United We Divide?: Education, Income, and Heterogeneity in Mass Partisan Polarization

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

“…4 They thus argue that the clarification associated with the increasing policy divergence of political elites does not close the gaps between citizen groups. Ellis and Ura (2008) also confirm that the strength of partisan thinking varies by levels of income and the formal education of citizens. They show that mass partisan salience on economic issues is most prominent among citizens with higher education and those with low incomes, whereas stronger mass partisanship in terms of cultural issues is found among citizens with less education and higher incomes.…”

“…Just as scholars have argued about whether mass publics have responded to growing elite polarization by increasingly taking more ideologically extreme positions, scholarly attention also has been given to other dimensions of mass reactions to ideological divisions in the U.S. Congress (Ellis and Ura 2008;Hetherington 2008;Levendusky 2010;Rogowski 2012). Indeed, from the electorate's side, as the political environment changes with growing partisan polarization among elites,citizens would not only be more likely to adopt ideologically polarized attitudes, but their political behavior, in terms of how they perceive or how they interact with politics, will likely change accordingly.…”

Backlash and Legitimation: Macro Political Responses to Supreme Court Decisions

“…Much of the variance in Stimson's mood index has been due to Americans’ changing preferences on issues of taxing and spending, and mood has traditionally been interpreted as a dimension of attitudes related to “scope of government”(e.g., Stimson ). However, aggregate preferences on issues of traditional morality (such as abortion and gay rights) increasingly correspond to the underlying mood dimension and contribute to the dynamics of mood as these issues “evolve” onto the primary dimension of ideological conflict in American national politics (Adams ; Ellis and Stimson ; Ellis and Ura ; Layman and Carsey ; Mulligan, Grant, and Bennett ; on similar issues among political elites, see McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal ) . The estimated mood time series therefore indicates a dimension of liberal‐conservative preferences across a reasonably comprehensive set of salient policy domains at issue in American national politics and which map onto the space of issues considered by the Supreme Court (see also McGuire and Stimson ).…”

“…Enns and Kellstedt (2007) and Ellis and Ura () show that the strength of the positive association between unemployment and mood is conditional on political sophistication. In the aggregate, therefore, the relatively high responsiveness of more sophisticated cohorts “averages out” with the relatively low responsiveness of less sophisticated cohorts. Using somewhat different data and modeling approaches, some scholars have continued to find a stronger association between unemployment on public opinion liberalism (Enns and Kellstedt 2007; Erikson, Stimson, and MacKuen ), whereas others show a weaker, more limited relationship between the two (Ellis and Ura ; Ura and Ellis ; Ura and Socker ). This mixed set of results suggests a need for care in modeling opinion dynamics that vary systematically across various social and political cleavages in general and about the dynamic consequences of unemployment for policy mood in particular.…”

Partisan Moods: Polarization and the Dynamics of Mass Party Preferences

“…For the most part, this work has concentrated on the roles of education, sophistication, and engagement in shaping public responsiveness and has challenged the conventional wisdom that aggregate opinion movements are driven by a small number of highly attentive, sophisticated citizens (e.g., Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002). Aggregate patterns of dynamic responsiveness to political and economic events are not significantly different across cleavages in education, income, voter status, and political knowledge (Ellis and Ura 2011;Ellis, Ura, and Robinson 2006;Enns and Kellstedt 2008;Page and Shapiro 1992;Ura and Ellis 2008;Wlezien and Soroka 2008). Taken as a whole, this literature supports the notion that the public is able to systematically update policy attitudes across divisions associated with access to information and the ability to process it.…”