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Partisans Without Constraint: Political Polarization and Trends in American Public Opinion
Abstract
Political polarization is commonly measured using the variation of responses on an individual issue in the population: more variation corresponds to more people on the extremes and fewer in the middle. By this measure, research has shown that - despite many commentators' concerns about increased polarization in recent decades - Americans' attitudes have become no more variable over the past two or three decades. What seems to have changed is the level of partisanship of the electorate. We define a new measure of political polarization as increased correlations in issue attitudes and we distinguish between issue partisanship - the correlation of issue attitudes with party ID and liberal-conservative ideology - and issue alignment - the correlation between pairs of issues. Using the National Election Studies, we find issue alignment to have increased within and between issue domains, but by only a small amount (approximately 2 percentage points in correlation per decade). Issue partisanship has increased more than twice as fast, thus suggesting that increased partisanship is not due to higher ideological coherence. Rather, it is parties that are more polarized and therefore better at sorting individuals along ideological lines; the change in people's attitudes corresponds more to a re-sorting of party labels among voters than to greater constraint on issue attitudes. We conclude suggesting that increased issue partisanship, in a context of persistently low issue constraint, might give greater voice to political extremists and single-issue advocates, and amplify dynamics of unequal representation.
... If a wedge is a cultural object that resonates with extant articulations of the partisan other, the audience for its mobilization will tend to be a partisan faction. In a societal context like the US, characterized by two highly sorted, highly affective partisan mega-identities (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008;DellaPosta 2020;DellaPosta et al. 2015;Iyengar et al. 2012;Finkel, et al. 2020), in which individuals increasingly select media sources that conform to their partisan identities (Berry and Sobieraj 2013;Bolin and Hamilton 2018;Wilson et al. 2020), the relative attention to topics across those sources can provide indirect insight into their partisan resonance. In lieu of public opinion data on the Delta Smelt, data from the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer (Stanford University Computer Graphics Laboratory 2022) provide a useful image of the national partisan resonance of the Delta Smelt, given that Fox News targets a strongly conservative audience, whereas MSNBC and CNN's audiences trend liberal (Greiko 2020). ...
... In other contexts, a wedge may be directly tied to a policy position. It may invest an already divisive issue with new partisan significance (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008), thereby strengthening its relationship to the partisan other. Alternatively, a wedge may imbue an issue that was not previously divisive with partisan significance, thereby extending the partisan other into new issue areas (DellaPosta 2020). ...
... Wedges may also help to explain the concrete dynamics of partisan sorting (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008;Hetherington 2009;Levendusky 2009). The strategic mobilization of wedges may contribute to the "broadening alignment across a wider range of issues than were previously aligned" (DellaPosta 2020, p. 514). ...
Drawing on a multi-method analysis of the controversy surrounding the Delta Smelt, an endangered fish emblematic of California’s so-called “water wars,” this article develops the concepts of division entrepreneurs as strategic actors who articulate partisan selves in relation to partisan others, and wedges as divisive cultural objects. Despite the appearance of a conflict about the distribution of water, the dynamics of the Delta Smelt controversy cannot be explained hydrologically. Instead, conservative division entrepreneurs opportunistically imbued the species with partisan significance, thus mobilizing it as a wedge. The Delta Smelt’s particular qualities, including its status as an uncharismatic microfauna, afforded divisive action. Forging new connections among literatures on the construction of social problems, political polarization, and pragmatist cultural sociology, this article proposes a framework for understanding how strategic actors use objects to shape political senses of “us” and “them.”
... The argument for ideological consistency representing polarization is that, ultimately, consistency represents the alignment of individuals into distinct groups that are stable across a range of ideas and topics, creating factions that are consistently opposed to each other across domains (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008;Lelkes 2016). Thus it is not the degree of distance between the groups necessarily, but the fact that the groups (and individuals within them) become fairly intractable, as the boundaries separating them may be near each other, but are clear, firm, and rigid, creating a polarized populace. ...
... Within this conceptualization there are somewhat mixed results, often depending on measurement or focus. There can be at least two examinations of consistency -the consistency of issue positions wherein the degree to which the more liberal or conservative position is taken across a range of issues is consistent is examined, or the degree to which ideology aligns with party identification, which has been labeled as sorting (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008;Lelkes 2016;Levendusky 2009). While the results regarding whether there is an increase in the first examination (issue position consistency) are mixed, or at least argued over (e.g. ...
Ideological and political polarization in the United States electorate is an often discussed and heavily debated topic, with considerable disagreement over questions regarding whether polarization in the electorate is actually occurring, the extent to which it is occurring, and polarization's nature and causes. Using ANES data from 2012, we examine how an individual perceives the ideologies of the two major political parties and the effects. We do this by focusing on a neglected consideration within the debates over polarization-that of dis-identification. Through the application of OLS models and conditional process analysis, we demonstrate that individuals in the electorate are driven to identify with a particular party based not so much on the perceived similarities with the party with which he or she identifies, but instead perceived differences they have with the "opposing" party. This perceived distance results in a stronger party affiliation to their own party, due greater perceived distance between individuals and those belonging to other parties or possessing opposing ideologies. This stands in contrast to the more conventional view that polarization is a product of heightened differences between individuals' own ideologies or the strength of their partisan loyalties. Instead, "polarization" is a product of viewing "the other side" as more extreme than they really are. Understanding our new conception of dis-identification can help resolve some of the differences that have emerged in debates over polarization. 3
... By many measures, the American political sphere has become increasingly polarized in recent decades 69,70 , especially among political elites 71,72 . While there is disagreement as to how much ordinary Americans have grown apart in their ideological and policy preferences 73,74 , there is little doubt that Republicans and Democrats have become increasingly antagonistic toward members of the other party 75,76 . The independent effects of growing interparty hostility are difficult to isolate; however, multiple indicators suggest that it has been increasing as American political discourse has become more divisive [e.g., 77 ] and Americans' faith in democratic institutions has declined [e.g., ref . ...
... While interparty hostility has been unequivocally on the rise, ordinary Americans have not exhibited an equally clear and systematic increase in ideological and policy polarization 73,79 . A common explanation for this phenomenon is partisan sorting: the increased alignment between voters' party affiliations and their ideological and policy preferences 74,100 . Even if Americans have, overall, not become more polarized in their opinions, proponents of this view contend that greater congruence between voters' ideology and partisanship likely increases their perceptions of a social boundary between these two political groups. ...
Dehumanization of others has been attributed to institutional processes that spread dehumanizing norms and narratives, as well as to individuals’ denial of mind to others. We propose that blatant dehumanization also arises when people actively contemplate others’ minds. We introduce the construct of imagined otherness—perceiving that a prototypical member of a social group construes an important facet of the social world in ways that diverge from the way most humans understand it—and argue that such attributions catalyze blatant dehumanization beyond the effects of general perceived difference and group identification. Measuring perceived schematic difference relative to the concept of America, we examine how this measure relates to the tendency of U.S. Republicans and Democrats to blatantly dehumanize members of the other political party. We report the results of two pre-registered studies—one correlational ( N = 771) and one experimental ( N = 398)—that together lend support for our theory. We discuss implications of these findings for research on social boundaries, political polarization, and the measurement of meaning.
... Many sociologists agree that social class is not only an economic category, it is also a cultural category (Ginwright 2002;Baldassarri and Gelman 2008). Social class speaks to occupational identities as well as the intellectual labor performed in occupations. ...
... African Americans are the most church going people in the United States, and the Black church serves as a powerful socializing agent and acts as an institutional foundation for Black group consciousness and collective action (Kidd et al. 2007). Although the Republican party has tried to exploit the socially conservative values of Black people to gain support for their party in the past, conservativism translates into socially progressive values in the Black community (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008). ...
... Partisan sorting refers to a process where ideological and partisan identities are brought into agreement. Like-minded citizens are clustered into parties, and within these groups, there can be further issue alignment along multiple divisive issues within the population subgroups (Baldassarri & Gelman, 2008). ...
... Empirically, we begin by presenting the mean values by election year to detect possible trends in terms of whether the Finnish population has ideologically moved in a certain direction over time. For each survey, we also include a crude measure of political polarisation, the standard deviation, which increases in size if groups of people gravitate towards opposing poles (Baldassarri & Gelman, 2008). Table 8.1 shows that in terms of the classic left-right dimension the electorate (including non-voters) has not moved steadily in a certain direction, nor has there been any major polarisation judging from the standard deviations which have not increased in size. ...
... Issue alignment is essential for the emergence of political polarization, since, without it, the formation of two consistently opposed political blocks would be impossible. Consequently, it has been argued that issue alignment should in fact be part of the definition of polarization, although there are many competing approaches regarding how to integrate different issue dimensions into a single polarization metric (Bauer 2019;Baldassarri & Gelman 2008). In Section 4, we describe our own approach to this problem. ...
... Like us, he doubts that issue alignment is the product of logically consistent ideologies, and argues for the role of passion in the emergence of a single ideological spectrum. This conjecture fits well with the long-standing observation that political elites and activists, who can be assumed to be more passionate about politics, exhibit higher levels of issue alignment than the general populace (Converse 1964;Poole 2005;Baldassarri & Gelman 2008). More recent research has uncovered connections between issue alignment and increasing anger towards out-partisans (Webster & Abramowitz 2017). ...
... For at least the past three decades, scholars have observed, defined (1), measured (2), and modeled social polarization, its drivers, its effects (3; 4), and its trends around the world (5; 6; 7; 8). 1 Increasing polarization tendencies have been documented for the short run (9; 10) and predicted in long run (11) unless some event or intervention changes its course. 2 The problems generated by severe societal polarization are felt in many places and in many ways-and in particular in diminished ability to solve serious societal problems demanding consensus. ...
... Most proposals are decided on party line, meaning that they pass by the slimmest of majorities, at 1 or two vote differences. As a result, some senators and representatives acquire more power than warranted by 1 The references included here are illustrative of the numerous articles addressing the increasing polarization around the world. 2 For example, after long months of a deep split in the Israeli polity, accompanied by numerous weekly demonstrations, the sudden violent events of October 2023 played the role of a focusing event: differences were mostly set aside, and the entire society concentrated on mutual help and a unified response. ...
This article belongs in the emerging area of research seeking ways to depolarize societies in the short run (around events such elections) as well as in a sustainable fashion. We approach the depolarization process with a model of three homophilic groups (US Democrats, Republicans and Independents interacting in the context of upcoming federal elections). We expand a previous polarization model, which assumed that each individual interacts with all other individuals in its group with mean-field interactions. We add a depolarization field which is analogous to the Blume-Capel model’s crystal field. There are currently numerous depolarization efforts around the world, some of which act in ways similar to this depolarization field. We find that for low values of the depolarization field, the system continues to be polarized. When the depolarization field is increased, the polarization decreases.
... Each individual in group i (i = 1, 2, 3) has a stance compatible with the group's attitude S i regarding a specific issue under debate-economics, social issues, defense, etc.-or (here) a package of such issues (in the [1] and [6] sense). The individual stances have values between -1 and +1, where -1 corresponds to the democrats/progressive/left position (i = 1), while +1 corresponds to the republicans/conservative/right position (i = 2). ...
... The individual stances have values between -1 and +1, where -1 corresponds to the democrats/progressive/left position (i = 1), while +1 corresponds to the republicans/conservative/right position (i = 2). Individuals thus align with the group whose average stance is compatible and closest to their own [1]. ...
In this paper, using Monte Carlo simulations we show that the Blume-Capel model gives rise to the social depolarization. This model borrowed from statistical physics uses the continuous Ising spin varying from-1 to 1 passing by zero to express the political stance of an individual going from ultra-left (-1) to ultra-right (+1). The particularity of the Blume-Capel model is the existence of a D-term which favors the state of spin zero which is a neutral stance. We consider the political system of the USA where voters affiliate with two political groups: Democrats or Republicans, or are independent. Each group is composed of a large number of interacting members of the same stance. We represent the general political ambiance (or degree of social turmoil) with a temperature T similar to thermal agitation in statistical physics. When three groups interact with each other, their stances can get closer or further from each other, depending on the nature of their inter-group interactions. We study the dynamics of such variations as functions of the value of the D-term of each group. We show that the polarization decreases with incresasing D. We outline the important role of T in these dynamics. These MC results are in excellent agreement with the mean-field treatment of the same model.
... For at least the past three decades, scholars have observed, defined (1), measured (2), and modeled social polarization, its drivers, its effects (3; 4), and its trends around the world (5; 6; 7; 8). 1 Increasing polarization tendencies have been documented for the short run (9; 10) and predicted in long run (11) unless some event or intervention changes its course. 2 The problems generated by severe societal polarization are felt in many places and in many ways-and in particular in diminished ability to solve serious societal problems demanding consensus. ...
... Most proposals are decided on party line, meaning that they pass by the slimmest of majorities, at 1 or two vote differences. As a result, some senators and representatives acquire more power than warranted by 1 The references included here are illustrative of the numerous articles addressing the increasing polarization around the world. 2 For example, after long months of a deep split in the Israeli polity, accompanied by numerous weekly demonstrations, the sudden violent events of October 2023 played the role of a focusing event: differences were mostly set aside, and the entire society concentrated on mutual help and a unified response. ...
This article belongs in the emerging area of research seeking ways to depolarize societies in the short run (around events such elections) as well as in a sustainable fashion. We approach the depolarization process with a model of three homophilic groups (US Democrats, Republicans and Independents interacting in the context of upcoming federal elections). We expand a previous polarization model, which assumed that each individual interacts with all other individuals in its group with mean-field interactions. We add a depolarization field which is analogous to the Blume-Capel model’s crystal field. There are currently numerous depolarization efforts around the world, some of which act in ways similar to this depolarization field. We find that for low values of the depolarization field, the system continues to be polarized. When the depolarization field increases, the polarization decreases.
... The idea is that the relation between affective polarization and political identity is confounded by political beliefs. The reason that political party supporters dislike each other more now than in the past is that the political beliefs of parties in polarized contexts are more strongly sorted (e.g., Republicans and Democrats; Baldassarri & Gelman, 2008;Dias & Lelkes, 2021). Political sorting means it is clearer to the public what attitudes parties disagree on, and it is the disagreement on political beliefs that drives affective polarization. ...
... Different belief system structures exist. A tightly structured belief system is constrained and consistent ideologically (Baldassarri & Gelman, 2008;Converse, 2006), so attitudes are strongly related. Strongly left-wing and right-wing belief systems (e.g., Democrats and Republicans; Baldassarri & Goldberg, 2014) have the same ideological logic and tight structure despite having different beliefs. ...
We investigate the extent that political identity, political belief content (i.e., attitude stances), and political belief system structure (i.e., relations among attitudes) differences are associated with affective polarization (i.e., viewing ingroup partisans positively and outgroup partisans negatively) in two multinational, cross-sectional studies (Study 1 N = 4,152, Study 2 N = 29,994). First, we found a large, positive association between political identity and group liking-participants liked their ingroup substantially more than their outgroup. Second, political belief system content and structure had opposite associations with group liking: Sharing similar belief system content with an outgroup was associated with more outgroup liking, but similarity with the ingroup was associated with less ingroup liking. The opposite pattern was found for political belief system structure. Thus, affective polarization was greatest when belief system content similarity was low and structure similarity was high.
... While earlier studies typically focused on a single topic [14,15], researchers recently have proposed novel modeling frameworks to address the case of multi-dimensional opinions [16][17][18], where opinions can vary across different topics. Notably, when multiple topics are considered, correlations between opinions may arise [19][20][21][22]. For instance, racism and the stereotype of blacks as violent individuals may be related to gun ownership and opposition to gun control policies in US whites [23]. ...
... One could argue that the validity of the perturbation theory is contingent to the assumption of a local order parameter, Eq. (19), being close to zero in the vicinity of the polarized state. The vanishing of the local order parameter can only be achieved when it is computed over a sufficiently large number of nearest neighbors. ...
The process of opinion depolarization is assumed to be mediated through social networks, where interacting individuals reciprocally exert social influence leading to a consensus. While network topology plays a decisive role in many networked dynamical processes, its effect on depolarization dynamics remains unclear. Here, we show that, in a recently proposed opinion depolarization model, the threshold of the transition from correlated and polarized opinions to consensus can vanish on heterogeneous social networks. Our theoretical findings are validated by running numerical simulations on both synthetic and real social networks, confirming that a polarized yet heterogeneously connected population can reach a consensus even in the presence of weak social influence.
... A tail of agents with small or large attitudes remains. The joint near-normal distribution of final attitudes matches distributions of opinions observed in real life (Baldassarri and Gelman, 2008;Geiger, 2014;Hohmann et al., 2023). To investigate the impact of changing distributions of self-reliance, we consider normally distributed self-reliance (γ) instead of a uniform distribution. ...
Opinion formation within society follows complex dynamics. Towards its understanding, axiomatic theory can complement data analysis. To this end, we propose an axiomatic model of opinion formation that aims to capture the interaction of individual conviction with social influence in a minimalist fashion. Despite only representing that (1) agents have an initial conviction with respect to a topic and are (2) influenced by their neighbours, the model shows the emergence of opinion clusters from an initially unstructured state. Here, we show that increasing individual self-reliance makes agents more likely to align their socially influenced opinion with their inner conviction which concomitantly leads to increased polarisation. The opinion drift observed with increasing self-reliance may be a plausible analogue of polarisation trends in the real-world. Modelling the basic traits of striving for individual versus group identity, we find a trade-off between individual fulfilment and societal cohesion. This finding from fundamental assumptions can serve as a building block to explain opinion polarisation.
... Elite polarization refers to ideological and/or affective polarization between the leaderships of the major parties or political movements vying for state power (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008). Polarization may sometimes be an intentional strategy employed by political leaders to demarcate rival political camps, discredit their opponents, and mobilize supporters (Penfold and Corrales 2007). ...
Mounting evidence suggests that Latin American democracies are characterized by politics and societies becoming more divisive, confrontational, and polarized. This process, which we define here as the “new polarization” in Latin America, seems to weaken the ability of democratic institutions to manage and resolve social and political conflicts. Although recent scholarship suggests that polarization is integral to contemporary patterns of democratic “backsliding” seen in much of the world, this new polarization in the region has not yet received systematic scholarly attention. Aiming to address this gap in the literature, the different contributions in this special issue revise the conceptualization, measurement, and theory of a multidimensional phenomenon such as polarization, including both its ideological and affective dimensions, as well as perspectives at the elite and mass levels of analysis. Findings shed light on the phenomenon of polarization as both a dependent and an independent variable, contributing to comparative literature on polarization and its relationship to democratic governance.
... At the individual level, negative political affect may undermine personal interactions in the family, the workplace, or in social interactions such as dating [29][30][31]. In fact, scholars and commentators often worry about and analyze polarization because it has consequences for personal relationships that might eventually harm social cohesion more generally [14,[32][33][34][35]). Dislike of out-groups-whether defined in terms of politics, religion, region, ethnicity, or language-can damage social interactions, both by dissuading people from entering into meaningful interactions and by decreasing the quality of the interactions they do pursue. ...
Affective polarization measures account for partisans’ feelings towards their own party versus its opponent(s), but not for how likely partisans are to encounter co-partisans versus out-partisans. However, the intensity of out-party dislike and the probability with which this comes into play both determine the social impact of cross-party hostility. We develop an affective fractionalization measure that accounts for both factors, and apply it to longitudinal survey data from 20 Western publics. From this perspective, countries with fewer dominant parties may be more harmonious because partisans have lower probabilities of interacting with political opponents. At the party level, partisans of smaller, more radical parties are particularly troubled because they strongly dislike out-partisans and have few co-partisans. Affective fractionalization has increased in most Western publics over time, primarily because of growing party-system fragmentation.
... The most commonly analyzed survey measures of the culture wars assess the extent of polarization in issue positions and ideological and partisan identification (see, e.g., Abramowitz & Saunders, 2008;Fiorina et al., 2006Fiorina et al., , 2008Layman, 1999;Baldassarri & Gelman, 2008;Hetherington et al., 2016;Hill & Tausanovitch, 2018;Jessee, 2016;Levendusky & Malhotra, 2016;Van Boven et al., 2012). Less commonly analyzed survey measures of the culture wars assess the extent of polarization in affect, intensity of belief, or affinity or dislike for various societal groups (see, e.g., Iyengar & Westwood, 2015;Mackie, 1986;Mason, 2016;Westfall et al., 2015). ...
We provide the first account of the culture wars in the political psychology and public opinion literature based on a theory of culture. Using innovative measures of grid‐group cultural theory (CT), we identify the cultures associated with ideological and partisan identifications in annual U.S. national surveys from 2011 to 2022, a unique data set of 24,870 respondents. As hypothesized, we find that the culture wars occur not just between ideologues and partisans but among them as they draw support from distinct, relatively stable yet shifting cultural coalitions. Egalitarian and, less often, fatalistic liberals and Democrats battle against individualistic and, less often, hierarchical, conservatives and Republicans. As hypothesized, fatalists are the least reliable coalition partners, and, as expected, they gravitate Republican and conservative in 2017, after Trump's election. However, fatalists who are strong partisan identifiers never defect. Moreover, our hypothesis that fatalist attraction to Trump would drive defections in their political identification is largely invalidated. Instead, fatalists mostly flee Trump in our aggregate analysis as well as in subanalyses of strong and weak ideological and partisan identifiers. In 2016 and 2018–2022, it appears that independent fatalists cause fatalists to gravitate liberal and Democrat. Unexpectedly, hierarchists also go liberal and Democrat in 2022, in apparent reaction to Trump's multifront attacks on the 2020 election that he lost. We identify the basis for cultural coalitions that can end particular culture wars, including the most significant one now occurring between egalitarians and individualists, and conclude with suggestions for further research.
... One helpful construct for understanding this cognitive and collective process is ideology. As a system of interconnected beliefs, ideology is invoked to explain the role of political partisanship and the causes of political polarization (Baldassarri and Gelman, 2008). However, how to analyze ideology as a correlation structure on beliefs is a methodological challenge yet unresolved (Kalmoe, 2020). ...
Political opposition to fiscal climate policy, such as a carbon tax, typically appeals to fiscal conservative ideology. Here, we ask to what extent public opposition to the carbon tax in Canada is, in fact, ideological in origin. As an object of study, ideology is a latent belief structure over a set of issue topics—and in particular their relationships—as revealed through stated opinions. Ideology is thus amenable to a generative modeling approach within the text-as-data paradigm. We use the Structural Topic Model, which generates word content from a set of latent topics and mixture weights placed on them. We fit the model to open-ended survey responses of Canadians elaborating on their support of or opposition to a carbon tax, then use it to infer the set of mixture weights used by each response. We demonstrate this set, moreso than the observed word use, serves efficient discrimination of opposition from support, with near-perfect accuracy on held-out data. We then operationalize ideology as the empirical distribution of inferred topic mixture weights. We propose and use an evaluation of ideology-driven beliefs based on four statistics of this distribution capturing the specificity, variability, expressivity, and alignment of the underlying ideology. We find that the ideology behind responses from respondents who opposed the carbon tax is more specific and aligned, much less expressive, and of similar variability as compared with those who support the tax. We discuss the implications of our results for climate policy and of broad application of our approach in social science.
... The main focus of our study, however, is how polarization ties into these individual religio-political positions and public support for gender equality. Polarization is a multidimensional phenomenon, spanning elite and public polarization (Abramowitz, 2010;Bermeo, 2003;Druckman et al., 2013) as well as issue (Baldassarri & Gelman, 2008), affective (Abramowitz, 2010), and attitudinal polarization (Downey & Huffman, 2001). This study focuses on a major fault line in Muslimmajority countries (Dennison & Draege, 2021;Wegner & Cavatorta, 2019): polarization between conservative-Islamist sentiments and progressive-secularist sentiments in the shadow of anti-Western imaginaries. ...
This study focuses on links between religion, political polarization, and support for gender equality, empirically studying Turkey, Indonesia, Tunisia, and Malaysia. These four Muslim-majority electoral democracies include different degrees of polarization between secularists and Islamists, whereby Islamists vilify secularists' supposed Western ideals as gender equality. We explore whether regional polarization between Islamist and secularist sentiments impacts common peoples' gender equality attitudes and the link between their religious and political positions and their gender equality support. Applying multilevel analyses to World Values Survey data, we find that the more strongly and politically religious and more right-wing people tend to support gender equality less, while regional polarization does not significantly affect gender equality in general. However, polarization does fuel support for women's political leadership (not educational and economic equality) among men, which might echo the strategical deployment of female candidates in polarized regions. Clearly, gender equality's dimensions have their own dynamics.
... In other words, common sense appears to be correlated with an ability to empathize with others and to reflect on one's own instinctive reactions, but not with any identifiable demographic group. Although at first surprising, the lack of sensitivity of common sense to demographics is consistent with findings from research on partisan differences in political opinions in US [20,21], personality traits across countries [22] and gender-based differences in ability [23], all of which find that intuitively salient sub-populations tend to differ from each other less than their members anticipate. So far we have defined and measured common sense at the individual level; i.e. of individual claims and people. ...
The notion of common sense is invoked so frequently in contexts as diverse as everyday conversation, political debates, and evaluations of artificial intelligence that its meaning might be surmised to be unproblematic. Surprisingly, however, neither the intrinsic properties of common sense knowledge (what makes a claim commonsensical) nor the degree to which it is shared by people (its “commonness”) have been characterized empirically. In this paper, we introduce an analytical framework for quantifying both these elements of common sense. First, we define the commonsensicality of individual claims and people in terms of the latter’s propensity to agree on the former and their awareness of one another’s agreement. Second, we formalize the commonness of common sense as a clique detection problem on a bipartite belief graph of people and claims, defining pq common sense as the fraction q of claims shared by a fraction p of people. Evaluating our framework on a dataset of 2 , 046 raters evaluating 4 , 407 diverse claims, we find that commonsensicality aligns most closely with plainly worded, fact-like statements about everyday physical reality. Psychometric attributes such as social perceptiveness influence individual common sense, but surprisingly demographic factors such as age or gender do not. Finally, we find that collective common sense is rare: At most, a small fraction p of people agree on more than a small fraction q of claims. Together, these results undercut universalistic beliefs about common sense and raise questions about its variability that are relevant both to human and artificial intelligence.
... Over recent decades, the ideologies and policy positions of the Democratic and Republican Party in the United States have increasingly diverged. At the elite level, party differences are likely greater now than at any other time in the last fifty years 12,13 . Further, there is growing evidence of increased political polarisation amongst the American public 14,15 . ...
Since the early 1990s, increasing political polarisation is among the greatest determinants of individual-level environmental and climate change attitudes in the United States. But several patterns remain unclear: are historical patterns of polarisation largely symmetrical (equal) or is rather asymmetrical (where one set of partisans shifts more than others)? How have polarisation patterns have changed over time? How generalizable are polarization patterns across different environmental and climate change attitudes? We harmonised four unique sets of historical, pooled cross-sectional survey data from the past 50 years to investigate shifts across seven distinct measures of citizen environmental and climate change attitudes. We find that contemporary attitudes are polarised symmetrically, with Democrats (higher) and Republicans (lower) attitudes are equidistant from the median. But the historical trends in polarisation differ by attitudes and beliefs. In particular, we find evidence of two distinct historical patterns of asymmetric polarisation within environmental and climate change attitudes: first, with Republicans becoming less pro-environmental, beginning in the early 1990s, and second, a more recent greening of Democratic environmental attitudes since the mid-2010s. Notably, recent increases in pro-environmental attitudes within Democrats is a potentially optimistic finding, providing opportunities towards overcoming decades-long inertia in climate action. These findings provide a foundation for further research avenues into the factors shaping increased pro-environmental attitudes within Democrats.
... We call these clusters ideologies in the sense that they are indicative of issue alignment as one of the main phenomena associated with polarization (Jost et al. 2022). This alignment is also reflective of ideology in the sense that individuals might be constrained to adopt preferences on certain issues by virtue of preferences that they have already adopted on others (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008). The five ideological clusters are: (1) a dominant ideology comprising party, candidate, and other stances correlated with δ 1 , (2) an ideology separating people defining themselves using the words "local" and "global", (3) an ideology separating people that use inclusive pronouns, define themselves as using the word "international", or having positive mentions of sciences in opposition to people criticizing experts and inclusive pronouns, (4) an ideology separating those defining themselves using the words "welfare" and "libertarian", and (5) an ideology separating those with positive and negative mentions of issues relating to sexual diversity and feminism, and the use of the word "communism". ...
A growing number of social media studies in the U.S. rely on the characterization of the opinion of individual users, for example, as Democrat- or Republican-leaning, or in continuous scales ranging from most liberal to most conservative. Recent works have shown, however, that additional opinion dimensions, for instance measuring attitudes towards elites, institutions, or cultural change, are also relevant for understanding socio-informational phenomena on social platforms and in politics in general. The study of social networks in high-dimensional opinion spaces remains challenging in the US, both because of the relative dominance of a principal liberal-conservative dimension in observed phenomena, and because two-party political systems structure both the preferences of users and the tools to measure them. This article leverages graph embedding in multi-dimensional latent opinion spaces and text analysis to propose a method to identify additional opinion dimensions linked to cultural, policy, social, and ideological groups and preferences. Using Twitter social graph data we infer the political stance of nearly 2 million users connected to the political debate in the U.S. for several issue dimensions of public debate. We show that it is possible to identify several new dimensions structuring social graphs, non-aligned with the classic liberal-conservative dimension. We also show how the social graph is polarized to different degrees along these newfound dimensions, leveraging multi-modality measures in opinion space. These results shed a new light on ideal point estimation methods gaining attention in social media studies, showing that they cannot always assume to capture liberal-conservative divides in single-dimensional models.
... Fourth, it is possible the extreme attitude holders identify and follow their chosen political parties more strongly than moderates 27 . This in turn may mean that extreme attitude holders would toe the party line even when their chosen political party changes directions or makes compromises as a way of expanding its electoral reach. ...
People with extreme political attitudes are often assumed to be more resistant to change than moderates. If this assumption is true, extreme attitudes would ossify and continuously aggravate intergroup conflict and polarization. To test this assumption of stubborn extremists, we use large-scale panel surveys of attitudes towards policy issues and general ideologies across up to 13 years (combined N = 16,238). By tracking the same people across multi-year periods, we are able to ascertain whether extreme attitude holders exhibit less change in policy attitudes than moderates. The results revealed that extreme attitude holders are more likely to change their attitudes than moderates across various policy issues and general ideologies, and tend to directionally moderate over time. A final experiment finds that lay people incorrectly believe that extreme attitudes holders are more resistant to change, contrary to the results found here. We discuss the implications of this finding for understanding the evolution of extreme attitude holders, the misperception of ideological and policy differences, and the role of inaccurate out-group perceptions in shaping polarization and intergroup conflict.
... To do so will require a substantial research program, and goes well beyond the scope of this paper. Yet at the present time a burgeoning academic research agenda is already at work to investigate the relative contribution of such varied factors as economic inequality, party polarization, and rising security concerns upon the extent and breadth of public support for liberal democratic governance (Uslaner, 2016;Han and Chang, 2016;Baldassarri and Gelman, 2008;Merolla and Zechmeister, 2009). ...
Until recently, many political scientists had believed that the stability of democracy is assured once certain threshold conditions – prosperity, democratic legitimacy, the development of a robust civil society – were attained. Democracy would then be consolidated, and remain stable. In this article we show that levels of support for
democratic governance are not stable over time, even among high-income democracies, and have declined in recent years. In contrast to theories of democratic consolidation, we suggest that just as democracy can come to be “the only game in town” through processes of democratic deepening and the broad-based acceptance of democratic institutions, so too a process of democratic deconsolidation can take place as citizens sour on democratic institutions, become more open to authoritarian alternatives, and vote for anti-system parties. Public opinion measures of democratic deconsolidation are strongly associated
with subsequent declines in the actual extent of democratic governance and predict not only recent democratic backsliding in transitional democracies, such as Venezuela or Russia, but also anticipated the downgrades in Freedom House scores occurring across a range of western democracies since 2016.
... Specifically, while it may be true that a less misinformed society is less divided, and while information provision may help reduce polarization, this is often not what occurs. Therefore, our work contributes to at least two strands of literature: First, it adds to the large literature in economics (Campante and Hojman, 2013;Grechyna, 2016;Canen et al., 2020;Levy, 2021;Boxell et al.;Azzimonti and Fernandes, 2023), political science (Fiorina and Abrams 2008;Abramowitz, 2010;Prior, 2013;Lelkes et al, 2017;Iyengar et al. 2019;Peterson and Iyengar, 2021), psychology (e.g., Baron and Jost, 2019;Moore-Berg et al. 2020;Van Baar, and FeldmanHall 2022;Jost et al., 2022) and sociology (DiMaggio et al., 1996;Baldassarri, D., & Gelman, 2008;Vann, 2021;Perry, 2022) on the determinants of polarization, and on tools to combat divisiveness. Second, we provide a novel lens (that of polarization) from which to consider the growing literature on misperceptions and preferences. ...
Voters hold widespread misperceptions about society, which have been documented in numerous studies. Likewise, voters demonstrate increasing political polarization over policy preferences. Against this backdrop, it is intuitively appealing to think that information provision can help correct misperceptions and create common ground by enhancing the political conversation and bridging political divisiveness. We show, using a general population survey in the United States, that beliefs in the power of information to reduce polarization are indeed widespread. Additionally, we review the extensive literature on misperceptions. To investigate the empirical relationships between misperceptions, information, and political polarization, we exploit the fact that many studies investigate heterogeneities in misperceptions and/or in the reaction to information treatments. Our review shows that existing misperceptions often, but not always, appear to be associated with an increased sense of divisiveness in society; however, information provision is more likely to increase polarization than decrease it. The reason is that different societal groups exhibit differing reactions to truthful and accurate information, in ways that often strengthens, rather than mitigates, existing preference schisms. Thus, the intuitively appealing suggestion that information provision can serve as a powerful tool to reduce polarization is often proven false.
... Binary oppositions, or polarisation, refers to the divergence of political attitudes into two ideological extremes (DiMaggio, Evans and Bryson, 1996;Baldassarri and Gelman, 2008). In binary politics, 'third' alternatives are less accommodated. ...
... However, higher volatility also means more divergence and splits in opinions and thoughts. This is regarded as a phenomenon of "opinion radicalization" (Baldassarri & Gelman, 2008), in which divergence and frequent changes in directions of opinions and sentiments reflect a lack of common ground, thus making it difficult to come to a legitimate conclusion (Evans, 2003;Shapiro & Bloch-Elkon, 2006). In recent years, divergence in public opinions appears to have been aggravated by the widespread usage of social media platforms, which gives rise to an immediate and disintermediated production and consumption of information or misinformation contents (Bessi et al., 2016). ...
... Within this context, it is of high interest the concept of opinion polarization [1], the intrinsic property of a topic to reach a state where the opinions about it are equally distributed in opposing positions. In particular, the study of political polarization has been the focus of research for plenty of decades [2][3][4][5][6] and in the debate on whether polarization levels have been increasing or not, scientific literature suggests that they do [7][8][9][10]. On many occasions any issue (sometimes even trivial ones) triggers a polarized response and the opinion splits equally into two opposing factions. ...
... Investigating the patterns of attitude positions, issue alignment, and group homogeneity jointly, and providing a solid characterization of attitude polarization, requires a novel framework that exploits the multidimensional nature of attitudes and overcomes the limitations of previous approaches that have strongly focused on attitude means. 40 The Attitudinal Space Framework Natural scientists have developed multidimensional trait-based frameworks to better describe the functional diversity and structure of ecological communities. [41][42][43] In functional ecology, the functional diversity and structure of an ecological community are evaluated through the measurement of functional traits. ...
Attitude polarization describes an increasing attitude difference between groups and is increasingly recognized as a multidimensional phenomenon. However, a unified framework to study polarization across multiple dimensions is lacking. We introduce the attitudinal space framework (ASF) to fully quantify attitudinal diversity. We highlight two key measures—attitudinal extremization and attitudinal dispersion—to quantify across- and within-group attitudinal patterns. First, we show that affective polarization in the US electorate is weaker than previously thought based on mean differences alone: in both Democrat and Republican partisans, attitudinal dispersion increased between 1988 and 2008. Second, we examined attitudes toward wolves in Germany. Despite attitude differences between regions with and without wolves, we did not find differences in attitudinal extremization or dispersion, suggesting only weak attitude polarization. These results illustrate how the ASF is applicable to a wide range of social systems and offers an important avenue to understanding societal transformations.
... We are assuming there is a global clustering to which users are aligned. This is not too far-fetched given the fact that there tends to exist issue alignment in society [55][1] and we control for different numbers of clusters. However, it is true that for time scales as large as the DerStandard dataset, we could be missing relevant changes in the global structure, especially considering COVID-19 times. ...
Online polarization research currently focuses on studying single-issue opinion distributions or computing distance metrics of interaction network structures. Limited data availability often restricts studies to positive interaction data, which can misrepresent the reality of a discussion. We introduce a novel framework that aims at combining these three aspects, content and interactions, as well as their nature (positive or negative), while challenging the prevailing notion of polarization as an umbrella term for all forms of online conflict or opposing opinions. In our approach, built on the concepts of cleavage structures and structural balance of signed social networks, we factorize polarization into two distinct metrics: Antagonism and Alignment. Antagonism quantifies hostility in online discussions, based on the reactions of users to content. Alignment uses signed structural information encoded in long-term user-user relations on the platform to describe how well user interactions fit the global and/or traditional sides of discussion. We can analyse the change of these metrics through time, localizing both relevant trends but also sudden changes that can be mapped to specific contexts or events. We apply our methods to two distinct platforms: Birdwatch, a US crowd-based fact-checking extension of Twitter, and DerStandard, an Austrian online newspaper with discussion forums. In these two use cases, we find that our framework is capable of describing the global status of the groups of users (identification of cleavages) while also providing relevant findings on specific issues or in specific time frames. Furthermore, we show that our four metrics describe distinct phenomena, emphasizing their independent consideration for unpacking polarization complexities.
... Second, cMCA can be applied to substantive topics. Recently, scholars of political polarization found that American voters' extremely ideological disagreement (i.e., ideological polarization), which usually aligns with partisan lines [56,57], has formed solid in-group/out-group identities and further reinforced their emotional cleavage (i.e., affective polarization) [58][59][60]. However, for instance, given that the alignment between salient issue disagreement and partisan lines among British voters is not as clear as among American voters, a derived "issue cleavage" from cMCA, which could cause social distance among citizens and further create group/faction affiliation [61], can be a good source of studying affective polarization as well, in addition to party ID. ...
Scaling methods have long been utilized to simplify and cluster high-dimensional data. However, the general latent spaces across all predefined groups derived from these methods sometimes do not fall into researchers' interest regarding specific patterns within groups. To tackle this issue, we adopt an emerging analysis approach called contrastive learning. We contribute to this growing field by extending its ideas to multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) in order to enable an analysis of data often encountered by social scientists-containing binary, ordinal, and nominal variables. We demonstrate the utility of contrastive MCA (cMCA) by analyzing two different surveys of voters in the U.S. and U.K. Our results suggest that, first, cMCA can identify substantively important dimensions and divisions among subgroups that are overlooked by traditional methods; second, for other cases, cMCA can derive latent traits that emphasize subgroups seen moderately in those derived by traditional methods.
Past research observing differences in environmental attitudes across racial and ethnic groups often mischaracterized those differences as deficits, casting environmental concern as a predominately White issue. Our study contributes to current work correcting this account by mapping substantive differences in the structure of climate attitudes across racial and ethnic groups. We use belief network analysis on 14 years of survey data from the Climate Change in the American Mind (CCAM) survey ( n = 20,396), and we find substantive differences in the climate belief networks of White, Black, and Hispanic survey respondents. These differences are not primarily about the strength or weakness of associations between attitudes, as theorized by deficit accounts. Instead, we find different attitudes are most central to these respective belief networks. We argue research on the social construction of race and ethnicity can better measure substantive variation in climate attitudes among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) respondents by attending to how racialized experiences with climate change may produce aggregated belief networks with different profiles of salient issues and different interpretive frameworks.
La polarización afectiva en España parece estar estabilizándose entre sus ciudadanos, incluso a lo largo de 2023 y durante las elecciones de julio de ese año. Esto sugiere que su influencia en el ámbito electoral ha sido completamente asimilada, reduciendo significativamente su impacto en los resultados electorales. En este contexto, fueron los votantes del espectro progresista, particularmente aquellos preocupados por cuestiones clave de la agenda social y cultural, quienes inclinaron la balanza en el último giro electoral, un fenómeno que las encuestas no lograron prever. Por ello mismo, es importante diferenciar entre generar tensión y división mediante la discusión de temas relevantes y el posicionamiento de cada partido sobre estos, y adoptar un enfoque que directamente cuestiona la legitimidad del oponente político, “los otros”, para gobernar y aplicar ciertas políticas. La dinámica electoral que se ve influenciada por cómo se construye y percibe la legitimidad dentro del espectro político tiene un alcance limitado llegados a unos niveles altos de polarización.
Perkembangan teknologi informasi dan komunikasi telah membawa banyak perubahan signifikan pada dunia perpolitikan, dengan membawa isu perpecahan politik yang sudah ada sejak Pemilu 2014 hingga menjelang Pemilu 2024. Kedua kubu polarisasi yang dulu eksis antara “Cebong” versus “Kampret” kini berubah nama menjadi kubu “BuzzeRp” versus “Kadrun”. Kubu BuzzeRp merupakan kelompok yang disebut sebagai Cebong, yang pada awalnya mendukung Jokowi sebagai presiden, lalu beralih menjadi pendukung Ganjar Pranowo dan berpindah ke Prabowo untuk menjadi Capres 2024. Sementara kubu Kadrun yang dulu dikenal dengan sebutan Kampret kini mendukung Anies Baswedan maju Capres 2024. Kedua kubu ini di dunia medsos terutama di Twitter (kini X) menggunakan beragam narasi dan propaganda untuk saling menjatuhkan nama tokoh politik yang bersebrangan dan menyanjung tinggi nama baik tokoh politik yang didukungnya. Kedua kelompok ini saling menggiring opini dan pengaruh mereka di Twitter. Dengan memanfaatkan sejumlah hastag politik demi menarik lebih banyak perhatian dan mengapai lebih banyak akun di Twitter. Buku ini mengajak pembaca untuk lebih memahami bagaimana intrik dan perang narasi di antara dua kubu ini. Selain itu, buku ini juga mengekplorasi kompleksitas medsos seperti Twitter dan pengaruhnya dalam membentuk politik digital dan pertukaran narasi politik yang diwarnai dengan perang narasi dan penggunaan hastag politik. Jadi, Twitter memiliki pengaruh signifikan dalam pembentukan polarisasi politik di kalangan netizen.
Socializing, moving, working, and leisure form the foundation of human experience. We examined whether these foundational, ostensibly apolitical activities are nevertheless organized along political fault lines, revealing “lifestyle polarization.” In a sample of up to 1,373 young adults followed for up to 11,397 days, we quantified the association between political identity and 61 social, movement, work, and leisure behaviors collected from smartphone sensors and logs (i.e., GPS, microphone, calling, texting, unlocks, activity recognition) and ecological momentary assessments (i.e., querying activity level, activities, interaction partners, locations) at multiple temporal levels (i.e., daily, mornings, afternoon, evenings, nights, weekends, weekdays). We found that liberals and conservatives behave differently in everyday life. Behavioral differences between liberals and conservatives were small but robust, observed at most times of the day and week, and were most pronounced in the leisure domain. At the same time, these small behavioral differences were not accurately discerned by observers, who overestimated the extent to which liberals and conservatives within their community behave differently. Together, our results suggest that political identity has penetrated some of the most basic aspects of everyday life, but not to the degree that people think. We argue that lifestyle polarization has the potential to undermine individual wellbeing and societal cohesion.
Political polarization in the United States goes beyond divided opinions on key political issues, extending to realms of culture, lifestyle, and social identity once thought to be apolitical. Using a sample of 1 million Twitter bios, this study investigates how users’ partisan self-presentation on social media tends to include cultural as well as political markers. Representing the text in Twitter bios as semantic networks, the study reveals clear partisan differences in how users describe themselves, even on topics that seem apolitical. Consequently, active Twitter users’ political alignments can be statistically inferred from the non-political references in their bios, even in the absence of explicitly partisan language. These findings offer further evidence of partisan polarization that is aligned with lifestyle preferences. Further research is needed to determine if users are aware of that alignment, which might indicate the politicization of lifestyle preferences. The findings also suggest an under-recognized way social media can promote polarization, not through political discourse or argument, but simply in how users present cultural and lifestyle preferences on those platforms.
The Oxford Handbook of Swiss Politics provides a comprehensive analysis of the many different facets of the Swiss political system and of the major developments in modern Swiss politics. Its breadth offers analyses relevant not only to political science but also to international relations, European studies, history, sociology, law, and economics. The volume brings together a diverse set of more than fifty leading experts in their respective areas, who explore Switzerland’s distinctive and sometimes intriguing policies and politics at all levels and across many themes. They firmly place them in an international and comparative context and in conversation with the broader scholarly literature. Therefore, this edited collection provides a necessary corrective to the often rather idealized and sometimes outdated perception of Swiss politics. The edited volume presents an account of Swiss politics that recognizes its inherent diversity by taking a thematic approach in seven sections, an introduction, and an epilogue. However, by presenting new arguments, insights, and data, all chapters also make contributions in their own right. The seven sections are foundations (Chapters 2 to 7), institutions (Chapters 8 to 12), cantons and municipalities (Chapters 13 to 15), actors (Chapters 16 to 20), elections and votes (Chapters 21 to 23), decision-making processes (Chapters 24 and 25), public policies (Chapters 26 to 40); and three concluding chapters compose the epilogue (Chapters 41 to 43).
Despite the popular narrative that the United States is a “land of mobility,” the country may have become a “rooted America” after a decades-long decline in migration rates. This article interrogates the lingering question about the social forces that limit migration, with an empirical focus on internal migration in the United States. We propose a systemic, network model of migration flows, combining demographic, economic, political, and geographic factors and network dependence structures that reflect the internal dynamics of migration systems. Using valued temporal exponential-family random graph models, we model the network of intercounty migration flows from 2011 to 2015. Our analysis reveals a pattern of segmented immobility, where fewer people migrate between counties with dissimilar political contexts, levels of urbanization, and racial compositions. Probing our model using “knockout experiments” suggests one would have observed approximately 4.6 million (27 percent) more intercounty migrants each year were the segmented immobility mechanisms inoperative. This article offers a systemic view of internal migration and reveals the social and political cleavages that underlie geographic immobility in the United States.
Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status competition between groups. The present study—which analyzes commenting behavior of Reddit users across diverse cultural contexts (subreddits)—tests the alternative hypothesis that such incivility derives in large part from a selection effect: Toxic people are especially likely to opt into discourse in partisan contexts. First, we examined commenting behavior across over 9,000 unique cultural contexts (subreddits) and confirmed that discourse is indeed more toxic in partisan (e.g., r/progressive, r/conservatives) than in non-partisan contexts (e.g., r/movies, r/programming). Next, we analyzed hundreds of millions of comments from over 6.3 million users and found robust evidence that: (1) the discourse of people whose behavior is especially toxic in partisan contexts is also especially toxic in non-partisan contexts (i.e., people are not politics-only toxicity specialists); and (2) when considering only non-partisan contexts, the discourse of people who also comment in partisan contexts is more toxic than the discourse of people who do not. These effects were not driven by socialization processes whereby people overgeneralized toxic behavioral norms they had learned in partisan contexts. In contrast to speculation about the need for partisans to engage beyond their echo chambers, toxicity in non-partisan contexts was higher among people who also comment in both left-wing and right-wing contexts (bilaterally engaged users) than among people who also comment in only left-wing or right-wing contexts (unilaterally engaged users). Discussion considers implications for democratic functioning and theories of polarization.
In this article we describe an Agent-Based Model that extends the Hegselmann-Krause model of opinion dynamics to study the role of social identity in opinion polarization. In our model, an agent’s social identity is a function of two things—the agent’s opinion in relation to those of the other agents, and the observer’s sensitivity to the tightness of clustering. We implement this by first selecting a subset of the agent population that are deemed to have close neighbors, and then using Louvain community detection to find identity groups. At every time step, agents only consider the opinions of other agents within their identity group that also fall within their Hegselmann-Krause opinion boundary, ε. We show that our dynamic implementation of social identity systematically modulates the relationship between average ε and polarization.
This study seeks to assess whether self-interest influences support for two policies to cancel student debt—one forgiving all student debt and one taking a means-tested approach to debt forgiveness. Each of these policy proposals offers a material benefit to certain groups of individuals while imposing cost or having no benefit to others, which allows for an examination of the role of self-interest in policy preference. I use original Cooperative Congressional Election Study survey data and conduct binomial logistic regression to evaluate the role of self-interest on support for these policies as indicated by family income, student debt status, and belief that funding these programs will lead to the respondent’s taxes increasing. I also consider the effects of party identification. My findings demonstrate that partisanship remains a strong predictor of policy preference and also suggests a significant role for self-interest in support and opposition of policies for student debt cancelation.
Is racial animus sensitive to social shocks, or is it a disposition that resists change? The early COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by incidents of prejudice and discrimination against the Asian American community in the United States. We investigate whether comparable shifts in public opinion also occurred during this time using survey data fielded through 2019 and 2020. We compare changes in anti-Asian sentiment to changes in anti-Black, anti-Latino, and anti-white sentiment, finding a distinct rise in anti-Asian sentiment starting in January 2020 that slowly returns to 2019 levels. We also compare neutral response options to both positive and negative responses and find polarization in sentiment where partisanship, political interest, and self-reported COVID-19 exposure all associate with a higher likelihood of expressing both positive and negative sentiment relative to neutral responses about Asian Americans. We discuss these findings in line with a theory of racial animus as a disposition that is subject to temporary, episodic activation.
Objectives: To investigate the attitudes and behaviors of Americans concerning the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19 vaccines, COVID-19 tracing apps, and the actions they believe the government should take during a public health crisis, we designed and conducted a survey during the ongoing COVID-19 emergency.
Methods: In January 2022, we administered an online survey on Prolific Academic to 302 participants in the United States, a nationally demographic representative sample. To explore differences in attitudes and opinions among demographic subgroups, we employed several statistical tests, including Mann Whitney U tests, Kruskal-Wallis tests, and chi-squared tests.
Results: Our survey results suggest that Americans' opinions towards the COVID-19 pandemic are severely divided by their political views. There is strong partisan polarization in almost every COVID-19 related question in our survey.
Policy Implications: Our findings suggest that policy makers need to consider partisan polarization and the enormous impact it can have on people’s attitudes and behaviors during public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health experts need to consider how to convey scientific knowledge about a pandemic without allowing political views to dominate medical conversation.
World-wide, political polarization continues unabated, undermining collective decision-making ability. In this issue, we have examined polarization dynamics using a (mean-field) model borrowed from statistical physics, assuming that each individual interacted with each of the others. We use the model to generate scenarios of polarization trends in time in the USA and explore ways to reduce it, as measured by a polarization index that we propose. Here, we extend our work using a more realistic assumption that individuals interact only with “neighbors” (short-range interactions). We use agent-based Monte Carlo simulations to generate polarization scenarios, considering again three USA political groups: Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. We find that mean-field and Monte Carlo simulation results are quite similar. The model can be applied to other political systems with similar polarization dynamics.
In recent decades, the rapid emergence of new political leaders capturing growing social discontent with populist promises has highlighted elements of the internal fragility of democracy. Schumpeter predicts such fragility in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, where, in analyzing thse “competitive struggle for the popular vote,” he makes two assumptions that reverse the classical model of rational decision-making: the limited use of “conscious rationality” by voters and the potential unfairness of political leaders. These two elements introduce systematic distortions into the process of collective decision-making in democracy, suggesting a possible explanation for the rise of populism. Based on delegation, representative democracy must function despite the small amount of intellectual effort that most citizens put into forming their political opinions. Ideologies have historically functioned as implicit heuristics, allowing citizens to evaluate political facts, shape their expectations, and simplify political reasoning; as such, they have been the tools used by parties to give credibility to their programs while at the same time affiliating and polarizing the electorate. While they continue to serve as anchors for defining political identity, today's ideologies are fragmented and therefore less effective in supporting long-term programs and retaining voters; thus, keeping voters close to their political affiliation requires massive use of the media, and for emerging parties lacking strong identitarian values, a short-term political offer becomes less risky than formulating long-term political strategies. At the same time, the decline of classical ideologies makes any political commitment to long-term perspectives hardly credible to the electorate. This leads to an adverse selection process in which populist programs have a better chance of success than long-term policy programs. As a result, the role of the political leader as an entrepreneur is severely weakened. The competition for votes becomes unfair (since it is not based on the quality or plausibility of policy results), while at the same time the process of polarization disrupts the elements of mediation. The result is a process of democratic backsliding that can ultimately lead to a loss of trust in democracy.
Understanding the dynamics of opinion depolarization is pivotal to reducing the political divide in our society. We propose an opinion dynamics model, which we name the social compass model, for interdependent topics represented in a polar space, where zealots holding extreme opinions are less prone to change their minds. We analytically show that the phase transition from polarization to consensus, as a function of increasing social influence, is explosive if topics are not correlated. We validate our theoretical framework through extensive numerical simulations and recover explosive depolarization also by using initial opinions from the American National Election Studies, including polarized and interdependent topics.
This article accounts for two puzzling paradoxes. The first paradox is the simultaneous absence and presence of attitude polarization - the fact that global attitude polarization is relatively rare, even though pundits describe it as common. The second paradox is the simultaneous presence and absence of social polarization - the fact that while individuals experience attitude homogeneity in their interpersonal networks, their networks are characterized by attitude heterogeneity. These paradoxes give rise to numerous scholarly arguments. By developing a formal model of interpersonal influence over attitudes in a context where individuals hold simultaneous positions on multiple issues, we show why these arguments are not mutually exclusive and how they meaningfully refer to the same social setting. The results from this model provide a single parsimonious account for both paradoxes. The framework we develop may be generalized to a wider array of problems, including classic problems in collective action.
According to Morris Fiorina, Americans are moderate, tolerant, and ambivalent in their political attitudes. This has always been true and it is, if anything, more true today than in the past. The culture war is almost entirely an elite phenomenon, driven by a small group of activists on the left and right who exert influence far out of proportion to their numbers. It is the elites and activists who are polarized, not the public. In this study we use data from the American National Election Studies and national exit polls to test five major claims made by Fiorina about the state of public opinion in the United States. This evidence indicates that while some of the claims of culture war proponents are overstated, there are deep divisions in America between Democrats and Republicans, between red state voters and blue state voters, and between religious voters and secular voters. These divisions are not confined to a small minority of elected officials and activists - they involve a large segment of the public and they are likely to increase in the future as a result of long-term trends affecting American society.
Within a framework of reasoning voters who use various cognitive shortcuts — heuristics — to arrive at decision, we classify Italian voters on the basis of the information they possess, how information and judgment are organized and whether preferences match actual vote. By using only two sets of variables present in nearly all election surveys, we distinguish four types of voters: Utilius, a sort of Downsian voter that uses the left–right dimension in order to reduce the complexity of politics to a unidimensional space; Amicus, who conceives politics as an arena in which two main coalitions fight; Aliens, a detached voter that is strongly disinterested in — or even disappointed by — politics and its protagonists; and Medians, who belongs to a residual category. By distinguishing voters according to their actual knowledge and style of political reasoning, we provide a classification that is both able to grasp actual differences in the level of political cognition and sophistication, and suggestive with respect to the kind of information that are pertinent for the task at hand. We demonstrate that people follow multiple strategies and rely selectively on different kind of available information. It follows that parties, leaders, coalitions and media affect voter behavior, but they have different leverage on different types of voters. We conclude that a proper account of voter behavior needs to move from the search of the determinants of vote to the search of multiple mechanisms through which voters perceive, represent and evaluate the political landscape.
Drawing on a multitude of data sets and building on analyses carried out over more than a decade, this book offers a major new theoretical explanation of how ordinary citizens figure out what they favour and oppose politically. Reacting against the conventional wisdom, which stresses how little attention the general public pays to political issues and the lack of consistency in their opinions, the studies presented in this book redirect attention to the processes of reasoning that can be discerned when people are confronted with choices about political issues. These studies demonstrate that ordinary people are in fact capable of reasoning dependably about political issues by the use of judgmental heuristics, even if they have only a limited knowledge of politics and of specific issues.
This chapter provides a focused analysis of the “sorting” thesis presented by Bill Bishop in his book The Big Sort. Published in 2008, the book argues that education and economic prosperity have allowed individuals to move to communities that match their tastes and lifestyles. While not explicitly driven by desires for partisan homogeneity, the practical consequence of these trends is increasing Democratic and Republican geographic enclaves. Recent research does confirm that geographic polarization has increased in recent decades, although many scholars point to other factors besides migration as the primary cause. Neither Bishop nor this recent research, however, considers the partisan landscape prior to WWII. We take Bishop’s concept of “landslide” partisan counties and examine partisan voting patterns since 1828. We do find that the country has grown more “sorted” since 1976 (Bishop’s baseline year for analysis); we also find that education is increasingly correlated with county-level voting patterns—a key expectation of Bishop’s argument. However, we also show that the percentage of the voting public living in heavily or “landslide” partisan counties in the twenty-first century is well within a normal historical range. This context is vital to assessing the novelty of, or normative concern for, our modern political landscape.
This authoritative edition of the complete texts of the Federalist Papers, the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Constitution, and the Amendments to the U.S. Constitution features supporting essays in which leading scholars provide historical context and analysis. An introduction by Ian Shapiro offers an overview of the publication of the Federalist Papers and their importance. In three additional essays, John Dunn explores the composition of the Federalist Papers and the conflicting agendas of its authors; Eileen Hunt Botting explains how early advocates of women's rights, most prominently Mercy Otis Warren, Judith Sargent Murray, and Charles Brockden Brown, responded to the Federalist-Antifederalist debates; and Donald Horowitz discusses the Federalist Papers from the perspective of recent experiments with democracy and constitution-making around the world. These essays both illuminate the original texts and encourage active engagement with them.
Tracking trends in American public opinion, this study examines moods of public policy over time. James Stimson looks at shorter term movements as the public approves or disapproves politicians, trusts or distrusts government. His book is distinctive in that it focuses on determining the unobserved true opinion that lies beneath superficial polls. It argues that public opinion is decisive in American politics and identifies the citizens who produce influential change as a relatively small subset of the American electorate.
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In recent decades, Democratic and Republican party elites have grown increasingly polarized on all three of the major domestic policy agendas: social welfare, racial, and cultural issues. We contend that the mass response has been characterized not by the traditional expectation of "conflict displacement" or the more recent account of "ideological realignment," but by what we term "conflict extension." Mass attitudes toward the three agendas have remained distinct, but the parties in the electorate have grown more polarized on all three. Conflict extension, rather than conflict displacement or ideological realignment, has occurred because there has been a limited mass response to the growth of elite-level party polarization. Only party identifiers who are aware of party elite polarization on each of the issue dimensions have brought their social welfare, racial, and cultural issue attitudes toward the consistently liberal or consistently conservative stands of Democratic and Republican elites. Analyses using data from the 1972 through 2000 National Election Studies support both the aggregate- and individual-level predictions of the conflict extension perspective.
Social structures are defined by their parameters--the criteria underlying the differentiation among people and governing social interaction, such as sex, race, socioeconomic status, and power. The analysis of various forms of differentiation, their interrelations, and their implications for integration and change is the distinctive task of sociology. Two generic types of differentiation are heterogeneity and status inequality. Nominal parameters divide people into subgroups and engender heterogeneity. Graduated parameters differentiate people in terms of status rankings and engender inequality. The macrosocial integration of the diverse groups in modern society rests on its multiform heterogeneity resulting from many crosscutting parameters. For although heterogeneity entails barriers to social intercourse multiform heterogeneity undermines these barriers and creates structural constraints to establish intergroup relations. Crosscutting lines of differentiation thus foster processes of social integration, and they also foster processes of recurrent change. Strongly interrelated parameters impede these processes of integration and adjustment, however. (Such relationships between parameters--for example, between the occupation and income of individuals--must not be confused with the relationships between forms of differentiation--for example, between the division of labor and income inequality in societies.) Pronounced correlations of parameters reveal a consolidated status structure, which intensifies inequalities and discourages intergroup relations and gradual change. The growing concentration of resources and powers in large organizations and their top executives poses a serious threat of structural consolidation in contemporary society.
Part I. Introduction: 1. Introduction Part II. From Value Pluralism to Liberal Pluralist Theory: 2. Two concepts of Liberalism 3. Three sources of liberal pluralism 4. Liberal pluralist theory: comprehensive, not political 5. From value pluralism to liberal pluralist politics 6. Value pluralism and political community Part III. The Practice of Liberal Pluralism: 7. Democracy and value pluralism 8. Parents, government, and children: authority over education in the liberal pluralist state 9. The public framework of the liberal pluralist state 10. Liberal pluralism and civic goods.
This article investigates the consequences of ideological realignment for the motivations and policy preferences of active partisans—Democratic and Republican identifiers who engage in electoral activities that go beyond the act of voting. We hypothesize that, consistent with the logic of persuasion and selective recruitment/derecruitment, the influence of ideology as a motivation for campaign participation varies over time and between parties depending on the salience of the ideological cues provided by a party’s candidates and office-holders. Evidence from the 1972 to 2000 American National Election Studies supports this hypothesis. As a result of an ideological realignment led by conservative Republican leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, by the mid-1990s, ideology had become a much more important motivation for participation among Republicans than among Democrats, and active Republicans were farther to the right of the electorate than active Democrats were to the left of the electorate on a wide range of policy issues.
A large body of research examines relationships between social class and voting behavior in the United States, but there have been no systematic studies of how occupational segregation structures voting outcomes across many local settings. This article argues that electoral outcomes in the United States are strongly influenced by inequality between men and women and between whites and non-whites, with that inequality being rooted in occupational segregation. Republican candidates should receive their strongest electoral support in locations where occupations are highly segregated by sex and by race, particularly in settings where segregation is most vulnerable to penetration. The argument finds support in statistical analyses of county-level variation in Republican voting in the 2004 presidential election.
Many observers have asserted with little evidence that. Americans' social opinions have become polarized. Using General Social Survey and National Election Survey social attitude items that have been repeated regularly over 20 years, the authors ask (1) Have Americans' opinions become more dispersed (higher variance)? (2) Have distributions become flatter or more bimodal (declining kurtosis)? (3) Have opinions become more ideologically constrained within and across opinion domains? (4) Have paired social groups become more different in their opinions? The authors find little evidence of polarization over the past two decades, with attitudes toward abortion and opinion differences between Republican and Democratic party identifiers the exceptional cases.
I assess the extent of "partisan voting" in American national elections since 1952 using a series of simple probit analyses. My measure of partisan voting is sensitive both to changes in the distribution of partisanship and to changes in the electoral relevance of partisanship. I find that the impact of partisan loyalties on voting behavior has increased in each of the last six presidential elections, reaching a level in 1996 almost 80 percent higher than in 1972-and significantly higher than in any presidential election in at least 50 years. The impact of partisanship on voting behavior in congressional elections has also increased markedly, albeit more recently and to a level still well below that of the 1950s. I conclude that the conventional wisdom among scholars and commentators regarding the "decline of parties" in American politics is badly outdated.
Journal of Democracy 7.1 (1996) 169-175
Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Party Politics in America. By John H. Aldrich. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 349 pp.
Parties are the core institution of democratic politics. As E.E. Schattschneider puts it, "democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties." Many analysts of the democratic process have emphasized the relationship, but perhaps no one more systematically than Joseph Schumpeter. He defined democracy as a system in which the people select the governors from among competing elites, meaning organized groups led by politicians.
Those who seek to gain or keep office must present the voters with alternative policies, personalities, or critiques of extant institutions-- political, economic, or otherwise. As John Aldrich reiterates, office seekers are rational actors who will do all they can to appeal to the voters, who in turn have interests and values stemming from various identities such as economic position, gender, ethnicity, race, caste, religion, region, and so forth.
Politicians have always sought to maximize their appeal. Before the 1930s, they either guessed what voters wanted by judging crowd reactions, or had confederates report their impressions of public opinion. But such techniques pale beside modern opinion surveys.
Negative campaigning -- criticism, fair or dirty, of opponents -- has always marked polities with free elections. The longest continuous such system, that of the United States, has witnessed vicious campaign tactics almost from the start. Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans were denounced as tools of the immoral French Revolutionists. Their Hamiltonian rivals, the Federalists, were called Britain's hirelings. Allegations of corruption and immorality were common. Charges of sexual misconduct and even of miscegenation were known long before the Civil War, as were tales of bribery and vote-buying. Nothing, it seems, is new under the electoral sun.
Aldrich repeats that "democracy is unworkable save in terms of parties." They harness a "nation's leadership . . . to public desires and aspirations." But if this is true, Aldrich asks, why do so many analysts of contemporary politics conclude that U.S. parties are in decline? In a work intended to demonstrate the utility of rational-choice theory, Aldrich ascribes recent changes to politicians' personal (rather than partisan) ambitions. The fulfillment of these, he notes, following Richard Fenno, is "sought in government, not parties." He sees the so-called decline of parties as "the change from what I call the `party in control' of its ambitious office seekers and holders to the `party in service' to them," rather than as a real decline.
Aldrich does not deny that institutions and history shape the nature and behavior of parties. Thus he notes that in a pluralistic country like the United States (and all others, I would add), parties are needed to bring together "many and diverse groups" into governing majorities. Those who determine how such coalitions operate are the office seekers and holders and others who seek benefits from the parties.
In discussing the U.S. two-party system, Aldrich relies heavily on Maurice Duverger (and also, it should be noted, on Kenneth Arrow, Anthony Downs, William Riker, and other formal theorists). Without going into the details of Aldrich's formal rational-choice analysis, I would argue that the effort does not contribute much to our knowledge of the changes in the behavior of parties beyond what we can understand by long-established methods like systems analysis and individual-actor analysis, both of which also assume rational behavior.
Aldrich tells us, not surprisingly, that "the reason for affiliating with a major rather than a minor party is relatively simple to explain": the chances of getting elected are higher in a major party. The needed "theoretical underpinnings" that he seeks to provide for Duverger's law--"that elections decided by plurality or majority rule yield a two-party system"--are the "wasted-vote thesis" and the recognition that it is "in the party's interests . . . to be one of the two major parties." Hence parties seek to recruit the strongest candidates, and these in turn seek to reduce the effective choices to two.
While these assumptions are valid most of the time, they do not explain the emergence of third parties, or the...
Latin American Politics & Society 46.3 (2004) 131-134
Every five or ten years, the field of comparative politics is graced by the appearance of a big book. Such a book has several traits. It addresses a central and enduring question in the field, typically one that "travels" beyond a particular area or region and encompasses a range of cross-regional cases. It addresses this central question by systematically evaluating all relevant arguments and debates, and in so doing, presents compelling evidence, including quantitative and qualitative data from both original and secondary sources. Most important, a big book causes us to rethink the question in a new way; to see things differently. In the best of cases, it is also lucidly organized and clearly, even gracefully, written.
This is such a book. It should be read by every comparativist, not just Latin American scholars, for it illuminates one of the central questions of the field: Under what conditions does democracy break down? That 4 of Bermeo's central cases are South American gives this book particular interest for readers of this journal; however, the book's scope is broader, embracing a total of 17 European and Latin American cases from throughout the twentieth century. The author seeks to assess perhaps the most influential argument in the "breakdown of democracy" literature: Sartori's polarization thesis. Sartori argues that democracies crumble when antisystem parties of both the left and the right gain strength at the expense of centrist, prosystem parties. In such situations, which are often prompted by economic crises, there is "the likely prevalence of centrifugal drives over centripetal ones, . . . the enfeeblement of the center [and] a persistent loss of votes to one of the extreme ends (or even to both)" (Sartori 1976, 132-34, quoted in Bermeo, 19).
The real culprits, in Sartori's view, are the masses of average citizens who become, in crisis moments, the "masons of polarization" (Bermeo's term), who "use their votes, one by one, to create distant and uncooperative political blocks" (Bermeo, 5). Sartori's perspective belongs to a long tradition of what one might call the "fickle masses" view. This tradition links, among others, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Proudhon, Lipset, and Huntington, all of whom view ordinary people as being susceptible to radical appeals in moments of economic or political crisis. Lacking accurate information, strong political party affiliations, or organizational ties, ordinary people, in this view, can become disoriented in crisis situations and thus "available" for mobilization by elites of the extreme left and right. In Bermeo's phrase summarizing this perspective, "If citizens experience severe material scarcities in new democracies, they don't just get mad, they go mad" (21).
Bermeo takes issue with this "blame the masses" view. Her basic argument can be summarized roughly as follows (to paraphrase a famous writer): the fault (for democratic breakdown) lies not in ordinary people but in our elites, that they are inept, power-hungry, and ignorant of public opinion. In almost all her cases in which democratic breakdown leads to dictatorship, the essential dynamic is not that of voters deserting centrist, prosystem parties, but of elite polarization; namely, divisions among leaders in the military, government, and interest groups. Even in the relatively rare instances of growing support for extremist parties -- Nazi Germany being the notable example -- polarization does not stem from vote switching as much as from the expansion of the vote to new groups and the mobilization of nonvoters. Bermeo concludes, "Those who have attributed the breakdown of democracy to popular defections have mistaken changes in the composition of the electorate for changes of mind and heart" (5).
Bermeo thus recognizes that polarization is a crucial component of democratic breakdown, but she contests the dominant view that party polarization based on volatile voters is the driving force. She convincingly establishes this argument by first distinguishing two types of polarization: public and private. The former refers to manifestations of political division that occur in public spaces, such as strikes, demonstrations, and riots. Private polarization...
GARY C. JACOBSON analyzes the results of the 2004 United States House, Senate, and presidential elections, arguing that the Republicans' gains did not reflect any shift in public sentiments in that party's favor, but rather were the result of the Republicans' structural advantages, reinforced by the intense partisan polarization provoked by the Bush administration.
PETER TRUBOWITZ and NICOLE MELLOW examine the electoral conditions associated with bipartisanship in Congress over the last century of American politics. They challenge the widely held view that bipartisanship is above politics and show that bipartisanship is just as driven by electoral imperatives as partisanship. They argue that the polarization of political parties combined with sluggish economic conditions and the war on terrorism challenge the future of bipartisanship.
For the most part, scholars who study American political parties in the electorate continue to characterize them as weak and in decline. Parties on the elite level, however, have experienced a resurgence over the last two decades. Such a divergence between elite behavior and mass opinion is curious, given that most models of public opinion place the behavior of elites at their core. In fact, I find that parties in the electorate have experienced a noteworthy resurgence over the last two decades. Greater partisan polarization in Congress has clarified the parties' ideological positions for ordinary Americans, which in turn has increased party importance and salience on the mass level. Although parties in the 1990s are not as central to Americans as they were in the 1950s, they are far more important today than in the 1970s and 1980s. The party decline thesis is in need of revision.
In introductory American politics courses, when we get to the
section on political parties, we often contrast the American
parties with their more disciplined European counterparts.
Under a European model, copartisans unite behind a coherent
set of party principles and policy proposals that they
present to the electorate, and party leaders in both the
executive and the legislature exercise significant authority. In
the following class, we then explain why such a system does
not obtain in the United States: A federal system produces
decentralized party organizations rooted in states and localities;
single-member districts; the electoral connection and
the localism that comes with it; the committee and seniority
systems in Congress; the power of individual U.S. senators;
and the constitutional system of separate institutions sharing
power.
The American electorate today is different from that described in The American Voter. Both the 1950s era of ideologically innocent party voting and the subsequent period of partisan dealignment are over. Some political scientists began to describe the New American Voter as a new partisan evolution occurred. What has not been fully appreciated in the twentieth/twenty-first century history of voting studies is how partisanship returned in a form more ideological and more issue based along liberal-conservative lines than it has been in more than 30 years. This is visible in the strength of partisan voting, in the relationship between partisanship and ideology, and in the strength of the relationship of partisanship and self-reported liberal-conservative ideology to the public's economic, social, racial, and religious attitudes and opinions. Not only has the public responded in a striking way to changes in politics and its context, but the current transformation has also appeared to be strikingly enduring and difficult to shake, based on survey evidence for this new partisan voter.
Using data from the 1976–1994 American National Election Studies and the 1992–94 ANES panel survey, this paper demonstrates that the outcomes of the 1994 and 1996 elections reflected a longterm shift in the bases of support and relative strength of the two major parties. This shift in the party loyalties of the electorate was based on the increased ideological polarization of the Democratic and Republican Parties during the Reagan and post-Reagan eras. Clearer differences between the parties' ideological positions made it easier for citizens to choose a party identification based on their policy preferences. The result has been a secular realignment of party loyalties along ideological lines.
For decades, the Democrats have been viewed as the party of the poor, with the Republicans representing the rich. Recent presidential elections, however, have shown a reverse pattern, with Democrats performing well in the richer blue states in the northeast and coasts, and Republicans dominating in the red states in the middle of the country and the south. Through multilevel modeling of individual-level survey data and county-and state-level demographic and electoral data, we reconcile these patterns. Furthermore, we find that income matters more in red America than in blue America. In poor states, rich people are much more likely than poor people to vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but in rich states (such as Connecticut), income has a very low correlation with vote preference.
