Are Americans polarized on issue dimensions?

ABSTRACT

American mass polarization is still a contested subject in political science. One reason why scholars disagree is because polarization has often been studied either using individual issue questions or using an overall measure of ideology (usually ideological constraint). Because these methods are problematic, I use a multidimensional approach to estimating ideology. Since scholars have disagreed on what issue domains are important for Americans, I use exploratory factor analysis to show that there are three major ones: economics, race, and morality. I then use a latent measurement model to construct ideal points on all three beginning in the year 1988 going through to 2016. Then I evaluate polarization both as an increase in dispersion and as a state of how bimodal the distribution is. Although I find increased dispersion on all the dimensions since 1988, the key finding of this study is that the level of polarization is dependent on the dimension–Americans are more polarized on race and morality in 2016 than they are on economics. Still, all the distributions are centrally distributed even in 2016. Hence, polarization could still become a lot worse than it was in 2016.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a comprehensive discussion on this debate up to their time periods see Layman, Carsey, and Horowitz (2006), Fiorina and Abrams (2008), Hetherington (2009), and Lelkes (2016).

2 This is a very important area of research on public opinion, no doubt. It is simply a different concept than the type of polarization I am researching.

3 Campbell (2016) actually does look at issue polarization in chapter 4 of his book, but he analyzes individual issues. I will argue later in the paper that this method falls short in many regards.

4 The following argument is inspired by a combination of Fiorina and Levendusky (2006b) and Broockman (2016).