Consensus is a Cue for Quality
survey experiment
perceived polarization
bipartisanship
Negative partisanship theories suggest that when parties in Congress frequently disagree on policy, the proposing party’s base will view out-party support as evidence of a compromise in values, while models of learning from biased information suggest that unanticipated out-party support conveys high policy quality. We test the predictions of the two models using experiments embedded in representative sample surveys and find support for consensus as a cue for quality.