Abstract
Repositioning by political elites plays a key role in a variety of political phenomena, including legislative policymaking and campaigning. While previous studies suggest that repositioning will lead to negative evaluations, these studies have not explored the role of elite communications in structuring mass responses. We argue that this omission is problematic because elite explanations for their actions may limit the costs associated with ‘flip-flopping’ by persuading some citizens to update their attitudes so that they agree with the elite’s new stance and also by molding beliefs about the motives of the elite when repositioning. We present evidence supportive of this argument obtained from two large experiments conducted on samples of American adults. Ultimately, we show that elites offering a satisfactory justification for their change can avoid most, if not all, of the evaluative costs that would otherwise occur. This study thus has important implications not just for this particular element of elite behavior, but also related questions concerning governmental accountability and representation.
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Notes
Data and all replication code for the analyess presented herein can be found at the Political Behavior Dataverse.
It should be noted that ‘flip-flops’ in popular parlance often refer to cases where elites switch back and forth on an issue multiple times, while our current investigation focuses on a single switch (as does existing work on this subject; e.g. Croco 2016; Doherty et al. 2016; Hoffman and Carver 1984; Tomz and Van Houweling 2012a, b). As we discuss in the conclusion, the number of switches is an important area for future work on this subject.
There also exists a literature on the effects of repositioning by European political parties. The effects of such changes on voting behavior appear to be highly contingent in nature and may only show up over extended periods of time (Adams et al. 2011, 2014; Adams and Somer-Topcu 2009; Tavits 2007).
Of course, it is possible that explanations play this role even without affecting the mass public. In other words, legislators may switch positions when they think they can explain the switch even if explanations don’t generally work.
One potential exception is Levendusky and Horowitz (2012), who investigate a particular context: a President who backs down from a commitment to enter a foreign conflict. Study participants evaluated the fictional President worse than a consistent one unless the inconsistent President indicated that they changed course due to the presence of new information. This should provide added confidence to the importance of explanations. However, people treat legislators and executives differently (Sigelman et al. 1992). Presidents are also given greater leeway for foreign affairs than other issues (Sirin and Villalobos 2011). Presidents may be a highly credible source on that particular issue; it is unclear whether similar effects will emerge elsewhere. The present study thus builds on Levendusky and Horowitz (2012).
Online Appendix A also provides results from randomization checks for both experiments (in both cases, our included predictors were jointly insignificant i.e. conditions were balanced); results from manipulation checks; details on the measurement of the variables used in our analyses; summary statistics for both of our dependent variables by treatment condition; and results from a pre-test for the explanations used in Study 1.
Also included in the design, but omitted from analyses in-text, are separate conditions wherein Candidate A was consistent and provided an explanation for the position they consistently took. Given that our interest is in comparing repositioning sans justifications and repositioning with them, we will not investigate these conditions in-text. The consistent version of Candidate A explored in text is one that does not offer a justification for their position taking. Our conclusions would be the same if the consistent/justification sub-sample were also included; see Appendix OB for a replication of in-text analyses with this subsample included. Given that the mean values on our DVs tend to be slightly lower among those who also received a justification from the consistent candidate, omitting this subsample biases against supporting our hypotheses.
In Study 1, this single factor has an eigenvalue of 3.76 and explains 62.6 % of the variance among the items; factor loadings of the individual items ranges from a low of 0.74 (thermometer) to a high of 0.83 (strong leadership). In Study 2, the single dimension has an eigenvalue of 2.59 and explains 64.8 % of the variance across the items; factor loadings range from a low of 0.76 (open-minded) to a high of 0.84 (feeling thermometer). In Online Appendix B we provide replications of our results focused on the individual items of this scale (see Tables OB11–12).
These analyses are robust to alternative specifications including analyses with demographic and political control variables (see Online Appendices B & D).
One question of potential interest is how background characteristics of the audience influence reactions to repositioning both with and without a justification. Recent work on motivated reasoning, for instance, might suggest that individuals likely to disagree with the elite’s new position, and those from the opposite partisan team, might punish the elite the most for repositioning and reward them the least when a justification is offered (Bolsen et al. 2014; Lodge and Taber 2006). We provide analyses on this front in Online Appendix B. Repositioning appears to have hurt evaluations to an equal degree across issue and partisan lines and perhaps helped the most among those that agreed with the Candidates final position in Study 1 and among non co-partisans in Study 2.
Respondent ideology is measured on the post-test. A cleaner test of this relationship would be to use a pre-test measure to prevent the possibility of treatment contamination. Thus, some caution must be used when interpreting the sub-group analyses in Fig. 2 although we can note that ideology does not substantially vary across conditions and we do not have a priori reasons to expect the treatment to influence respondent ideology.
The difference between these conditions and those in the Consistent Candidate A condition is −0.04 [− 0.44, 0.37] for Support to Oppose and 0.03 [− 0.38, 0.44] for Oppose to Support.
It is possible that respondents were using the partisanship of the Representative to make inferences regarding whether they were losing or gaining proximity from the change in question. However, persuasion should nevertheless have been more difficult given that no specific position was mentioned. Moreover, the relatively low salience of patent reform and, thus of the parties’ positions on the issue, may further augur against the persuasion explanation.
As we show in the Supplementary Materials, these two motive dimensions are positively related to the respondent’s evaluations toward the vignette elite in both studies, while the political motives dimension is unrelated to the evaluation dimension in Study 1 (as in Doherty 2015) and negatively so in Study 2; see Tables OB9–10.
A one-way ANOVA of this outcome variable yields an F-statistic of 1.09 (p = 0.35).
In the theory section we intimated that account satisfaction should moderate these relationships, e.g. we would expect to see persuasion and positive motive attributions among those that accepted the account but not among those that rejected the justification. We assessed satisfaction on the post-test which makes a clean analysis of this possibility difficult at best given that individuals may have many reasons to report satisfaction with the justifications not least of which is the possibility that they are rationalizing from positive evaluations of the elite to satisfaction rather than vice versa. In the Online Appendix we report results wherein we condition on post-test account satisfaction—both in its ‘raw’ form and in analyses which use a version pre-processed via a coarsened exact matching process (Blackwell et al. 2009). The results reported there are consistent with expectations (e.g. more persuasion and more positive motive attributions alongside higher levels of account satisfaction). However, given the very real methodological drawbacks of using a post-test (matched or unmatched) satisfaction measure, we leave a fuller explication of those results to the Online Appendix.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Jamie Druckman, Thomas Leeper, Martin Bisgaard, Jennifer Jerit, Jason Barabas, participants in the Political Behavior Workshop at Aarhus University, and two anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. This article is better for their feedback; all remaining errors remain my own. Study 1 was funded via a Graduate Research Grant from Northwestern University.
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Robison, J. The Role of Elite Accounts in Mitigating the Negative Effects of Repositioning. Polit Behav 39, 609–628 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9372-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9372-6