Deficit Attention Disorder: Partisanship, Issue Importance and Concern About Government Overspending

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Deficit Attention Disorder_PoBe_AcceptedVersion_FINAL_author_id.pdf (1.82 MB)

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https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-022-09783-5

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09783-5
 http://hdl.handle.net/11603/24449

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UMBC Political Science
UMBC Faculty Collection

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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1545-4270

Date

2022-03-02

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journal articles
postprints
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Citation of Original Publication

Kane, J.V., Anson, I.G. Deficit Attention Disorder: Partisanship, Issue Importance and Concern About Government Overspending. Polit Behav (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09783-5

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Subject to Springer Nature re-use terms.
Access to this item will begin on 03/02/2023

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Abstract

Political action and electoral behavior often stem from a conviction that an issue is important. Yet despite a growing literature on partisan bias, it remains unclear whether partisan attachment also affects the perceived importance of various issues. We propose a theory of partisan-motivated issue attention (PMIA), wherein citizens satisfy partisan instincts by shifting the perceived importance of an issue. We apply our theory to an issue involving a fundamental tool of the federal government—the power to deficit-spend—and test the hypothesis that partisans’ concern about government overspending significantly changes depending on which party presides over deficit-spending. Leveraging pre-registered experimental and observational studies, we find strong support for this hypothesis among both Republicans and Democrats. Lastly, using text analytical methods, we also find evidence of PMIA in televised partisan media. Our study thus demonstrates that putative concern about deficit-spending contains a sizable partisan component and, more broadly, uncovers an additional means by which partisan bias guides citizens’ attitude formation on policy-relevant issues in the United States.