How Partisanship and Identity Have Structured US Public Opinion on Education

• In Event: Political Parties and American Democracy Mini-Conference III: The State of Polarization, Nationalization, and Identity in U.S. Schools

Abstract

If measured by the contentiousness of local school board meetings about topics such as
pandemic-induced school closures, Critical Race Theory in the classroom, and bathroom access for
transgender students, the last few years in K-12 education in the United States appear uniquely turbulent
(Feuer, 2021). Recent polling reveals large partisan divides on these and other emergent issues (Collins,
2021; 2022; Houston et al., 2022; Polikoff et al., 2022). However, our current era is hardly the first in which the front lines of American politics have breached the schoolhouse gate This project takes a step back from the contemporary political conflicts that have
enveloped elementary and secondary education policy in the US in order to consider the changing
relationship between partisanship and public opinion on K-12 education issues since the middle of the 20 th century.
I have begun by assembling nationally representative survey data on public attitudes regarding
school desegregation, school prayer, sex education, and school spending from the 1950’s onward from the
American National Election Study (ANES) and the General Social Survey (GSS). My analysis is organized around three main research questions. First, how do the
gaps in public opinion between self-identified Democrats and Republicans on issues regarding race, religion, sexuality, and education in the second half of the 20 th century compare to the gaps observed in recent polling on issues relating to similar themes? Second, as documented by Houston (2022), partisan gaps in public attitudes have widened across a range of contemporary education policies issues since
2007. To what extent do we observe a similar phenomenon when considering a much longer period of time? And third, if these gaps have widened since the 1950’s, what underlying shift in the nature of the two major political parties best accounts for this pattern: Is the increasing alignment between party
affiliation and education policy preferences primarily a function of the changing demographic compositions of the two parties, or is this phenomenon better explained by the growing divergence
between members of each party in terms of their beliefs about the role of identity in American life?
There is an extensive body of evidence documenting the ways in which the parties’ demographic
configurations have shifted over time. Beginning with the transition of the American South from a
reliably conservative Democratic region to a reliably conservative Republican region in the wake of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Carmines & Stimson, 1989) and accelerating
in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the election of Barack Obama as president (Podhorzer, 2022),
Americans have increasing sorted themselves into political parties in a manner that aligns with their
racial, ethnic, gender, educational, economic, religious, geographic, and ideological identities (Bafumi &
Shapiro, 2009; Levendusky, 2009; Mason, 2018). To the extent that these characteristics are related to
individuals’ education policy preferences, it follows that the changing demographic compositions of the
parties ought to be a key explanatory factor in any account of the widening partisan gaps in public opinion
on education issues. However, some scholars argue that an over-emphasis on partisans’ social identities
obscures the more fundamental role played by partisans’ beliefs about social identity, specifically with
respect to racial equity and the role of racism in American society (Abramowitz, 2018; Jardina, 2019;
Mason, 2018, Sides et al., 2018). These authors argue that racial resentment—one’s beliefs about the
importance of white identity and the extent to which whites are unfairly discriminated against
serves as a better predictor of presidential vote choice, and by extension partisan affiliation,
than individuals’ demographic characteristics alone.
To assess the applicability of these theories to the case of growing partisan polarization over
education issues, I track the changing relationships between individuals’ demographic characteristics and
whether their education policy preferences align with the modal response of their co-partisans. Likewise, I
track the analogous relationships between individuals’ racial resentment scores and the same indicators of
partisanship-preference alignment. In other words, are the widening partisan gaps we observe on
education issues better explained by the changing social identities of the Democratic and Republican

parties or by the parties’ changing beliefs about social identity? By documenting and evaluating these
trends, I seek to contribute to our understanding of how the political coalitions organizing K-12 education
policy have evolved since the middle of the 20 th century, generating insight into the nature of the conflicts
that currently animate the domain.

Author

• David Houston, George Mason University