Replication Data for: How National Cues Polarize Perceptions of Political Figures

A growing body of research documents the increased importance of national issues and politics for vote choice and election outcomes in subnational elections. The extant literature identifies two dimensions - informational and behavioral - along which politics can be more or less nationalized. This study advances our understanding of the nationalized political environment by directly examining the relationship between these two dimensions. We use an experimental approach to manipulate a legislator's campaign rhetoric to identify the relationship between a more or less nationalized information environment and public opinion. By manipulating a legislator's messaging, we are able to more directly compare the impact of local and national cues on citizens' assessments of legislators. We find that national messages lead people to view political figures as more ideologically extreme. We further find that opposing partisans consistently report more negative evaluations of politicians who use national rhetoric. Local rhetoric sometimes leads partisans to view a politician from the opposing party more favorably, but these effects are inconsistent. On the whole, our findings imply that there are electoral costs associated with the nationalization of campaign rhetoric.