Polarization All the Way Down: How Coverage of Elite and Partisan Polarization Spills Over to Perceptions of the U.S. Mass Public

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do ordinary citizens perceive and respond to different kinds of political polarization in the U.S.? Recent work shows that people believe that the parties are intensely polarized but, in reality, the extent of polarization depends on whether we focus on political elites or the mass public. This paper reports results from two survey experiments with samples from Dynata and CloudResearch (total N = 2,940) exploring how people perceive ideological and affective polarization among (a) party elites, (b) partisan voters, and (c) ordinary Americans in the mass public. I show that participants believe that the public is both ideologically and affectively polarized, only marginally less than partisans and elites. I also find some evidence that news media creates perceptual spillover between elites, partisans, and the mass public: participants given information about (non)polarization for only one group nonetheless update their perceptions of all three groups in parallel. Given the dominance of information about elites and elite polarization in the U.S. media environment, I argue that top-down spillover from news stories about elites may help to explain why people think the public is more polarized than it really is.