Replication Data for: Voter Decison-Making with Polarized Choices

Nearly seventy years ago, members of the American Political Science Association's Committee on Political Parties argued that voters could exercise greater control over government if the two major political parties adopted clear and ideologically distinct policy platforms. Today, partisan polarization is a defining feature of American politics, while extreme parties have maintained support in Europe and elsewhere. This paper investigates voter decision-making with ideologically divergent electoral choices. In contrast to existing accounts, I argue that ideological conflict increases the role of motivated reasoning in political decision-making, and reduces citizens' responsiveness to candidates' ideological locations. Results from two observational studies and a survey experiment provide strong and consistent evidence in support of this account, and the findings are robust across a range of model specifications and characterizations of the key independent variables, assumptions about voter utility functions, and when accounting for alternative voter decision rules. These results have important implications for accountability and democratic decision-making in an age of partisan polarization.