Abstract
Partisan Anger and Partisan Dehumanization
Anger is a pervasive emotion in American politics. While much is known about its implications for political behavior, we know comparatively less about anger’s ability to shape extreme political attitudes. In this study, we examine how partisan-based anger leads to one such attitude: partisan-based dehumanization. Drawing on data from two national survey experiments, we find that the exogenous introduction of partisan-directed anger causes Americans to engage in partisan-based forms of dehumanization. We find that this relationship is robust to different estimation strategies and measures of dehumanization. We further examine whether anger’s ability to produce partisan dehumanization is dependent upon individuals’ level of trait-based dogmatism—that is, their tendency to have a closed and intolerant worldview. Our results indicate that anger’s effect on partisan dehumanization is not dependent on this psychological predisposition, suggesting that it is broadly able to shape Americans’ views of those whose political beliefs differ from their own.