The Evolution of Political Ideology Axes in the United States, 1984–2020

• In Event: Measuring Public Opinion

Abstract

Significant strides have recently been made in mapping and understanding how political beliefs are organized in the US. In a major contribution, Baldassarri and Goldberg (2014) studied the organization of political beliefs by analyzing “relationality”, that is, how similarly or differently people shift their opinions across political issues. Using a Relational Class Analysis (RCA), a relationality measurement instrument, they found that the space of political opinions in the US was organized around three ideological axes: a standard “ideological” axis where support/rejection of public spending is positively correlated with liberal/conservative moral views, an “alternative” axis where opinions on both themes are negatively correlated, and an “agnostic” axis populated by people by individuals with low degrees of constraint in their political opinions. While RCA has proven valuable, in this paper we identify two issues that limit RCA’s ability to produce informative descriptions of political opinion spaces: one related to its mathematical underpinnings and another related to its poor adjustments to typical structures of opinion measurement in public opinion research. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a new method to measure relationality. This method, which we name Orientation Relational Analysis (ORA), explicitly separates relationality into orientation and magnitude components. Unlike RCA, ORA accommodates ordinal and neutral metrics to measure political opinion. By running simulations, we show that ORA performs systematically better than RCA in its capacity to detect underlying political relationality structures. By applying ORA to re-run BG’s analysis of the American political opinion space, we find little support for the existence of Baldassarri and Goldberg’s “alternative” ideology as a meaningful ideological axis in the United States. Instead, we find standard or traditional ideologues being accompanied by non-traditional ideologues organized along an axis that opposes morally liberal people that favor public spending and reject the existence of structural racism in the US to fiscal and moral conservatives that recognize systematic discrimination against blacks. We also find evidence of a shift in political opinion organization since 2016, where correlations of opinions on law and order and other topics start to take a distinctive shape relative to all other associations between political opinions.

Author

• Sergio Galaz García, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M)