Stevenson, Randolph T2019-05-172019-05-172018-052018-04-16May 2018Santoso, Lie Philip. "Partisan Bias in Economic Perceptions: How Political and Economic Contexts Condition the Strength of the Partisan Screen." (2018) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105672">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105672</a>.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105672For more than 50 years, the usefulness of party identification (PID) in cross-national research has been a matter of dispute in the study of comparative political behavior. These debates are wide-ranging but boil down to how one conceptualizes the nature of PID. There are some who argued that PID is primarily a social identity while there are others who treat it simply as a political attitude. As a result, there are widespread disagreements about the stability, measurement, and applicability of the concept in comparative contexts. In this dissertation, I seek to move beyond these debates by focusing on the one aspect of PID that has reached a scholarly consensus: the function of PID as a perceptual screen through which individuals perceive realities. To do this, I first develop an individual-level theory of partisan bias drawn from a general psychological theory of motivated reasoning to formally define a “partisan screen” at the individual level. In particular, I argue that the key mechanism in which individuals develop a partisan screen is through the selective exposure to favorable information. Subsequently, I use this individual level theory to identify the contextual variables most likely to condition the strength of that screen for typical individuals in different political and economic contexts. Importantly, these factors are derived directly from my individual model of partisan bias – that is, I seek to identify the parameters of that theoretical model that can vary across contexts. This theoretical approach means that my empirical results about the impact of contexts speak directly to the veracity of the underlying individual level theory. My empirical results about the impact of these contextual variables reveal that selective exposure is indeed a key mechanism that partisans use to develop strong partisan screens in perceiving the economy. In particular, since my theory suggests that voters need to be able to identify a set of “trusted sources” that will consistently deliver a partisan message in order to develop a strong partisan screen, a key contextual variable that would explain the variation in the strength of the partisan screen needs to capture the ease to which individuals are able to identify these “trusted” sources. As such, I develop a compelling new measure of the identifiability of partisan media for different parties and different times and shows that it does have a strong causal effect on the strength of the partisan screen across contexts.application/pdfengCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.Partisan ScreenIdentifiability of the Partisan MediaThesis2019-05-17