Contains estimates of voter perceptions of candidate's ideology using C/CES data from 2009-2024.

We examine the role that local parties play in responding to and equipping local volunteers to work during campaign seasons. We use a field experiment during the 2020 U.S. general election to investigate whether local parties are more likely to respond to certain types of volunteers and to examine what factors are associated with local parties’ responsiveness. We find that both Democratic and Republican local parties in competitive counties are more likely to respond to volunteers. Moreover, we find that both parties are more likely to respond to white volunteers and Democratic parties are more likely to respond to women. These differential response rates may be contributing to the increased demographic sorting between the parties.

In this research note we document changes to rate of comments, shares, and reactions on local Republican Facebook pages. Near the end of 2018, local Republican parties started to see a much higher degree of interactions on their posts compared to Democratic parties. We show how this increase in engagement was unique to Facebook and happened across a range of over a thousand local parties. In addition, we use a changepoint model to identify when the change happened and find it lines up with reported information about the change in Facebook’s algorithm in 2018. We conclude that it seems possible that changes in how Facebook rated content led to a doubling of the total shares of Republican party posts compared to Democratic party posts in the first half of 2019 even though Democratic parties posted more often during this period. Regardless of Facebook’s motivations, their decision to change the algorithm might have given local Republican parties greater reach to connect with citizens and shape political realities for Americans. The fact that private companies can so easily control the political information flow for millions of Americans raises clear questions for the state of democracy.

Although research on the provision of ideologically slanted news has focused on consumers’ demands or news ownership’s profit margins and political agendas, little focus has been paid to those individuals who create the news content: the political journalists. We use a new measure of newspaper ideology derived from a large scale survey of journalists to estimate the ideology of almost 700 newsrooms, a substantial increase over previous efforts. By estimating newsroom ideology independent of content we show that newsroom ideology influences the responsiveness of newspapers to the demands of readers. We find that newsroom ideology has an effect on the ideological slant of news content even after controlling for consumer preferences. While consumer demand influences the ideological content of the news, the ideology of the newsroom that produces the news skews the responsiveness to the demands of readership and ultimately affects the production of ideological slant in the news.

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