On the relationship between party polarization and citizen polarization

Abstract

Do party policy offerings simply reflect public opinion or do parties shape public demand for policies? Theories of party position-taking and the operation of democracy expect parties to track their supporters’ positions, while scholarship of public opinion has shown voters often adopt the position of their preferred parties. We apply both of these theoretical expectations to the relationship between citizen polarization and party polarization and additionally argue that the relationship between them should be stronger among more politically more engaged and sophisticated citizens. We draw on aggregated survey data from 174 cross-national and national election studies from 19 established democracies, to assess the extent to which citizen polarization responds to party polarization, the extent to which parties respond to changes in citizen polarization, and whether these relationships differ across different groups of citizens. We estimate seemingly unrelated error-correction models employing data on party and citizen positions from 1971 to 2019. Our findings suggest that citizen polarization follows party polarization and also that politically engaged and sophisticated citizens are more responsive to changes in party polarization than the politically less engaged and unsophisticated. In contrast, we find little evidence that party polarization responds to changes in citizen polarization.

Moving toward the Median: Compulsory Voting and Political Polarization

“…This suggests that elite polarization can influence polarization among ordinary citizens. Moral and Best (2023) show that the causal arrow generally runs from elite polarization to mass polarization, with the largest and most immediate effects among the most politically sophisticated citizens. However, his study focused on ideological rather than affective polarization, so further research is required in this matter.…”

Activating Self-Interest: The Role of Party Polarization in Preferences for Redistribution

“…This follows the demand-side logic of electoral politics: parties are responsive to changes in public opinion, so if the public becomes more polarized, then parties will follow in turn (e.g., Budge et al, 2012). Many studies have provided evidence for party responsiveness to changes in voter preferences (Adams et al, 2004, 2006; McDonald and Budge, 2005; Ezrow and Xezonakis, 2011; Ezrow et al, 2014), although this effect does not appear to extend to party polarization (Moral and Best, 2022). At the meso-level, party polarization is often attributed to institutional factors, such as the proportionality of the electoral system (Downs, 1957; Cox, 1990; Calvo and Hellwig, 2011; Dow, 2011), whether parties are in government or in opposition (Bawn and Somer-Topcu, 2012), and coalition expectations (Curini and Hino, 2012).…”

“…Studies of the United Kingdom have found modest convergence among the public, but people who perceived convergence among parties followed suit (Adams et al, 2011; Adams etal., 2012). In a recent study of 19 advanced democracies, Moral and Best (2022) find that citizens, especially informed and engaged ones, follow political parties as they become more or less polarized (and that this effect does not occur the other way around).…”

“…Still, the role of political parties in this area has often been overlooked. The ability of political elites to shape the agenda and public opinion is welldocumented in a long and extensive literature (Key, 1961;Sartori, 1969;Zaller, 1992;Evans and De Graaf, 2013;Geer, 1996;Lachat, 2008;Medina, 2015;Moral and Best, 2022), but there has not yet been a cross-national examination of the role that political parties have in moderating economic self-interest. This is particularly pertinent to the declining salience of the economic cleavage in advanced democracies that has been noted by scholars, as it points to the agency that parties have in shaping the political landscape.…”

“…In other words, if parties differentiate themselves more on economic issues, do the economic conditions of voters become more closely associated with their preferences for redistribution? This question lies at the intersect of two important areas of political research, namely the determinants of preferences for redistribution (e.g., Meltzer and Richard, 1981; Alesina & Giuliano, 2011; Rueda, 2018) and the role of political parties in shaping public opinion (e.g., Zaller, 1992; Abramowitz, 2010; Moral and Best, 2022). Economic self-interest is the extent to which people’s preferences for redistribution are determined by their income position (Dimick et al, 2016).…”