Public Ideological Polarization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new measure of American public ideological polarization, showing it has increased over three decades mainly due to greater disagreement, not demographic or partisan divergence.

Contribution

It proposes a novel summary measure of polarization based on survey response distributions and demonstrates its effectiveness in capturing long-term trends.

Findings

Public polarization has increased over three decades.

Increases are mainly due to more disagreement, not demographic divides.

Diverging opinions of Democrats and Republicans are not the primary cause.

Abstract

This paper provides a novel summary measure of ideological polarization in the American public based on the joint distribution of survey responses. Intuitively, polarization is maximized when views are concentrated at opposing extremes with little mass in between and when opinions are highly correlated across many issues. Using this measure, I show that public polarization has been increasing for the past three decades and that these changes are mostly due to increases in general disagreement, not dimensional collapse. Furthermore, these increases are not explained by the diverging opinions of Democrats and Republicans, nor divergence of opinions across gender, geography, education, or any other demographic divide.