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The polarization of Democrats and Republicans in Congress is so well-known that it seems natural to conclude that the American public is polarizing, too. A recent Pew Research Center report generated headlines such as “Polarization is dividing American society, not just politics.” Ezra Klein called polarization “The single most important fact about American politics.” A prominent political scientist wrote a book titled “The Polarized Public.” And in the pages of this very blog, another prominent political scientist declared, “Americans are so polarized, they’re even polarized about polarization.”
This narrative is badly skewed. In fact, scholars do not agree that the American public has actually become more polarized. Our new research, forthcoming at the Journal of Politics, shows that although Americans disagree about many political issues, they have not become more polarized over the past 60 years.
Our research takes advantage of everything we know about people’s issue positions from the longest running and most respected survey in political science, the American National Election Studies. Unlike previous research, which tends to focus on changes in a few policy attitudes between two time periods, we use all of the survey questions about domestic policy that are available to us in 27 different surveys over 60 years.
