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Abstract
An enduring and increasingly acute concern – in an age of polarized political parties – is that people’s partisan attachments distort preference formation at the expense of relevant information. This dissertation examines the scope and influence of the partisan ‘perceptual screen’ in attitude formation. In the following chapters, I demonstrate that partisan distortions in preference formation, although quite powerful, are profoundly shaped by political contexts, features of information, and individual characteristics that have previously been overlooked in the extant literature. By theorizing and systematically testing the ways in which different political environments alter attitude formation, I provide a more nuanced and comprehensive assessment of the influence of partisanship—furthering not just our understanding of the nature of public opinion and political behavior, but speaking to normative concerns at the heart of democratic governance. The results have broad implications for political parties, polarization, and assessments of citizen competence in contemporary democratic politics.
