“I Disrespectfully Agree”: The Differential Effects of Partisan Sorting on Social and Issue Polarization
The author would like to thank Stanley Feldman for his reading of and responses to multiple drafts of this article, and Leonie Huddy and Alan Abramowitz for many helpful comments on this topic. I would also like to thank Morris Fiorina for his queries and suggestions, and Bill Bishop for his support of this idea. Finally, I sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions were insightful and kindly delivered, significantly improving the final version of this article.
The data analyzed in this article can be obtained from the National Election Studies website, www.electionstudies.org, under the title “American National Election Studies TIME SERIES CUMULATIVE DATA FILE [dataset].” The data are produced and distributed by Stanford University and the University of Michigan. These materials are based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers SBR‐9707741, SBR‐9317631, SES‐9209410, SES‐9009379, SES‐8808361, SES‐8341310, SES‐8207580, and SOC77–08885. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organizations. All replication data and files for the forthcoming analyses can be found at the AJPS Dataverse.
Abstract
Disagreements over whether polarization exists in the mass public have confounded two separate types of polarization. When social polarization is separated from issue position polarization, both sides of the polarization debate can be simultaneously correct. Social polarization, characterized by increased levels of partisan bias, activism, and anger, is increasing, driven by partisan identity and political identity alignment, and does not require the same magnitude of issue position polarization. The partisan‐ideological sorting that has occurred in recent decades has caused the nation as a whole to hold more aligned political identities, which has strengthened partisan identity and the activism, bias, and anger that result from strong identities, even though issue positions have not undergone the same degree of polarization. The result is a nation that agrees on many things but is bitterly divided nonetheless. An examination of ANES data finds strong support for these hypotheses.
