Ambivalence, Political Engagement and Context
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.12063 |
| Date | 01 October 2014 |
| Published date | 01 October 2014 |
| Author | April A. Johnson |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Ambivalence, Political Engagement and Context
April A. Johnson
Stony Brook University
Scholars of American politics have generally found a negative relationship between ambivalence and political
engagement.This study explores such conclusions and argues that the effect of ambivalence on engagement varies
according to electoral context. Using a multi-level modeling strategy, I find that ambivalence has a significant overall
effect on political engagement for citizens in the United States but a lesser overall impact for citizens in Great Britain.
Yet by allowing the slope and the intercept of ambivalence to vary across parliamentary districts, I find that
ambivalence has asymmetrical effects on political engagement within Britain. I conclude by arguing that ambivalence
essentially operates in a differential manner across electoral contexts and provide preliminary evidence as to why
this is.
Keywords: ambivalence; participation; comparative
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign
them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea
(Antoine de Saint-Exupéry).
Engagement, interest and participation in politics are the lifeblood of a democratic
society. Representative democracies, however, are a two-way street. The institutional
context must provide as few barriers as possible to citizen involvement and citizens
themselves must strive to make their voices heard in government.This article focuses on the
latter. While American media coverage is filled with dramatic marches on Capitol Hill,
Occupy Wall Street protesters sleeping in Zuccotti Park and Congressmen yelling out of
turn during presidential speeches, we have reason to doubt that a large majority of the mass
public is so strongly divided or polarized. In 2000, 36 per cent of American National
Election Study (ANES) respondents held ambivalent (i.e. a mix of both positive and
negative) attitudes towards the Republican and Democratic Parties (Basinger and Lavine,
2005). More recently, Howard Lavine et al. (2012) show that approximately 40 per cent of
individuals in 2008 produced identity-conflicting evaluations of the two major political
parties, meaning that they displayed some degree of in-party negativity and/or out-party
positivity. Despite polarization angles which seem to dominate news stories, I conclude,
given these and other contemporary findings (Mulligan, 2011; Thornton, 2011), that
ambivalence is alive and well among the American electorate.
Although a significant amount of research has been devoted to ambivalence as it pertains
to American politics, ambivalence has not been well studied elsewhere.As a result, it is not
clear whether ambivalence operates in the same fashion across various contexts.If research-
ers are truly interested in understanding ambivalence as a predictor of political attitudes and
behavior, exploring how this construct varies by situation should provide researchers with
valuable insight.The theoretical assertion of this article is that contextual influences shape
the very meaning of ambivalence.As a result, I expect to find variation in the way in which
ambivalence impacts on political engagement. This type of comparative analysis of
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doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12063
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2014 VOL 62, 502–521
© 2013The Author.Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
ambivalence and political engagement, to the best of my knowledge,is absent in the extant
literature. As such, I consider the current study to be an exploratory analysis.The meth-
odology of this article is threefold. First, I investigate whether the overall effect of ambiva-
lence on political engagement varies by country. Second, I examine whether ambivalence
produces differential effects on political engagement across electoral districts. Lastly, I
explore contextual factors that might explain such variation.
Relevant Literature
Conceptualizing Ambivalence
As a psychological construct, ambivalence wears many masks.Individuals may hold ambiva-
lent attitudes towards their career choice, towards their favorite (but losing) sports team or
towards their decision to order a cheeseburger rather than a salad at dinner. While
ambivalence comes in all shapes and forms, the specific type of ambivalence that I focus on
here is partisan ambivalence, meaning those feelings which arise from one’s evaluation of
political stimuli. Partisan ambivalence has been conceptualized as an attitude that arises
when one holds a set of competing considerations (Lavine, 2001), when one experiences
internal conflict (Alvarez and Brehm, 2002) and when one experiences both positive and
negative reactions to a given political stimulus (Basinger and Lavine, 2005). In contrast to
partisan ambivalence, individuals who strongly favor one candidate or policy over another
and do not experience competing considerations or doubts are classified as univalent
partisans (Basinger and Lavine, 2005).
In explaining where ambivalence comes from,researchers have typically taken a cognitive
approach. John Zaller (1992) posited that most individuals hold both positive and negative
considerations about any given political stimulus in memory. His Receive-Accept-Sample
(RAS) model argued that when individuals respond to survey measures they simply sample
from the most salient (‘top of the head’) considerations and average across these to form an
overall opinion (Zaller, 1992). In the same vein, American politics scholars have typically
calculated partisan ambivalence by examining the number of likes and dislikes towards the
Republican and Democratic Parties (Lavine, 2001).Thus, partisan ambivalence has largely
been conceptualized as a function of one’s cognitive evaluations.
Other researchers, however, have questioned the validity of the cognitive approach.
According to Milton Lodge and Charles Taber’s (2005) theory of hot cognition, all
socio-political concepts contain an affective component.That is, at a very basal level we
should expect that the concepts of Bill Clinton, taxation,individualism and so forth should
be tagged with either positive or negative affect. Moreover, Taber and Lodge (2013)
conceptualize this affective component as primary to political evaluations, arguing that
one’s affective evaluation of a given political concept is activated automatically and without
conscious awareness.While there has been some research to date that examines affective,
rather than cognitive, ambivalence (Meffert et al., 2000; Steenbergen and Ellis, 2003), the
empirical task of differentiating between these two conceptualizations deserves to be
studied at greater length.
Drawing largely upon the literature from social and political psychology, Thomas
Rudolph and Elizabeth Popp (2007) hypothesize an information processing approach to
POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT AND CONTEXT 503
© 2013The Author.Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2014, 62(3)
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