“Things are Getting So Politically Polarized We Can’t Measure How Politically Polarized Things are Getting”

Sociologist Claude Fischer writes:

Polarization has been less a matter of Americans becoming extremists—most remain centrists or oblivious to politics—but more that politically engaged Americans have increasingly aligned their views, values, and even their practices, from where they live to what they drive to where they pray, with their politics.

He continues:

Both the surveys and the administrative data that researchers use to track polarization are increasingly distorted by polarization itself. . . .

Looking at polls taken over the years is the major way researchers observe trends in polarization. . . . Polling, however, has become extremely difficult. The percentage of Americans who agree to be polled has plummeted even for the best survey organizations and government agencies. The respected AP-NORC collaboration just reported a poll with “a cumulative response rate of 2.5%.” This trend partly reflects polling fatigue and partly political fatigue. In a 2023 Pew survey, 65% of respondents said that “they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics.” . . . Polarization itself shapes response rates. People who participate tend to be more partisan, more connected, and more informed and, so, more polarized, giving us overestimates of polarization. At the same time, reports of polarization in the polls seem to feed people’s sense that America is dividing into camps and in that way they increase future partisanship. . . .

Polarization also affects the answers respondents give. . . . partisans succumb to “motivated reasoning,” adopting and reporting their side’s supposed “facts.” For example, partisans believe and report that the economy is doing well if their party holds the White House, but believe and report that it is doing poorly if the other side holds the White House. . . . Some survey respondents even lean in to polarization by making assertions that they probably do not believe just to make a rhetorical point . . .

Fewer Americans are getting news through traditional journalism, if getting news at all. Perhaps as cause or as effect of this, American news media’s language has become much more negative in tone since 2000, especially since 2010: angrier, sadder, more disgusted. . . .

Other ways of assessing polarization are also being distorted by polarization . . . Voting data are increasingly affected by hyper-partisanship . . . threats against election officials and challenges to voter lists; finely-targeted, data-driven get-out-the-vote campaigns; misinformation online and in text message campaigns . . . Political partisanship is distorting census data as well. . . .

In summary:

American political polarization seems to have accelerated in ways making it harder for us to assess its acceleration.

20 year ago, some colleagues and I started a project on political polarization, culminating in our book Red State Blue State. We thought polarization was extreme then, but it’s only gotten worse (or better, I suppose some people might say).

One thing that’s been bugging me on all this is that political polarization as we see it now in the United States seems like it should be inherently unstable. Polarization is not based on voters being loyal to their own parties, so much as voters hating the other party. Most people don’t like Democrats or Republicans, and the motivation comes from voting against the other side. This does not seem like a stable equilibrium: you’d think there’d be an opening for a third party or, if that’s too difficult in our winner-take-all elections, that one or both major parties could split. But that hasn’t happened yet.