Are American voters really as polarized as they seem? Research suggests “yes”

A new study of American voters by researchers at Rice University and Stanford University shows that although response rates to political surveys are falling, people are more polarized than ever.

Evidence of political polarization in the United States comes largely from a single source, the American National Election Studies (ANES) sensation thermometer time series. While historical response rates have reached 80%, the response rate in recent years has fallen below 50%.

“The declining survey response rate has called into question the accuracy of reports of extreme political divisions, which is why we wanted to dig deeper. Additionally, more people are responding to surveys online rather than going door to door,” said Matthew Tyler, an assistant professor of political science at Rice and lead author of the study published online in the American Journal of Political Science.

To assess whether the survey provides an accurate measure of political polarization, Tyler and study co-author Shanto Iyengar of Stanford examined several reasons why the ANES might make polarization appear worse than in reality it is not.

For example, some people who really care about their political party might be overrepresented in the survey; people who identify strongly with their party might be more likely to participate, which could make the results appear more extreme; reading articles about politics while taking the survey may make people feel more negatively about the other party; and letting people complete the survey online could yield different results.

“Our results suggest that the way the ANES survey is conducted may make affective polarization worse than it actually is. But even after accounting for this, we found that people still become more negative toward “other part over time,” Tyler said. . “This shows that the increase in negative feelings toward the other party is real and not just a result of the way surveys are conducted.”

To reach this conclusion, the researchers compared the ANES survey with the much less political General Social Survey, described as “the only full-probability personal interview survey designed to track changes in social characteristics and attitudes currently being conducted in the USA “. “.

The researchers then designed a survey evaluation method that mimicked less politically charged questionnaires that asked about lifestyle choices, living environments, consumer decisions, culinary preferences and other information .

“The idea behind this survey design was to target and assess people who were not on the far left or far right on the political spectrum,” Tyler said. “We wanted to better understand what people think about the current political environment.”

Ultimately, researchers found that even more mainstream Americans feel more polarized than ever. Tyler said he hopes future work will examine how this can be reduced, especially as people spend more time on social media and don’t interact in person as much as in the past.