From on High: The Effect of Elite Polarization on Mass Attitudes and Behaviors, 1972–2012

Abstract

Though there is widespread scholarly consensus that American political elites have become increasingly ideologically polarized, there remains debate about how the mass electorate has responded to the increase in polarization at the elite level. This article shows that as party elites have become more polarized, individuals have become better able to identify the party that best matches their own ideological positions, thereby contributing to polarization at the mass level. Using forty years of ANES and DW-NOMINATE data to test this argument, it was found that the relationship between a voter’s position in policy space and their political behavior is indeed conditional upon polarization at the elite level. This finding demonstrates how changes in elite polarization translate to behavioral changes on the mass level.

Populist radical right parties and mass polarization in the Netherlands

“…The same simultaneous depolarization movement was seen in the United Kingdom (Adams et al ., 2012b). Conversely, in the United States, most evidence shows that the increased party-system polarization has led the public to sort itself into clearly separated groups (Hetherington, 2001; Druckman et al ., 2013; Zingher and Flynn, 2016).…”

“…Jensen and Thomsen, 2011), or across many relevant issues (e.g. Zingher and Flynn, 2016), in which case there is little overlap between supporters of different parties and the negative consequences of polarization are more visible.…”

Dimensions of Elite Partisan Polarization: Disentangling the Effects of Incivility and Issue Polarization

“…Against this background, it is perhaps unsurprising that many researchers have claimed that incivility and issue polarization affect citizens in similar ways. Both dimensions of elite conflict have been linked to political distrust (for example, Forgette and Morris 2006;King 1997;Mutz and Reeves 2005;Uslaner 2015), and just as issue polarization has been linked to polarization in terms of policy attitudes and affect among partisans (for example, Levendusky 2009; Levendusky 2010; Rogowski and Sutherland 2016;Zingher and Flynn 2018), incivility has been linked to an unwillingness to compromise and lowered affective evaluations of the political opposition (for example, Gervais 2019; Mutz 2007). Of course, it is not impossible for distinct phenomena to affect citizens in similar ways, but the potential for empirical confounding in many studies makes it hard to know whether the effects of incivility and issue polarization actually differ.…”

Growing Apart? Partisan Sorting in Canada, 1992–2015

“…The precise drivers of partisan polarization have been much debated. On the one hand, some scholars point to the impact that elite polarization may have on partisan preferences, with increasingly distinct party elites helping to create increasingly distinct partisans (for example, Druckman et al, 2013; Zingher and Flynn, 2016). A key part of this top-down process has been a greater degree of mass partisanship (see Carmines et al, 2012; Lupu, 2015), driven by the easier partisan sorting of voters: distinct party positions make it simpler for (politically interested) citizens to figure out which party is closest to them, while at the same time making rival parties more unpalatable (Davis and Dunaway, 2016; Hetherington, 2001).…”