Constrained Citizens? Ideological Structure and Conflict Extension in the US Electorate, 1980–2016

Christopher Hare

doi:10.1017/s000712342100051x

Abstract

AbstractPast the half-century mark of Converse's (1964) field-defining essay, the nature of political ideology in the mass public and how it has changed in response to partisan polarization remains enigmatic. To test the ideological structure of US public opinion, I develop and implement a Bayesian dynamic ordinal item response theory model. In contrast to static scaling procedures, this method allows for changes in the mappings between issue attitudes and the underlying ideological dimension over time. The results indicate that over the last forty years, mass attitudes on a range of long-standing policy controversies better fit a unidimensional ideological structure. As among elites, the left–right dimension has come to encompass a wide range of policy, partisan, and value divides in the mass public. Further, these trends hold for voters at all levels of political sophistication. Widespread conflict extension appears to be a defining feature of mass polarization in contemporary US politics.

Highlights

There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives. (Lorde 1984)
It is well established that core values influence attitudes on specific political issues and divide partisans in the contemporary mass electorate (Goren 2013; Jacoby 2014), but are citizens’ basic value dispositions related to changes in the ideological structure of US public opinion? The theory of conflict extension leads to the expectation that the latent ideological dimension I measure in this article has increasingly encompassed core values and beliefs relating to economic and social policies over the last forty years
The development of a Bayesian DO-item response theory (IRT) model with timevarying item parameters offers a method to measure mass ideology that accounts for changes in public opinion over time

Summary

Introduction

There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives. (Lorde 1984). We should expect to find higher levels of mass ideological constraint when political parties and other elite actors are simultaneously polarized on a large number of policy issues and core values.

Results

Conclusion