Mass Responses to Growing Elite Polarization in the U.S.: Ideological Extremism and Political Awareness

Abstract

In recent years scholars of American politics have paid a great attention to party elites' ideological polarization and the mass reactions to the changed political environment. Applying a novel empirical strategy, this study attempts to contribute to this body of literature examining the mass consequences of party elites' ideological polarization. More specifically, using the cumulative ANES (American National Election Study) survey , this paper examines how ordinary citizens have responded to the polarizing political environment in terms of changes in their ideological positions and levels of political awareness. In particular, assuming that mass effects of the polarized politics could be potentially heterogeneous in these two dimensions depending on citizens' existing positions in the distribution of dependent variables (i.e., ideological positions and political awareness), this study utilizes a quantile regression model to account for differential responses of citizen strata in addition to the ordinary regression analyses of conditional mean effect for the general electorate. Empirical findings here suggest that the general electorate not only becomes to perceive more ideological differences between the two parties, but they also tend to adopt more extreme positions on the ideological self-placement. In addition, this study demonstrates that the mass effects of growing congressional polarization are quite consistent across different strata of the electorate rather than being disproportionate. This result contrasts sharply with the claim of who argue that mass polarization is largely limited to the small subset of population with stronger ideological orientation.

How to measure political polarization in text-as-data? A scoping review of computational social science approaches

“…The use of CSS methods for the analysis of real-life and online political polarization, both by the political elite and the civil society, is increasing in the literature (Web Of Science, 2022), showing high-performance metrics within the field (Kursuncu et al, 2019;Shaw & Benkler, 2012). In this scoping review, we focused on text as data, which enabled us to encompass both real and online environments, as well as both players involved in political polarization: the political elite, composed by political party members; and the civil society, composed by civilians belonging to a specific country or political system (Lee, 2013). Despite increasing interest, CSS categorization methods are inconsistent, making it difficult to identify advantages and disadvantages for each problem use case, within the wide range available (Cantini et al, 2020;Esteve Del Valle et al, 2021;Serrano-Contreras et al, 2020).…”