How Industries Polarize: Partisan Sorting of Young Adults, 1965-2022

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Methodology & American Political Economy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: American Political Economy

Abstract

Political polarization has risen steadily since the 1970s. One consequence of this rise in polarization has been the polarization of trust in institutions. The press, science, higher education, public schools, and organized labor are now trusted more by Democrats than Republicans, undermining shared trust and the ability of institutions to combat misinformation. Trust in business, the police, organized religion, and the military has also polarized in the opposite direction (Brady and Kent 2022). One explanation for this polarization of trust may be shifts in the partisanship of the people working in these industries. Not only do Americans’ partisanship increasingly align with their political party, but partisanship is also increasingly aligned with other salient characteristics, including educational attainment (i.e., the “diploma divide”), religiosity, media and consumption habits, and even neighborhood. As such, we argue that increased partisan polarization in trust in institutions may be rooted in more than just affective polarization. We propose polarization in trust may be rooted in accurate beliefs that particular institutions and industries have become increasingly dominated by members of a particular party—which, in turn, drives the asymmetric decline in institutional trust and embrace of misinformation that has been observed in contemporary US politics. We use nearly six decades of data (1965–present) from the Higher Education Research Institution (HERI), an annual survey of hundreds of thousands of freshman and senior students which measure their college majors, career aspirations, political attitudes, and ideologies. We argue that institutions and industries have become increasingly sorted along partisan and ideological lines over the last 60 years, and that these differences can be traced back to decisions about career intentions held in early adulthood.

Authors

• Max Kagan, Columbia Business School

• Thomas Bradley Kent, US Department of State