Political opinions have become more extreme in the last two decades. There is a sharp point of deepening division in 2004. While for most of the 1990s the Republicans and the Democrats tended to overlap considerably and the Republicans to become more “liberal,” after 2004 – 2008, the members of the two parties have started to have less in and less in common ideologically.
The chart above, published by the Pew Research Center, reveals the ideological drift in stark contrast. The black lines represent the location of the median Republican or Democrat on an imaginary horizontal line of political polarization. The horizontal axis reflects an index of conservatism vs. liberalism derived from answers to 10 questions asked by Pew researchers over more than 20 years. The questions captured political values through questions about the importance of government in public life, the causes of poverty, or racial relationships. The researchers made the assumption that ideological affiliation is not the same as political affiliation and that the answers will position both Democrats or liberals on the same scale, albeit at different locations. In effect, the questions allow people to identify themselves as “liberal republicans” or “conservative Democrats,” as, in fact, it often happens. As the lines move right or left, the distribution of ideological preferences in the two parties moves with them. If the two lines go in the opposite directions, the two parties are becoming polarized ideologically. What we see is that while for the 1990s the two lines swung together left, after 2004 they swung apart.
Although the data cannot tell us what created the polarization directly, we can speculate that the continuation of the Middle East wars in the second Bush presidency and the controversies surrounding the social-economic policies of the Obama administration have lead to a deep division motivated and exacerbated by ideological noise. It is also probable that the trauma of the 2008 crisis has also had an important role to play in the division of opinions and options. What do you think?
