Are Party Messages Making Americans More Ideological?

• In Event: Parties and Partisanship in the US

Abstract

Elite polarization between Democratic and Republican elected officials has clarified the party’s positions, made the American public more aware of their ideological differences, and reduced mismatching between voters’ ideological labels and their partisanship. But do the parties’ messages lead voters to think about their political choices through the lens of the left-right ideological spectrum?

Americans have long been considered ideologically “innocent,” based in part on their inability to explain their opinions of the parties and presidential candidates by clearly stating how their own ideological labels and policy positions map onto those of the parties. We return to the same American National Election Studies (ANES) open-ended responses to clarify that both Democrats and Republicans have become more likely to conceptualize politics ideologically, through both the use of ideological concepts and identification of the alignments of the parties on numerous policy issues. But Democrats and Republicans have become more likely to be ideologues at different rates and in distinct elections, partially in response to the rhetoric from each party’s presidential nominees.

To assess the connections between elite messages and public conceptualization, we link data from content analyses of party platforms, convention speeches, and presidential debate answers for each election since 1972 with updated categorizations of voters’ understanding based on Philip Converse’s canonical measure of their “levels of conceptualization.” Overall, the percentage of voters who are concept ideologues has increased from 25 to 33% while the percentage of voters who are policy-based ideologues has increased from 3 to 11%. But Republican voters have been consistently more likely to be concept ideologues than Democrats, matching the much more common ideological language used by Republican candidates. In elections when Democratic nominees have used more ideological rhetoric, such as 1984 and 2016, their voters have followed. Democratic politicians have more often spoken about social groups in the party coalitions throughout the period, which helps explain why their voters more frequently invoke group benefits to explain their choices.

We also categorize the policy issue emphases of the parties and voters to see if and how they are linked. Both parties are mentioning more policy issues over time and focusing more on social issues relative to economic and foreign policy; that mirrors trends among voters. The rising salience of social issues like gun control and abortion, may help voters more easily place themselves relative to the parties. Elections where these issues are emphasized see more policy-based differentiation by voters. We compare the potential effects of party messages with those of other factors that may explain increasing voter conceptualization, such as the rise in Americans’ educational attainment over time. Both voter characteristics and elite messages matter and they interact to better enable transmission of elite conceptualizations of politics to an increasingly large group of educated voters.

The results are updated through 2016 and help to explain change in the last election. Bernie Sanders, as an avowed Democratic socialist and progressive, led his primary voters to be more likely to explain politics in ideological language and led his party to adopt more progressive language in its platform. Donald Trump used ideological language less frequently and invoked social groups more often, leading his primary supporters to invoke less ideological language and even moving some ideological Republicans to abandon the party in the general election. That suggests that the 2020 Democratic nominee could have a large effect on voters’ attitudes. Sanders’ supporters may be correct that their candidate could help transform their party into a more ideologically pure party, both in its rhetoric and its voting coalition.

Our results suggest that, although elites have helped lead the public, ideological polarization has not been purely an elite phenomenon. The American public is becoming more ideological in its conceptualization of politics, not just adopting party stances or developing more negative attitudes about the other political party. Voters have increasingly learned about the policy positions and ideological views of the parties and are more adept at using that knowledge to make and explain their political choices. Although half of the electorate still lacks ideological or policy sophistication, the other half of the American public is no longer so ideologically innocent.

Authors

• Matt Grossmann, Michigan State University

• Martin P. Wattenberg, UC, Irvine