How Polarized are Citizens? Measuring Ideology from the Ground-Up

Mirko Draca and Carlo Schwarz
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Mirko Draca: University of Warwick and Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) from University of Warwick, Department of Economics

Abstract: Strong evidence has been emerging that major democracies have become more politically polarized, at least according to measures based on the ideological positions of political elites. We ask: have the general public (‘citizens’) followed the same pattern? Our approach is based on unsupervised machine learning models as applied to issueposition survey data. This approach firstly indicates that coherent, latent ideologies are strongly apparent in the data, with a number of major, stable types that we label as: Liberal Centrist, Conservative Centrist, Left Anarchist and Right Anarchist. Using this framework, and a resulting measure of ‘citizen slant’, we are then able to decompose the shift in ideological positions across the population over time. Specifically, we find evidence of a ‘disappearing center’ in a range of countries with citizens shifting away from centrist ideologies into anti-establishment ‘anarchist’ ideologies over time. This trend is especially pronounced for the US.

Keywords: Polarization; Ideology; Unsupervised Learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cmp and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: How Polarised are Citizens? Measuring Ideology from the Ground up (2024)
Working Paper: How Polarized are Citizens? Measuring Ideology from the Ground-Up (2021)
Working Paper: How Polarized are Citizens? Measuring Ideology from the Ground-Up (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wrk:warwec:1218

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