The Pew Research Center released in tri-annual survey data this month. As the headline on it states, Political Typology Reveals Deep Fissures on the Right and Left.
It’s very long - 15 pages including appendices - and I haven’t studied it thoroughly. In a quick skim for now, it’s obvious that the country is fractured along a large number of lines, of ideology, of values, of race, of income, and of where the country stands now and should go in the future. It’s hard to see any consensus on anything at all emerging from these splits.
This is sort of the definition of “not news” considering we can see that right here and probably everywhere else we look. Pew does do a better job of setting out the numbers than anyone else, though. They are always worth the read.
People are getting more partisan and ideologically cohesive.
**Adahar **posted something showing in another thread that only about 29% of democrats were liberals in 2000, which rose to 39% in 2011. Liberals are now at about 50% of democrats. I don’t know the stats offhand for GOP members who consider themselves conservative, but I assume that has also grown in the last few decades.
Either way, both parties have their ideological cores, which each make up about 1/4 of the electorate. On the right the core conservatives & country first conservatives and solid liberals on the left. So half the electorate is part of the ideological core, the other half has a strong preference but it is not set in stone, that is my impression.
The other groups are more lean, maybe 60-80% one party over another. The ideological core are about 100% one party over another. There are no republicans in the solid liberal group, just as there are no democrats in the core conservative or country first conservative groups.
ALso if you look at polling, on a lot of issues you’ll find that 90%+ of liberals disagree with country first & core conservatives on a lot of issues. So yeah people are pretty divided.
One issue is approval of Trump. Liberals have a 1% approval rating for him, core conservatives have a 93% approval. 1% of core conservatives think the democrats care about the middle class, 0% of solid liberals think the GOP cares about the middle class. Stats like that happen on a lot of questions.
I noticed the same thing. The “Hard Pressed Skeptic” group that I was in as of 2014, seems to have disappeared and gotten polarized into “Disaffected Democrats” and “Market Skeptic Republicans”, and now the quiz alternately puts me in either one depending on how I answer one of the questions.
I took the online quiz, and I don’t like how the questions exclude the middle. I think they’re introducing an appearance of polarization. I’m really disappointed in this year’s version.
I’m not disappointed but that’s because I didn’t have any hopes to begin with. I agree that for answers where the majority see shades of grey in a binary choice that it emphasizes polarization: even if the vast majority of conservatives answer one way and the vast majority of liberals answer the other, the nation still isn’t very divided over that particular issue if it was a tough call on both sides despite their final answer.
Agree with this. I took the quiz just for laughs and really wanted to answer “neither” for a lot of the questions. Wasn’t surprised when I wound up dissatisfied with how the quiz classified me; the classification description didn’t resonate with me at all.
Yes; I gave up after the first question: something along the lines of “the government should do more to help the poor, even if we go into debt” versus “we can’t afford any more help.” These choices are equally wrong. I’m a liberal, and I don’t believe in deficit spending to fund welfare programs. I believe in raising taxes to fund welfare programs, and deficit spending during recessions.
I think they cut corners in making the quiz. There should be more questions, more choices per question, and a rating for how important the issue is to you. Makes it harder to write the code, but I think would give better results. Other than homosexuality, nothing about social issues. But I got my expected Solid Liberal result, so for me at least it was accurate.