How to Measure Polarization

Full Audio episode available on Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/posts/is-polarization-149962215

Full Video episode available on Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/posts/149974348

• Many of the empirical trends mentioned come from the (still a favorite!) American National Election Studies dataset:

  • Party identity (including strength of party identity)

  • Affective polarization (specifically shown here as the gap between attitudes towards in-group and out-group ideologies)

  • Trust in government index 

  • Public opinion on LGBTQ laws 

  • Public opinion on abortion

  • Public opinion on government spending

• The observation of “party sorting” was initially made by political scientists Morris Fiorina. It’s most extensively written about in his book Unstable Majorities, but you can read some other writings here and here.

  • For further reading, see also Matthew Levendusky’s book The Partisan Sort

• A fantastic overview of the research on affective polarization is in this review article

• An interesting example of a recent application of using affective polarization to make sense of public opinion during Covid is here (we didn’t reference it; I just think it’s cool — and it’s a preview of our guest for the next episode!).

• I also wrote about all this in The Daily Beast, though I did not write the headline and would never actually sound that confident about anything.