Multiway Alignment of Political Attitudes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a higher-order measure of political attitude alignment that captures how opinions on one topic reveal information about multiple topics simultaneously, revealing insights into partisan dynamics and shifts over time.

Contribution

It presents a novel multiway alignment measure for political attitudes, extending beyond pairwise analysis to better understand complex partisan belief systems.

Findings

Parliamentary systems show similar multiway alignment patterns that change with intergroup dynamics.

In American surveys, party identification's importance grows alongside increasing multiway alignment.

Multiway alignment analysis uncovers evolving partisan structures over time.

Abstract

The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much individuals' attitudes toward a topic reveal about their attitudes toward another topic. We introduce a higher-order measure that extends the assessment of alignment beyond pairs of topics by quantifying the amount of information individuals' opinions on one topic reveal about a set of topics simultaneously. Applying this approach to legislative voting behavior shows that parliamentary systems typically exhibit similar multiway alignment characteristics, but can change in response to shifting intergroup dynamics. In American National Election Studies surveys, our approach reveals a growing significance of party identification together with a consistent rise in multiway alignment over time.