Value Disagreement and Partisan Sorting in the American Mass Public

Abstract

Decades ago, research described American political culture in terms of consensus. Contemporary research, however, reaches opposite conclusions, arguing that the “culture war” that now defines American politics stems from value disagreements among partisan and ideological groups. What factors are at work in this transition from consensus to dissensus? This manuscript pulls from two literatures—one on American core political values and another on partisan-ideological sorting and affective polarization—and argues that the term dissensus best describes value preferences among individuals whose partisan and ideological identities are aligned. Among others, however, preferences on core political values are largely in consensus. First, using data from 2006 and 2019 and fitting geometric models of value preferences, I show that strong value disagreements exist primarily among sorted partisans. Next, I explore possible implications of such alignments and find that relationships among value preferences, political attitudes, and political behaviors are significantly stronger in sorted partisans. I close with a discussion of how theories undergirding affective polarization and partisan-ideological sorting can help the discipline better understand value conflict in the American mass public.

Affective polarization and the destabilization of core political values

“…And because values are thought to be stable (Searing et al, 2019), they can help produce consistent political behaviors among citizens who do not engage in ideological thinking (Zaller, 1992;Feldman, 2003). Indeed, many studies have shown values are associated with political attitudes, identities, and behaviors (e.g., Feldman, 1988;Jacoby, 2006Jacoby, , 2014Schwartz et al, 2010;Goren, 2012;Evans and Neundorf, 2020;Lupton et al, 2020;Ciuk 2022;Ollerenshaw and Johnston, 2022). Enders and Lupton (2021) extend this values literature, concluding that affective polarization between 1992 and 1996 increased as Americans made reasonable judgements about the values represented by parties, ideological groups, and presidential candidates.…”

Civility norm violations and political accountability

“…This lack of accountability for nasty rhetoric mirrors other, recent work on norm violations more generally, which finds that the public is blasé when confronted with norm violations. In a deeply divided public, where values are contested (Ciuk 2023) and partisanship structures even nonpolitical behaviors (Iyengar, Westwood, and Llekes 2019), punishment for wrongdoing is rarely guaranteed. Elites and ordinary citizens have symbolic and material incentives to downplay wrongdoing in the name of partisan self‐interest.…”

Drivers of disaster planning among African-American households

“…Similarly, political ideology is measured on an ordinal scale from liberal to conservative. We omit a measure of party identity due to the strong overlaps between party and ideology and the problems of applying party labels outside of non-white populations (Mason, 2015; Ciuk, 2023; Jefferson, 2020).…”