Pluralistic Collapse: The “Oil Spill” Model of Mass Opinion Polarization

Abstract

Despite widespread feeling that public opinion in the United States has become dramatically polarized along political lines, empirical support for such a pattern is surprisingly elusive. Reporting little evidence of mass polarization, previous studies assume polarization is evidenced via the amplification of existing political alignments. This article considers a different pathway: polarization occurring via social, cultural, and political alignments coming to encompass an increasingly diverse array of opinions and attitudes. The study uses 44 years of data from the General Social Survey representing opinions and attitudes across a wide array of domains as elements in an evolving belief network. Analyses of this network produce evidence that mass polarization has increased via a process of belief consolidation, entailing the collapse of previously cross-cutting alignments, thus creating increasingly broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs. Further, the increasing salience of political ideology and partisanship only partly explains this trend. The structure of U.S. opinion has shifted in ways suggesting troubling implications for proponents of political and social pluralism.

Measuring Stability and Change in Personal Culture Using Panel Data

“…Finally, a number of approaches exist for evaluating theoretical processes of belief formation and change for a population, such as examining the association between theoretically related values (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008; Boutyline and Vaisey 2017; DellaPosta 2020) or looking at changes in the distribution of responses over time (DiMaggio et al 1996). These tools are well designed to address the questions they set out to answer.…”

The Interactive Effects of Scientific Knowledge and Gender on COVID‐19 Social Distancing Compliance

“…Over recent decades, Democratic and Republican voters have become more antagonistic toward each other and increasingly reliant on party cues. Partisans have also grown more ideologically and culturally homogeneous, simultaneously divided across a wide range of demographic attributes, policy issues, value dispositions, and lifestyle preferences (DellaPosta, 2020; Gibson and Hare, 2016; Grossman et al., 2020).…”

Cognitive Authority and the Constraint of Attitude Change in Groups

“…To gauge how strongly a group’s attitudes may form a constrained system, I construct attitude networks following Boutyline and Vaisey (2017). In this approach, attitudes are nodes connected to one another by the absolute value of their correlations among all members in a given group in the base year (see also DellaPosta 2020). Absolute values are used because, from the standpoint of constraint, no difference exists between beliefs that are positively or negatively linked.…”

“…Consistent with this line of work, experimental social psychologists have examined how priming certain attitudes leads to the activation of others (Jost, Ledgerwood, and Hardin 2008; Judd et al 1991; McGuire 1961; Nelson 1968). In cultural sociology, a growing body of work focuses on structures of belief systems, tastes, and schemas of various kinds (Baldassarri and Goldberg 2014; Boutyline and Vaisey 2017; Daenekindt, de Koster, and van der Waal 2017; DellaPosta 2020; DiMaggio et al 2018; Friedkin et al 2016; Frye 2017; Goldberg 2011; Hunzaker and Valentino 2019; Rawlings and Childress 2019). These intellectually diverse research streams all point in the same direction—namely, toward a need for research on attitudes as forming more or less constrained systems at various levels of analysis (individuals, groups, and populations).…”

“…To date, attitude constraint has been inferred in cross-sectional surveys by examining the alignment of attitudes within groups (e.g., Baldassarri and Bearman 2007; DellaPosta 2020). Yet, attitude constraint should be observable as correlations among an individual’s attitude changes.…”