A Political Spectrograph: High-Resolution Examinations of the United States' Ideological Landscape

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 supports the use of these responses as meaningful, comparable quantities, which general members of the public reliably project from the abstract space of political thought onto a shared one-dimensional domain. We end with observation of some broad initial patterns of political opinion acceptance, feelings towards the major political parties, and propensity for extreme thinking, finding mostly ideologically symmetric results strongly stratified by strong/lean/Independent political party identity. We hope these perspectives on quantification of political ideology serve as an invitation for a broader range of quantitative scientists to model and understand this vital societal arena.