by in-group partisan elites, but significantly less supportive of the same policy when it is endorsed by out-group partisan elites. On the other hand, partisan motivated reasoning disappeared when we either induced people to form an accurate opinion or when there was a cross-partisan bipartisan endorsement. Our results additionally provide suggestive evidence that partisan motivated reasoning works as a perceptual screen—i.e., people read and interpret the information in an effortful manner and do not simply follow the endorsement as a way to avoid thinking.
Where does this leave us when it comes to understanding partisanship and its effects on public opinion formation? The last 5–10 years has seen a renascence of work on partisan motivated reasoning. As mentioned, scholars have now moved beyond identifying its occurrence to isolating moderators including individual level factors such as sophistication and opinion strength, message repetition, information search, and partisan polarization. To this, we added what we consider to be two critical aspects of the reality of politics—the source of political information and the motivation underlying individuals’ opinion formation process. From here, we believe it is time scholars move beyond testing moderators and/or documenting the presence of partisan motivated reasoning and work towards a more complete theory of partisan motivated reasoning in political contexts. Indeed, as far as we know only Gerber et al. (2010) have definitively shown that partisanship causes certain behaviors. A fuller theory clearly will involve considering the relative impact of individual level variables (e.g., we did not find effects for sophistication), context, and source. We believe the motivation driving opinion formation clearly matters and this has been a topic lacking in study.
It may be that political scientists instead focusing on the content or basis of opinions (e.g., how much knowledge, ideological constraint), may be best off looking at motivation. For example, issue publics may be motivated on some issues
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and not others (e.g., Bolsen and Leeper n.d.). Another primary source of prompting accuracy motivation may be the social context (e.g., Sinclair 2012). Indeed, if one anticipates having to explain and justify oneself (akin to the manipulation we employed) in a social setting, it may generate an accuracy motivation. But this is where things can get complicated. If that social group is a mixed group, then it may be akin to our accuracy motivation that focused largely on generating a focus on substance. However, if that group is comprised of all in-party strong partisans, an accuracy motivation may lose out to a directional motivation (e.g., Druckman et al. 2013). The role of groups and their relationship to motivation in the opinion formation process seems like an area ripe for future work.16 More generally, unpacking motivation requires a mix of a consideration of material incentives (e.g., Prior and Lupia 2008; Bullock et al. 2013) in addition to social ones, as well as the potential for hybrid goals and alternative goals besides accuracy and directional.
Finally, there are several intriguing/vexing normative implications of partisan motivated reasoning. There is a lack of consensus among scholars as to what constitutes a normatively appealing opinion (see Druckman 2012). Our results will be troubling for people who worry that partisan motivated reasoning leads to lower quality opinions due to dogmatism and inflexibility (e.g., Lavine et al. 2012). However one could also make the case that relying on one’s partisanship (e.g., a partisan directional goal) in the face of limited policy information is ‘‘smarter’’ than trying to assess the policy’s content oneself (see Druckman et al. 2012 for further discussion). The bottom line is that our results only further highlight the lack of consensus on what a quality opinion is and the need for a much more detailed discussion and exchange on this topic between empirical and normative scholars— perhaps the focus should shift from considering the informational basis or ideological nature of opinions to the motivation underlying the opinion formation process, but this raises questions about unpacking the determinants of an accuracy motivation, as discussed above. The issue on which we focused—energy policy—deserves a final word. Energy policy, as mentioned, is a topic that has received scant attention among public opinion scholars. Given the future challenges of long-term sustainability, we see this issue area as one in need of much greater exploration as a topic itsel