A Political Spectrograph: High-Resolution Examinations of the United States' Ideological Landscape
David Sabin-Miller, Mary McGrath, Marisa C. Eisenberg

TL;DR
This paper compares various high-resolution measures of political ideology, finding internal consistency and external observer agreement, and explores patterns in political opinions and party affiliations.
Contribution
It introduces and compares high-resolution internal and external measures of ideology, demonstrating their consistency and potential for quantitative political analysis.
Findings
Internal measures of ideology are highly consistent.
External assessments of ideology are largely reliable across observers.
Political opinions show symmetric patterns influenced by party identity.
Abstract
The concept of ``ideology" is central to political discourse and dynamics, and is often cast as falling primarily on a one-dimensional scale from ``left-wing/liberal" to ``right-wing/conservative", but the validity of this simple quantitative treatment is uncertain. Here we investigate and compare various high-resolution measures of ideology, both internal (individuals self-identification and policy-stance agreements) and external (estimating the ideological position of political opinion statements). We find strong consistency between internal measures, although policy-stance agreement ideology yields a systematically centralizing and liberalizing portrait relative to subjective measures. More remarkably, we find that external assessments of ideology, while noisy, are largely consistent across observers, even for highly dissonant ideas and regardless of speaker identity markers. This…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPolitical Science Research and Education
