Moderates

• In Event: Ideology and Partisanship: Convergences and Divergences

Abstract

Moderates are often forgotten in modern research on American voters. To the extent that moderates have been studied, scholars have claimed that they’re actually closeted partisans, conflicted extremists, or unsophisticated about politics. We use survey data on tens of thousands of people across dozens of different policy areas to study and understand moderates. We develop a method to distinguish between genuine moderate, conflicted extremists, and people who don’t pay attention in surveys. Despite widespread claims about public polarization and hyper-partisanship, we find there are many citizens with moderate policy preferences across many surveys. Furthermore, most of the people who appear to be moderate (i.e., giving a mix of liberal and conservative answers to policy questions), seem to be genuinely moderate (i.e., they’re close to the center on an underlying left-right continuum). These moderates also behave differently than non-centrists but are sufficiently engaged to  largely determine the relative success of the parties across different elections. These results suggest a need for renewed attention on the middle of the American political distribution.

Authors

• Anthony Fowler, University of Chicago

• Seth J. Hill, University of California, San Diego

• Jeffrey B. Lewis, UCLA

• Chris Tausanovitch, University of California, Los Angeles

• Lynn Vavreck, University of California Los Angeles

• Christopher Warshaw, George Washington University