How Polarised are Citizens? Measuring Ideology from the Ground up

Mirko Draca and Carlo Schwarz

The Economic Journal, 2024, vol. 134, issue 661, 1950-1984

Abstract: We investigate whether the ideological polarisation of citizens has increased in Western democracies. We propose a novel methodology to identify individual ideologies by applying latent Dirichlet allocation to political survey data. This approach indicates that questions related to confidence in institutions play a leading role in defining citizen ideologies, in addition to the questions associated with the traditional left-right scale. We decompose the shift in ideological positions across the population over time and measure polarisation. This reveals evidence of a ‘disappearing centre’ in a sub-group of countries with citizens shifting away from centrist ideologies into anti-establishment ‘anarchist’ ideologies. This trend is especially pronounced for the United States.

Date: 2024
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Related works:
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)
Working Paper: How Polarized are Citizens? Measuring Ideology from the Ground-Up (2019)
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