As party divisions and political spins coexist in the U.S. society, “one size fits all” policy may not apply to contemporary political context (Fforde, 2010), which leads to some political advertisement information incongruent with the party stances. According to previous study, party identity, as a cue in motivated reasoning, can subject party members to accept cognition-inconsistent messages (Festinger, 1962; Slothuus & De Vreese, 2010). However, the rise of ideological diversity makes political tolerance difficult to sustain (Scanlon, 2003), as people tend to avoid lower psychological consensus and take a priority to seek attitude-consistent information (Bogart, 1971; Tsang, 2019). Besides, exposure to political disagreement can influence information credibility, political trust and negative emotional arousal (Sanders, 2012; Chen & Lu, 2017).
Based on an online experiment conducted through Qualtrics, this study recruited 656 participants from Mechanical Turk in May 2019 (51.7% male, Mean age = 39 years old). The target of this study is to find whether and how party identity and party attachment to disagreeing political advertisements on the immigration issue influence political skepticism, media credibility and negative emotional arousal, mediated by issue importance and issue urgency. Therefore, participants who exposing to political advertisements they disagree were analysed (N = 294), whereas others were excluded. In this way, we screened participants by matching their attitudes toward the immigration issue measured by 3 pre-survey questions (Cronbach’s α = .70) with politician’s attitudes in manipulations (i.e., showing positive or negative views on immigrants from other countries).
To examine the participants’ partisan attachment from the manipulated politician, this study employed a 2(self-affiliated same party x non-same party) x 2 (self-reported strong x non-strong party attachment) as basic factorial design. The stimuli were manipulated in the form of an online political advertising website in still state. Participants were told this is a campaign website for a Democratic (or Republican) nominee for the 2020 presidential election. In all four conditions, a fictitious candidate with a fake name was presented in the same format in all layouts of stimuli. As immigration is a controversial debate under Donald Trump administration (Pew, 2019), it is suitable to examine our hypothesis. To ensure the validity of manipulations and the questionnaire, subjects were asked to answer four manipulation questions correctly. After pretest and exposure to randomly assigned condition, participants were required to answer questions for research aims.
Analyses of covariances (ANCOVAs) were used in this study. Issue importance and issue urgency were also included when conducting path analysis. This study also set demographic variables as control variables to avoid interference on model testing. The result was predicted as exposure to opposing political attitude from the same party candidate, compared to exposure to opposing political attitude from the non-same party candidate, led to less political skepticism, more media credibility and less negative emotional arousal. The difference may be enhanced by stronger party attachment. Besides, issue importance and issue urgency evaluated by participants would be mediators.
Keywords: political disagreement, political party identity, party attachment, political campaign, political skepticism, media credibility, negative emotional arousal