own party’s candidate, more frequently being angry with the other party’s candidate was strongly associated with partisan loyalty. In fact, among those who did not like their own party’s candidate and reported “never” feeling angry at the opposing party’s candidate, only 22% remained loyal to their own party in the 2016 presidential election. Among those individuals who did not like their own party’s nominee but reported feeling angry at the other party’s candidate “some of the time,” nearly 48% voted loyally for their own party. Most drastically, 95.8% of Americans who did not like their own party’s candidate in 2016 but reported “always” feeling angry with the other party’s presidential candidate voted loyally. Anger, then, can lead to behavior that is more characteristic of dedicated partisans.

Though politicians have incentives to stoke voters’ anger, these actions are not without cost. In fact, voter anger has a host of negative consequences. In particular, anger serves to reduce Americans’ trust in the national government. In an era of heightened nationalization, the national government serves as the focal point for Americans’ views about politics. Because anger causes us to evaluate people, places, and institutions in a negative fashion, politicians’ stoking of voter anger specifically about politics has the unfortunate consequence of lowering Americans’ trust in their governing institutions.

This decline in trust is marked. In 1958, 73% of Americans said they trusted the federal government “always” or “most of the time.” By 2019, this figure had dropped to 17%. This diminished level of trust is problematic for effective governance. Trust in government has been shown to be essential for facilitating bipartisan cooperation and maintaining support for social welfare programs. Thus, should trust in government continue to decline, we are likely to see less bipartisanship and a further erosion of Americans’ support for programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Because politicians have an overarching concern with being reelected, and because anger aids in this pursuit, the outlook for the health of American democracy looks bleak.

The challenge is great if we are to make progress and hold together as a nation. Anger management is a good start.

Steven Webster is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Indiana University-Bloomington. His research interests are in political psychology, voting behavior, and public opinion. His book, American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics, was released earlier this year by Cambridge University Press. Follow him on Twitter @stevenwwebster.

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— Over the past 60 years, trust in government has declined precipitously. Whereas high levels of trust in the national government were typical during the Eisenhower Administration, by 2016 only a fifth of Americans said they trusted the government “always” or “most of the time.”

— Using a survey experiment and utilizing a technique known as “emotional recall,” I find that individuals asked to write about a time they were very angry or to write about a time they were very angry about politics were more likely to agree that the national government is unresponsive to the concerns and interests of the public. Merely asking individuals to recall a time they had thought about politics had no effect on lowering trust in government. These results indicate that anger does play a causal role in lowering citizens’ trust in the government.

— A regression analysis of respondents’ use of angry words as well as positive and negative emotional words revealed that those who were primed to exhibit higher levels of apolitical anger offered the most negative views of the national government. That is, apolitical issues, rather than political issues, elicited the most anger. This suggests that the magnitude of the anger, and not necessarily the target, is the most important factor in shaping citizens’ trust in government.

— Normatively, these results have troubling implications. With the rise of negative partisanship and a contentious style of governing, Americans are more frequently exposed to anger-inducing stimuli. With politics increasingly defined by feelings of anger toward the opposing party and its governing elite, trust in government is bound to decline.

All politics is anger

From President Donald Trump’s tweets, to congressional gridlock, investigations about Russia’s potential meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and, yes, a comedian’s standup routine at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the political scene is inherently anger-inducing. Indeed, in an era defined by intense partisan divisions where the logic of negative partisanship governs most political decision-making and forms of political behavior, anger is an omnipresent emotion in contemporary American politics. Yet, despite the fact that anger is so prevalent within the American electorate, little work has been done to understand the ways in which this anger is related to an equally worrisome trend that has been developing simultaneously: Americans’ declining trust in their own government.

Trust in government has declined precipitously over the past 60 years. As the trend line in Figure 1 shows, high levels of trust in the national government were typical in the latter years of the Eisenhower Administration. However, by 2016, only 20% of Americans said they trusted the government “always” or “most of the time.” Because trust in government is essential for facilitating democratic representation and legitimacy, understanding the causes of this cratering trust in government is of paramount importance. My research, published last September in the journal Political Behavior, suggests that the growth in anger within the electorate and Americans’ declining trust in the national government are not separate phenomena. In fact, my work has shown that higher levels of anger within the electorate are actually one of the primary reasons citizens have lost trust in the national government.

Figure 1: Americans’ trust in government is declining

Why might we expect higher levels of anger to lower citizens’ trust in the national government? The primary reason stems from the psychological theory of “mood congruity.” Aptly named, this theory argues that people tend to evaluate institutions, objects, or other people in ways that are in line with the emotions that they feel. Moreover, psychological studies indicate that every emotion has either a positive or a negative valence to it. So, if one is experiencing the emotion of happiness, he or she will evaluate objects positively precisely because happiness is an emotion with a positive valence. On the other hand, because anger is an emotion that contains a negative valence, an individual who is in an angry state will tend to render negative evaluations of any given thing.

To examine whether and how anger within the electorate causes citizens to lose trust in their own government, I conducted a survey experiment on approximately 3,300 registered American voters a few months before the 2016 presidential election. The key part of the survey is the experimental manipulation that seeks to induce anger in respondents. To do this, I utilized a technique known as “emotional recall.” This strategy simply asks respondents to write a paragraph about a time they were very angry about politics. The idea, which is rooted in psychological studies, is that when individuals write about an anger-inducing experience they will temporarily relive that emotional response.

However, in addition to asking respondents to write about a time they were very angry about politics, I randomly assigned respondents to two other treatment groups: a group that asked individuals to write about a time they were very angry, and a “political salience” group that asked individuals to write about a time they thought about politics. By doing this, I am able to separate the emotion (anger) from the target (politics) while invoking anger. Separating anger from politics is important from a theoretical standpoint because this allows me to examine both the effect of political anger and generalized apolitical anger on citizens’ trust in government. The individuals randomized into the control group were asked to write about what they ate for breakfast. This serves as a useful control group because it is benign in nature and unrelated to politics or political affairs. The schematic displayed in Figure 2 illustrates these four randomization groups.

Figure 2: The four randomization groups

To help facilitate an easier understanding of these experimental conditions, consider the following examples of responses to each of the treatment groups. One individual who was randomized into the anger about politics condition wrote that “the lack of action on social security pisses me off — it seems congress always waits till the very last minute to fix issues with it that need fixing.” Another individual wrote that “[o]ur country is going to crap because politicians care more about themselves and their own personal agendas then [sic] they do the welfare of the country and its people.” Individuals who were randomized into the apolitical anger condition wrote about their divorce, problems their children were having at school, and confrontations with former romantic partners. Finally, those individuals who were randomized into the political salience condition tended to write about noteworthy political events from their formative years, such as the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

After the randomization process was complete, survey respondents were asked to rate their level of agreement with the following statement on a 0-10 scale, where higher values indicate more agreement: “The national government is unresponsive to the concerns and interests of the public.” Accordingly, higher values on this measure indicate a greater level of distrust in the national government.

The results of the experimental manipulation are shown in Table 1. The positive coefficients for the “Anger” condition and the “Anger about politics” condition indicate that individuals who were randomized into the treatment groups that asked them to write about a time they were very angry and to write about a time they were very angry about politics, respectively, were more likely to agree that the national government is unresponsive to the concerns and interests of the public. Merely asking individuals to recall a time they had thought about politics had no effect on lowering trust in government. These results indicate that anger does play a causal role in lowering citizens’ trust in the government.

Table 1: Regression results of experimental manipulation

Yet, the results shown in Table 1 raise as many questions as they answer. Indeed, a particularly curious result that emerges from Table 1 is the fact that those individuals who were primed to exhibit higher degrees of apolitical anger gave more negative evaluations of the government than those who were primed to exhibit higher levels of anger specifically about politics. Because the national government is a political institution, the most logical expectation would have been to expect bigger effects for those who were given the political anger treatment.

To determine why the treatment effects were the largest for the anger-only condition, I conducted a sentiment analysis on the text that individuals wrote during the experimental design. To do this, I utilized a lexicon known as the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). In addition to analyzing the grammatical structure of a text, such as the number of adverbs or pronouns used, the LIWC dictionary is able to classify the emotional content of a given text. For these purposes, I was interested in the percentage of words each individual used that the LIWC dictionary classifies as “angry words” (there are nearly 200 words classified as angry words; examples include “frustrated,” “annoyed,” “irritated,” “hate,” etc.) and how this varies by treatment status. To do this, I conducted a regression analysis where the primary dependent variable is the percentage of angry words used in the respondent’s text and the independent variables are dummy variables indicating which treatment status the respondent was randomized into. I also analyzed the percentage of “negative emotional” words (an aggregate scale of all negatively-valenced words) and “positive emotional” words (an aggregate scale of all positively-valenced words) each respondent used. The results of these regressions are shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Regression results of sentiment analysis with original experimental manipulation

The results of the regressions shown in Table 2 indicate that those who were randomized into the anger only condition used nearly 3.4% more angry words, 4.5% more negative emotional words, and 3.4% fewer positive emotional words than those who were in the control group. Those who were randomized into the anger about politics treatment group used 2.7% more angry words, 3.7% more negative emotional words, and 2.4% fewer positive emotional words than the control group. These patterns reveal why those who were primed to exhibit higher levels of apolitical anger offered the most negative views of the national government: apolitical issues, rather than political issues, elicited the most anger. This suggests that the magnitude of the anger, and not necessarily the target, is the most important factor in shaping citizens’ trust in government. Finally, the results in Table 2 reveal something disconcerting: those who were asked to write about a time they had thought about politics were also more likely than those in the control group to use angry words and negative emotional words. This suggests that, to some extent, anger and politics are not separable. On the contrary, in the contemporary era, politics and anger go hand-in-hand.

Normatively, these results have troubling implications. With the rise of negative partisanship and a contentious style of governing, Americans are more frequently exposed to anger-inducing stimuli. With politics increasingly defined by feelings of anger toward the opposing party and its governing elite, trust in government is bound to decline. Absent some drastic change to the political system that reverses this trend, it is possible that trust in government will decline to a level so low that the national government will lose its sense of legitimacy in the eyes of those to whom it is accountable. To the extent that trust in government is a sign of the health of American democracy, we have ample reason to be concerned.

My full study can be found here.

Speaking at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate, famously declared that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.” Obama then went on to decry political pundits who “like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states.” The implication of Obama’s speech was that the perception of geographic sorting of the country into reliably Democratic and Republican areas was not based in fact, but was instead a false narrative imposed by the media.

Obama’s rhetoric of unity and homogeneity across party lines notwithstanding, there is substantial evidence that cultural and lifestyle preferences are strongly related to political tastes. Political scientists have demonstrated that political ideology and party identification are predictive of choices in areas as varied as mate selection, media consumption, cleanliness, office décor, music tastes, and housing decisions. If such relationships between political and lifestyle preferences are strong enough, and individuals are sufficiently willing and able to “vote with their feet” and move to areas that are a better match for their tastes, the implication is clear: We should expect to see the emergence over time of a geographically divided electorate of exactly the kind that Obama’s famous speech in 2004 sought to deny.

Perhaps the most famous argument in support of such a geographically divided electorate can be found in Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort. In this account, Bishop points out that most Americans live in neighborhoods that are dominated by one political party and that this divide has been growing over time. The result has been a “fundamental kind of self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing social division” of Americans along geographic and partisan lines.

While an argument like Bishop’s is persuasive, there has been very little empirical examination of these claims. To understand both whether partisans sort into geographic locales and the degree to which this sorting takes place, Greg Martin and I analyzed two similar sources of data: The first contains information on the moving patterns of the nearly 1.1 million people who moved from one location to another within the state of Florida between 2008 and 2010; the second contains information on 50,000 individuals who moved from one state to another between 2005 and 2016. In both sets of data, we analyzed whether Democrats and Republicans have differential preferences over three distinct characteristics of a geographic locale: the log population density; the “walkability” of a neighborhood, measured by its closeness to restaurants, shops, offices, and parks; and, finally, the Republican share of the two-party vote. While the results we find hold across both of our samples, I only present results from our dataset of Florida movers here.

Given what we know about Democratic and Republican partisans, there are clear expectations about the sorts of patterns we should see if a “big sort” is, indeed, occurring: Democrats (Republicans) should prefer more (less) dense locales, more (less) walkable areas, and areas with a lower (higher) Republican share of the two-party vote. What we find is that Democrats and Republicans do prefer to live in areas with more co-partisans. For instance, registered Democrats moving from one location to another in Florida move, on average, to locations about 5 log points denser than observably comparable registered Republicans. Moreover, registered Democrats move to areas that, on average, have approximately 2% lower Republican vote shares than observably comparable Republicans. These results are shown graphically in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Regression coefficients for Florida movers, 2008-2010

While these results suggest that there is a degree of partisan sorting along geographic lines taking place within the American electorate, the more important factors in determining patterns of migration are nonpolitical attributes of a location. Indeed, when we factor in characteristics of a neighborhood such as the racial, gender, and age demographics; income deciles; education levels; levels of home ownership in the area; and qualities of a house, such as the median number of rooms and the year it was built, the influence of partisanship in determining where an individual moves diminishes greatly. Americans, then, prefer to live near co-partisans, but this preference is a much lower priority than more practical considerations.

Given that our data suggest that partisanship is a very small factor in determining where an individual chooses to live, one interesting question is how long it would take to achieve a geographically polarized electorate like the kind we see in contemporary U.S. politics. Therefore, in order to answer this question, we simulated 20 years’ worth of moving in our data set of Florida movers. This simulation process consists of a few steps: First, we estimate the probability that every voter registered in Florida between 2008 and 2010 moves between 2008 and 2010; next, those individuals who are predicted to move relocate to a new precinct that better fits their own partisan preferences; after this, we recompute the Republican presidential vote and registration shares in every precinct once moving is complete. We repeat this process for a period of 20 years or, equivalently, 10 electoral cycles. After simulated each cycle, we record and plot the proportion of the Republican voter share and the Republican share of two-party registrations in each of Florida’s 25 congressional districts (based on the 2008 starting point; Florida has 27 districts following the 2010 reapportionment). These simulated changes are shown in Figures 2 and 3.

Note that we treat individuals’ presidential votes and registration choices as fixed; the only thing that may vary over time is their residential location. The statewide population of voters and hence statewide Republican shares are fixed throughout the course of the simulation. All that may potentially change is the composition of lower-level geographic units such as precincts or state house or congressional districts.

Figure 2: Simulated change in Republican presidential vote share by congressional district, 2008-2028

Figure 2: Simulated change in Republican share of two-party voter registration by congressional district, 2008-2028

As can be seen in Figures 2 and 3, both the proportion of the Republican voter share and the Republican two-party registration share increases very little over time. In fact, any change that does occur tends to produce more competitive congressional districts rather than more districts that are dominated by one party. This is because, as we have suggested, Americans are more concerned with things like finding affordable homes in areas with good schools than living near other people who share their partisan affiliation. Given the estimates we have found in our analyses, it would take an extraordinarily long time — if ever — for geographic polarization along partisan lines to occur. This claim is shown clearly in Figures 4 and 5. Figure 4 shows the distribution of simulated 2008 Republican presidential vote share at the precinct level in each of the 10 simulation cycles. Figure 5 shows the distribution of two-party Republican registration shares at the precinct level over this same simulated time period. If geographic sorting was happening, we should see an increasingly bimodal distribution on both of these metrics. Instead, what we see is the emergence of more competitive precincts and the decline of more lopsided precincts.

Figure 4: Distribution of simulated 2008 Republican presidential vote share at the precinct level, 2008-2028

Figure 5: Distribution of two-party Republican voter registration shares at the precinct level, 2008-2028

The results shown above suggest that partisan geographic sorting, in isolation, has a homogenizing — rather than polarizing — effect on the distribution of political preferences. What, then, explains the apparently stable degree of polarization in the current observed distribution of preferences? One possibility is that individuals’ political preferences are influenced by their social and physical environment. When a rural voter moves to an urban location or vice versa, his or her political preferences may change to fall in line with those of his or her new peers and neighbors, just as other cultural and lifestyle preferences are likely to change following such a move. Our simulation exercise explicitly rules this possibility out: individuals’ political preferences are assumed to be completely fixed. Under this assumption of fixed preferences, residential mobility tends to produce politically homogeneous rather than segregated geographic distributions. The fact that we do not observe such a homogeneous pattern, then, suggests that the reverse causal channel (location changing preferences, rather than preferences changing location) has some bite.

In order to examine this possibility, we examine changes in individual voters’ partisan registration over time. Specifically, we ask if voters who moved to new locations that were very different from their old locations on the three dimensions discussed above (population density, walkability, and GOP vote share) subsequently changed their registration status in a direction matching the change in their environment. Put more succinctly, do Democrats become more Republican over time when they move to more Republican areas (and vice versa)? Our analysis suggests that this process is, indeed, happening. When Republicans move to areas that are more densely populated, have higher degrees of walkability, and are more Democratic, these individuals — over time — shift their party affiliation from Republican to Democrat (or Independent). Conversely, Democrats who move to areas that are less densely populated, have lower degrees of walkability, and are more Republican, tend to become Republicans (or Independents).

The American electorate is geographically divided. Partisan affiliations correlate with tastes for housing characteristics, with Democrats clustered in urban cores and Republicans spread out across suburban and rural areas. However, our analysis suggests that this spatial distribution of partisans is not the result of any form of systematic partisan sorting. Individuals both move frequently enough and care more about “practical” considerations than political ones when deciding where they want to move. Thus, we do not believe that a “big sort” is occurring. We do, however, find evidence that where one chooses to live is important inasmuch as one’s peers have the ability to influence one’s own partisan affiliation. Whether this process is happening due to social influence, a desire to not stand out, or something else is a question that remains to be answered.

To read more, visit http://polisci.emory.edu/faculty/gjmart2/papers/partisan_sorting_density.pdf  or http://www.stevenwwebster.com/research/partisan_sorting_density.pdf.