Toward a Shared Ideological Currency: Ideological Affective Polarization & the Changing Structure of Ideology in the U.S.

Abstract

Much scholarly attention has focused on partisan affective polarization, a growing animosity between Democrats and Republicans in the mass public. Less notice has been given to affective polarization among the ideological teams, liberals, and conservatives. Yet, we suggest that given ideology’s particular influence in U.S. politics, ideological affective polarization has important and distinct consequences. We begin by offering evidence that ideological affective polarization both exists and has increased sharply in recent years. We theorize that this shift alters the way individuals come to form attachments to ideological identities, as well as the structure and tenor of ideology in the United States.

Keywords

ideology ideological identification affective polarization

The recent trend toward affective polarization amongst the American public is both an anecdotal—felt and reported by many—and an empirically supported finding (e.g., Enders, 2021; Finkel et al., 2020; Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012; Iyengar and Westwood 2015). Scholars have identified its roots in both ideological and social sorting of partisan coalitions (e.g., Abramowitz and Webster 2018; Iyengar et al. 2019; Levendusky 2009; Mason 2015, 2016, 2018; Mason and Wronski 2018) and the rise of partisan and social media (Berry & Sobieraj 2014; Druckman et al. 2019; Finkel et al. 2020; Lelkes, Sood, and Iyengar, 2017; Settle 2018). Furthermore, and pointing to the unlikelihood of retreat, recent work has demonstrated new age cohorts are entering the electorate more affectively polarized than their predecessors (Phillips 2022), and that the onset of partisan polarization emerges in adolescence (Tyler and Iyengar 2023).

Much empirical research has trained attention on the troubling political consequences of affective polarization. For example, Hetherington and Rudolph (2015) find that citizens' levels of basic political trust in government is highly contingent upon in- and out-party control. Perhaps more egregiously, Graham and Svolik (2020) demonstrate that only a small number of citizens prioritize democratic principles when they are pitted against their partisan identifications. Polarization, their work demonstrates, sharply undermines the public’s ability to serve as a democratic check. Compelling research likewise reveals that non-political consequences of affective polarization are no less pervasive. McConnell et al. (2018) find that partisanship often “spills over” beyond political settings, affecting cooperation across various situations typical in everyday life, while Iyengar and Westwood (2015) document remarkable partisan discrimination in survey experiments of scholarship allocations for graduating high-school seniors. Further, Shafranek (2021) finds that college students prefer roommates who share their political leanings, while Huber and Malhotra (2017) show that online dating preferences are heavily reliant on political homophily. In brief, there is no shortage of evidence that polarization has sincere and wide-ranging political and non-political ramifications.

While the disciplinary and democratic implications of this extensive body of work is unquestionably important, focusing the analytical lens in the other direction—considering how affective polarization may influence the micro-level formation of partisan and ideological group attachments that underlie it—remains relatively unexplored.

This empirical gaze guides the present study. Research in political psychology has done much to help us understand dispositional and motivational forces that drive ideological identities (for an overview, see Jost 2021). While some research in this field has likewise considered how these attachments are shifted by situational or environmental forces, such as system threat (Jost et al. 2003), fear of death (e.g., Landau et al. 2004), and terrorism (e.g., Willer 2004), this body of research has focused less on potential alterations to the underlying process by which individuals form their ideological attachments in the wake of these situational shifts to their environments. In the present study, we do exactly this by asking how the rise in ideological affective polarization has durably affected the underlying content and structure ideological identifications in the U.S.

Focusing on ideology (instead of partisanship) is a deliberate choice, one informed by ideology’s particular potency in the political realm. Ideological attachments are primarily symbolic in nature (e.g., Conover and Feldman 1981), less informed and influenced by cognitive content like policy and issue-based positions. Instead, ideology is best understood as “gut-level,” driven by connections to symbols and groups that have an affective charge for most Americans. Ideology “is increasingly argued to be at least partially anchored in rapid, implicit evaluations that spring from deep psychological and dispositional mechanisms” (Hatemi, Charles, and Smith, 2019; Hibbing, Smith, and Alford, 2013). All of this, in turn, makes ideology particularly powerful as a political and heuristic tool. That is, the gut-level, symbolic nature of ideology means it easy for politicians to cue—calling oneself a “conservative,” for example, has immense summative—and extra-political—power. So does calling one’s opponent “out” as a “liberal.” Ideological terms transcend politics and signal—without need for political sophistication—morality, worldviews, and values. In other words, ideology can simplify politics so that issue positions are often secondary.

We argue that, for ideological self-identification, the impact of persistent heightened animosity in the political and social realms, alongside other accompanying developments like the explosion of partisan news and social media, have been substantial, shifting what the terms “liberal” and “conservative” mean, and in turn, the process by which Americans come to identify with an ideological team. In other words, we argue that the contemporaneous situational force of affective polarization has altered the very content and structure of ideological identifications in the United States. The result is a reciprocal relationship in which changes to in political realm alter the meaning of the ideological identities themselves, and those ideological identities in turn drive certain behaviors and conceptualizations of the political realm.

Our study proceeds as follows: we begin by situating our study in the broader debate around ideology and its existence among the American public. We then rely upon compelling, extant literature to overview the shift in political climate, demonstrating that ideological affective polarization is indeed prevalent in the United States. Then, we build upon the work of Conover and Feldman (1981) to develop and rethink a micro-level model of self-identification in the wake of increased affective polarization. We thus review their model and the key findings that have guided understandings of ideological social identity to ground our proposed revisions. In brief, we suggest that we are no longer operating in an environment concomitant with their findings around the content and structure of ideological identification, which they eloquently summarized in their seminal work by positing, “that liberals and conservatives view the political world not from different sides of the same coin, but rather, if you will, from the perspective of entirely different currencies” (624). In other words, we call into question non-bipolarity in both the content and the structure of ideological identification in the U.S. Specifically, in the wake of the contemporaneous situational force of sharp increases in affective polarization, we challenge the hypothesis that (1) “liberal” and “conservative” are not structured as two ends of a single dimension and that (2) the “criterial referents,” or symbols and groups, that form the bulk of the content of ideological label meaning are unidirectional in nature. To test empirically our hypotheses, we leverage both “snapshot” and longitudinal data from the American National Election Study (ANES) that help us develop a deeper understanding of the evolving meaning of the ideological groups in the U.S. These investigations uncover both a bipolar nature of ideology in the United States and a shared, but oppositional, symbolic meaning of ideological labels—two empirically changed features of ideology. In our revisions to this model, we rely heavily upon an understanding of ideology from the social psychology lens, like that of Jost (2006; 2021) and others outlined in the next section. Pushing back against long held perceptions of a non-ideological American public, Jost (2006) argues for a deeply ideological public, and one that is increasingly so. Our results support this finding. We conclude by considering the implications for these changes in the nature and structure of ideological identity.

Differing Perspectives on Ideology

Ideology—specifically its existence and influence among the public—has been long debated in the political science literature. Converse (1964) argued that much of the American public is effectively non-ideological, finding that only a small, politically sophisticated strata could articulate a set of consistent positions organized around philosophical beliefs. Much research informed by this notion of a non-ideological public followed and persists (e.g., Kinder and Kalmoe 2017). In their model of ideological identity formation, Conover and Feldman (1981), allowed both issue-based and symbol-based referents to inform evaluations of ideological labels, and thus, ideological attachments. In discovering that that symbolic associations of social groups to each ideological label better predicted ideological self-identification than policy positions, their work uncovered evidence in favor of Converse’s (1964) stringent definition of “ideological” in that a constrained set of policy preferences did not undergird the dominant meaning of the ideological labels. Simultaneously, however, their analysis of the symbolic associations with the ideological labels revealed two distinctly defined labels separated by major cleavages in society, particularly that of change versus the preservation of traditional values. While a majority of Americans may not have connected their feelings about taxes to their ideology, they did see the connection between their ideology and larger debates over the trajectory of society as captured by the groups competing for power. Such a bifurcation of ideology as issue-based and symbol-based has been adopted broadly, and supported, in the literature (e.g., Ellis and Stimson 2012; Felman and Johnston 2014; Klar, 2014; Coggins and Stimson 2018; Grossman and Hopkins 2016).

Important to our interest in the changing political landscape, Conover and Feldman (1981) found that despite the symbols of change being associated with evaluations of liberals and the symbols of preservation of traditional values being associated with conservatives, much of the public did not see the two as oppositional. In their findings (later updated by Zschirnt, 2011), the social groups positively associated with “liberals” had little overlap with those positively (or negatively) linked with “conservatives.” Furthermore, a positive affect towards “liberals” or “conservatives” was only weakly correlated with a negative affect towards the other. Taken together, instead of representing opposing views of the same spectrum, they concluded that liberals and conservatives operated in different currencies. Nearly 30 years later, Zschirnt (2011) replicated these findings.

Entering the debate from the vantage point of social psychology, Jost (2006, 2021) more astutely confronts Converse (1964), arguing that using a stringent definition for ideology created a bar few Americans beyond the political elite could meet, and critically, overlooked the more central functioning of ideology. Borrowing from Tedin (1987), Jost defines political ideology as “an interrelated set of moral and political attitudes that possesses cognitive, affective, and motivational components. That is, ideology helps to explain why people do what they do; it organizes their values and beliefs and leads to political behavior” (Jost, 2006, 653). Policy positions to be structured coherently are a “peripheral” facet of ideology, or at least far less central, according to Jost, than the two “core” facets: attitudes toward inequality, and attitudes toward social change versus tradition. Notably, Jost’s two “core” factors of ideology map well onto Conover and Feldman (1981) and Zschirnt’s (2011) conclusions around the core symbolic meaning of the labels. In broadening the definition of ideology, Jost illustrates a deeply ideological American public, and one that is increasingly so.

This social psychological understanding of political ideology recognizes that beliefs are “at least partially motivated by subjective considerations such as epistemic needs for knowledge and meaning, existential needs for safety and reassurance, and relational needs for affiliation and social identification” (Jost 2006, 655). The relational needs, along with an awareness of the interplay of dispositional and situational factors on individuals' identification with liberal and conservative symbols and opinions, speak to the work of Malka and Lelkes (2010) and others in the social identity theory vein (Devine 2015; Barber and Pope 2019). Under the hood, we suspect that psychological attachments to ideological in-groups, also known as ideological social identity (ISI), has increased over time. Environmental stimuli such as heated electoral competitions or heavy exposure to extreme ideological media has been shown to enhance these psychological ideological attachments (e.g., Devine 2015). In line with prior research (e.g., Settle 2018), we suggest this is increasingly the environment in which citizens are operating and socialized. In the present context, this means that an environment characterized by high affective polarization shifts the meaning of “liberal” and “conservative,” and in turn, these shifts exacerbate affective polarization.

Social identities, research has long demonstrated, fulfill the deeply ingrained psychological needs for a sense of inclusion in a group and differentiation from other groups, and motivate feelings of disgust and anger toward the out-group, even when nothing substantial undergirds the division between “us” and “them” (Tajfel et al. 1979; Brewer 2001). The centrality of group identification in social identity theory further underscores the continued relevance of Conover and Feldman (1981), specifically their evidence that “liberal” and “conservative” derive symbolic meaning from their connection to salient social groups. That ideological identity functions as a social identity shows how ideology can fulfill the relational needs of many Americans. These relational needs, however, are just one facet of ideology’s psychological function; to view the ideological labels as simply identifiers devoid of substance, meaning, and the power to organize beliefs would be reductive.

Jost (2006; 2021) and other scholars of social identity theory have added much to conversations about ideology in recent years, moving from the realm of Converse’s (1964) non-ideological public to understanding Americans as ideological across core issues and deeply divided between in-group and out-group teams. We aim to add to this conversation by considering how a dominant situational force like affective polarization might alter the content and structure of ideology in the United States.

A Changed Political Landscape

Essential to positing if and how the process of ideological identity formation has changed over time is taking stock of the serious shifts in the American political landscape over the past few decades—that is, the changing situational factors.

The theory that perhaps most succinctly encapsulates a wide range of changes in the fabric of American politics is that of “mega-identities” (Mason, 2015; Mason and Wronski 2018). Over time, previously non-political group affiliations have increased in political salience and Americans have sorted—shifting either partisanship or identities—into two distinctive teams (Mason 2015). An association of the “correct” race-party alignment formed and strengthened, especially over the last 30 or so years, and then at a sharp rate after the election of Barack Obama in 2008 (Black and Black 1987; Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2018; Tesler and Sears 2010). Americans also sorted along religious and ideological lines into “correct” partisan alignments (Abramowitz and Saunders 2008; Mohseni and Wilcox 2008; Levine, Carmines, and Huckfeldt 1997; Bafumi and Shapiro 2009; Levendusky 2009). Mason (2015) coins the result of this increased social sorting the formation of “mega-identities”: partisanship serves as a heuristic for not only individuals’ party affiliation but also their ideological identity, race, and religion.

Each identity carries strong psychological attachments on their own; when aligned, they are intensely powerful. Psychological attachment to identities, affective polarization, in-partisan bias, activism, and anger towards threat and out-group members all increase, especially when individuals are aware of the “correct” alignment of their multiple social identities (Mason, 2015; Mason and Wronski 2018). Interestingly, an imbalance has emerged between the potency of in-group love and out-group dislike, with negative sentiments toward the other driving recent affective polarization more than increasing in-party love (Finkel et al. 2020). Not only do these mega-identities foster even stronger psychological attachments, but they serve as easily understood cues as to who—which social groups—each team consists of and represents (Mason and Wronski 2018).

These dynamics are only reinforced by the high-choice, partisan news environment in which the U.S. now operates (Lelkes, Sood, and Iyengar, 2017; Berry & Sobieraj, 2014). The decline of broadcast news particularly after the Reagan administration’s repeal of the Federal Communications Commission’s 1949 “fairness doctrine” enabled the rise of partisan news networks and commentary, like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and MSNBC (Finkel et al. 2020). Psychological biases lead individuals already slanted ideologically to seek out confirming content, and consumption of such content reinforces sectarianism (Finkel et al. 2020).

The same user choices that facilitate the polarizing consequences of partisan news consumption pervade social media networks as well. In fact, Settle (2018) argues that Facebook in particular is “uniquely suited to facilitate psychological processes of polarization: identity formation and reinforcement, biased information processing, and social interference and judgment” (8). Such platforms, she argues, perpetuate negative and stereotyped views of those holding opposing views. Relatedly, Rathje et al. (2021) outline three main cognitive biases that social media design and algorithms exacerbate—information seeking, belief updating, and belief sharing—which all may increase political polarization. Social media enables greater selective exposure to congruent political news, amplifies the most extreme viewpoints in competing for user attention, and incentivizes divisive messages that foster perceptions of threat. Posts about the political out-group are more likely to be shared than those about the political in-group, and, relating to the alignment into mega-identities, for every additional out-group descriptor, the odds of a post being shared increased by 67% (Rathje, Bavel, and van der Linden 2021). The incentives, in an attention economy, to feed users content that fosters outrage may directly impact ideological polarization even more than partisan or other divides due to the potency of moral-emotional messages within in-group networks (Brady et al. 2017). Thus, while such platforms may not be the core driver of political polarization, they do play a facilitating and mutually reinforcing role (Rathje, Bavel, and van der Linden 2021; Finkel et al. 2020; Settle 2018).

Since our interest centers on the effects of these shifts on how Americans come to form their own ideological identifications, understanding the timeline matters. Mega-identities coalesced over time, with evidence of realignment along partisan, racial, and religious lines spanning the past 50 or more years. However, shifts along racial lines—specifically the flight of less educated White voters from the Democratic Party—took off with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 (Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2018). Race, one of the most salient identities, was subsequently more widely activated in the political realm from 2008 and even more so in 2016 (Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2018). While the “fairness doctrine” was repealed in 1987 and the rise of partisan news precedes the turn of the century, social media’s proliferation is much more recent. In 2005, Pew Research reports that only 5% of American adults used at least one social media platform.¹ By 2011, that had risen to half of all Americans, and by 2021, 72% of the American public engaged with social media.

While the political realm is ever changing, substantial shifts have occurred in the past two decades, culminating in a sharp increase in affective polarization.

Setting the Stage: Ideological Affective Polarization

We argue that the contemporaneous forces of social sorting and the resultant affectively polarized environment impel the shifts we predict in ideological label meaning, self-identification process, and ideological structure. We ground our investigation by demonstrating a climate of increasing ideological affective polarization in the U.S. electorate to corroborate that change in the ideological political climate have indeed occurred. Following the approach and reasoning used by Iyengar et al. (2019) in their investigation of partisan polarization, we utilize longitudinal feeling thermometer data from the ANES. For our purposes, respondents are asked to rate liberals and conservatives from cold (0) to warm (100). Affective polarization is calculated as the difference between the score a respondent gives to their own ideological team and the score given to the opposing ideological group. Figure 1 reveals a growing ideologically affectively polarized political climate, with a noticeable uptick in 2008, due largely to out-group ratings (as opposed to in-group ratings). Interestingly, where Iyengar, et al. (2019) found a decrease in affective partisan polarization between 2012 and 2016, we instead observe a continued rise in ideological affective polarization after 2008.

What stands out among both measures, but is especially pronounced for ideology, is the significant shifts beginning around 2008. We believe that the forces altering the ideological identity formation process are inextricably linked to social sorting and resulting affective polarization in the political arena broadly. Dozens of studies and commentaries have been crafted about U.S. politics post-2008, and we suggest (and agree with others who have waded into these waters) that the power of social sorting took a strong hold, leading to ideological affective polarization, and a sharpening of ideological meaning in U.S. politics. Out-group dislike grew for partisanship, but especially for ideology. We stated earlier that ideology is a more gut-level attachment than partisanship, one less tied to specific policy and often even political referents. Instead, ideology often transcends politics, tapping into individuals' cultural, social, racial, and religious beliefs and preferences. Furthermore, the racialized tenor of the American landscape post President Obama’s first election has been well-documented (e.g., Tesler 2016), and we believe the sharp increase in out-group dislike is closely linked to racial (and other relevant cultural) preferences represented especially well by ideology.

Given this situational change, we believe a reevaluation of existing models of ideological identity formation is necessary.

A Theory of Shared Currency

We conjecture that the combined impact of social sorting into mega-identities, alongside the seismic proliferation in partisan and social media, and resulting environment of increased affective polarization has shifted the structure of meaning undergirding the terms “liberal” and “conservative” held by the American public. We thus suggest that the pathway to liberal identification and the pathway to conservative identification are no longer wholly distinct amidst an environment saturated with out-group distaste. That is, the two no longer rest on disparate “criterial referents,” (Kerlinger 1967) and the structure of ideology is no longer non-bipolar. The question, therefore, is how do these contemporaneous forces change the structure of ideological label meaning and the identification process, and thus the structure of ideology in the U.S.—what is the causal mechanism?

To start, identifying the out-group has grown easier with increasing social sorting as mega-identities draw clear lines around all of one’s in- and out-groups. At the extreme, the Black, non-Christian, liberal Democrats are pitted against the white, Christian, conservative Republicans, with both groups vying for the right to shape the contours of American life. Even when not taken to the extreme, schemas for “a liberal” and “a conservative” exist, and include relationships to religious and racial groups, among others. A claim to one identity denotes a claim to related identities; a threat to one identity is perceived as a threat to all identities and group affiliations. While partisanship is the clearest divide between the teams electorally, the two mega-identities embodied by the party labels represent more than just party alliance: they denote two sides of a deep cleavage in American politics, of which ideological identity is a core component.

Therefore, the conflict perceived between “liberals” and “conservatives” is no longer just a conflict between “liberals” and “conservatives” in its psychological effect. In the ideological out-group, individuals now perceive a multitude of identity threats: ideological, racial, religious, partisan and more, and that cumulative effect impels people to hold their identities closer; that is, with more emotion. People love their in-group more and they especially dislike their out-groups more. They know who is on their team and who is not. And, in a political moment of such heightened emotion, specifically anger and fear, newly politicized groups and stimuli are quickly classified into the “us” or the “them” as a means of psychological defense.

Taken together, we believe that social sorting and the resultant affective polarization have shifted the way individuals see the two ideological labels. “Liberal” and “conservative” once represented discrete perspectives on the political world because the symbols central to one’s meaning did not significantly overlap with those central to the other’s meaning. The increasingly negative sentiments that permeate the American political environment have seeped into the meaning of the ideological labels and altered that reality. To select one label is no longer simply to stand with certain social groups; it is to stand with one’s social groups, and, critically, to take a stance against the threatening others. Feelings of warmth toward one label cannot be divorced from feelings of distaste toward the other. In this way, the groups and images and “criterial referents” of one ideological team are tethered to, and no longer distinct from, the other ideological team. Thus, the pathways to a liberal identification are not distinct from pathways to a conservative identification. In sum, we suggest that the two ideological labels now operate in an atmosphere of shared currency.

The Model, Revisited

How does this alter the model of ideological self-identification? By way of example, consider an individual answering the ideological self-identification survey question. Following the model of Conover and Feldman (1981) and adopted by Zschirnt (2011) and others displayed in Figure 2, when an individual feels warmly towards those social groups pushing against the status quo—feminists, environmentalists—and she associates “liberals” with those groups, she is likely to select the liberal label as her ideological identification. Importantly, in this model, those referent groups more associated with the conservative label are simply not as salient in this individual’s identification process. Additionally, this individual likely did not report a strongly negative affect for those insignificant groups for two central reasons: the emotional temperature of the political realm was turned down, and they were being asked only about ideology in a time when mega-identities simply were not prevalent. Some liberals, of course—political elites or those with high levels of political awareness and involvement—may have held more negative evaluations of conservatives and their associated groups, but at the aggregate level, the model predicts, and empirical evidence has supported, that positive evaluations of one label were neither correlated with negative evaluations of the other label, nor indicative of negative evaluations of the other’s associated social groups (Conover and Feldman 1981; Zschirnt 2011).

We suggest that in an ideologically affectively polarized environment, this process looks quite different. In such an environment, the prevalence of mega-identities broaden the “criterial referents” considered when respondents are asked to affectively evaluate their own ideological group. Likewise, in a more polarized environment respondents are more apt to have an acute understanding of the ideological “out-group” and its referent groups, and have a strong negative sentiment toward them. In practice, this means that evaluations of the liberal label are likely not independent of evaluations of the conservative label: the two are deeply intertwined because liberal means, in part, a stance against “conservative” and the groups linked with it. And, the choice to identify with the liberal label is both a choice for liberal and a choice against conservatism—a process divergent from previous times.

This theory leads to a set of hypotheses related to changes to the original model of ideological identification. Specifically, we suggest that parameters d, e, f, and g are not unidirectional. That is, parameter d, in which Symbol A is a referent for evaluation of liberals, can also serve as a referent for the evaluation of conservatives.

Hypothesis 1

Relevant symbols (ANES societal groups) of evaluations of liberals (conservatives) will also serve as relevant symbols of evaluations for conservatives (liberals). In particular, we predict that positive correlates of liberals (conservatives) will be negative correlates of conservatives (liberals).

Relatedly, we also propose that parameter c, which should approach zero in a non-bipolar structure, will in fact become more negatively associated over time. The evaluations of liberals and conservatives will become more closely linked in an affectively polarized environment created by social sorting.

Hypothesis 2

Over time, the correlation between evaluations of liberals and evaluations of conservatives will grow increasingly negative and significant.

It is worth noting that we do not take issue with the core expectations around the content of the model of ideological identification offered by Conover and Feldman, and others studying the content of the liberal and conservative labels in U.S. politics. In fact, we agree that the central symbolic meaning of the liberal and conservative labels “revolve around elements of ‘change vs. the preservation of traditional values’” and “reflect in symbolic terms the dominant cleavages in society” (643). If anything, we expect to uncover evidence that further confirms this claim.

Hypothesis 3

The criterial referents (ANES societal groups) of the liberal label will represent those promoting or representing societal change, while the criterial referents of the conservative label will represent those promoting or representing the preservation of traditional values.

We turn now to an empirical investigation of the currency of ideological labels, attempting to understand how changes in the political climate have affected the way in which individuals form ideological attachments.

Three Analyses

We offer a set of three analyses that contrast the “different currencies” and “non-bipolar structure” findings which have defined the content and structure of ideology in the U.S.

We seek to demonstrate change along these two dimensions, and thus must demonstrate empirically substantial shifts in three ways: (1) symbolic meaning scales and their components, (2) the correlation between socially and politically relevant social groups and the ideological labels, and (3) the correlation between evaluations of “liberals” and “conservatives.”

Different Currencies?

In a climate defined by ideological affective polarization, we expect to find that the symbols and referents for liberals will be closely related—albeit affectively opposite—to those of the conservative label (and vice versa).

To test our proposition that not only are the two ideological labels perceived as increasingly antagonistic and bipolar by the American public but also that the two now overlap in the content of their meaning, we employ a “snapshot” approach, followed by a longitudinal view to corroborate change over time. Following core methodological choices of Conover and Feldman (1981), we rely upon feeling thermometer scores for liberals and conservatives, as well as feeling thermometer scores for different groups in society as proxies for symbolic sources of ideological meaning. As discussed above, much literature has demonstrated the primarily symbolic nature of identity-based ideology, so our shared belief in the associational nature of political schemas undergirds this methodological choice.²

For completeness, we utilize all available and relevant feeling thermometer scores in the 2020 data, listed in Table 1 alongside summary statistics for each item.

Table 1.

Summary Statistics of Feeling Thermometer Groups, 2020.

ANES Variable	Observations	Mean	Std. Dev.
Scientists	7367	78.020	20.921
Black people	7098	71.915	21.208
Christians	7344	71.543	24.879
Hispanics	7109	71.457	20.844
Jews	7293	71.357	22.649
Asians	3691	70.430	21.026
Asian Americans	3429	69.834	21.390
Rural Americans	6460	69.354	23.071
Police	7388	68.925	26.622
White people	7083	68.625	21.686
Gay men & lesbians	7321	64.831	27.247
Transgender people	7306	59.037	28.220
Labor unions	7318	58.970	24.333
Muslims	7291	58.599	24.854
#MeToo movement	6158	58.445	30.315
Feminists	7326	57.272	27.245
Capitalists	6615	54.567	24.885
Conservatives	7320	54.227	27.284
Black lives matter	7344	53.173	35.608
Journalists	7369	50.454	28.476
Liberals	7324	48.955	28.798
Illegal immigrants	7092	48.259	27.234
Big business	7339	47.917	23.210
Christian fundamentalists	7194	47.780	28.542
Socialists	6751	37.882	28.614

Note: Analysis weighted by sample weight V200010b from ANES 2020 Time Series Study.

In our first snapshot, and replicating the approach of prior work (Conover and Feldman 1981; Zschirnt, 2011) we factor analyze the feeling thermometer scores of respondents across a variety of socially and politically relevant social groups using data from the 2020 American National Election Study (ANES) to help us identify precisely where social cleavages lay. Table 2 presents the results from the factor analysis (presented in order of eigenvalues). There is general consistency in these groupings with those from Conover and Feldman (1981) and Zschirnt (2011) overtime, and perhaps some additional carving out of groups, with deeper distinguishing happening between the first and second factor. Also evident is a clear racial dimension in Factor 3, a religious, rural, police dimension of Factor 4, and an economic dimension in Factor 5 (Table 2). Worthy of note before analyzing these results in more depth is that the next set of correlational analyses (presented in Table 4) sheds more light on the power and significance of these relationships.

Table 2.

Symbolic Sources of Ideological Meaning, 2020.

Group	S₁	S₂	S₃	S₄	S₅
Journalists	0.805	0.013	0.038	−0.066	0.174
Black lives matter	0.804	0.127	0.024	−0.047	0.014
Socialists	0.804	0.029	−0.075	0.001	−0.094
Labor unions	0.768	0.045	−0.092	0.257	−0.009
#MeToo	0.652	0.291	−0.033	0.049	0.013
Feminists	0.602	0.392	−0.014	0.043	0.052
Illegal immigrants	0.530	0.022	0.354	−0.045	−0.121
Scientists	0.407	0.289	0.006	−0.234	0.328
Big business	0.253	−0.214	−0.018	0.107	0.892
Muslims	0.247	0.646	0.057	0.106	−0.069
Transgender people	0.164	0.773	0.013	−0.178	−0.027
Christians	0.142	−0.107	0.008	0.910	0.033
Black people	0.117	0.014	0.848	0.013	−0.055
Gay men & lesbians	0.074	0.836	0.024	−0.167	−0.035
Christian Fundamentalists	0.029	−0.235	−0.026	0.826	0.034
Hispanic people	−0.010	0.068	0.905	−0.039	−0.037
Jews	−0.014	0.597	0.095	0.425	−0.123
Asian Americans	−0.039	0.085	0.893	−0.074	0.015
White people	−0.103	−0.147	0.768	0.197	0.155
Rural Americans	−0.305	0.258	−0.016	0.546	0.039
Police	−0.305	0.088	−0.020	0.399	0.333
Capitalists	−0.364	0.194	0.022	−0.020	0.655
Eigen value	7.437	3.869	1.649	1.083	1.004
Reliability	0.894	0.826	0.865	0.781	0.632

Note: Entries are factor loadings from a principal components analysis with oblique rotation. Reliabilities are Cronbach’s Alpha. Analysis weighted by sample weight V200010b from ANES 2020 Time Series Study.

Before moving to that analysis, we utilize the factor analysis results to perform a first test of the bipolarity content-related hypothesis (Table 3). To do that, and following the analytical process of Conover and Feldman (1981) and Zschirnt (2011), we estimate evaluations of liberals and conservatives using the factor analysis results as predictors. To do that, we create an additive scale that sums respondents' ratings of the groups comprised in each factor. Higher scores on the scales reflect more positive views of the groups included. The additive scales are standardized for ease of interpretation.

Table 3.

The Effect of Symbolic Meaning Scales on Evaluations of Liberals & Conservatives, 2020.

Symbolic Meaning Scales	Evaluation of Liberals	Evaluation of Conservatives
S₁ Journalists, BLM, Socialists, Labor unions, #MeToo, Feminists, Illegal immigrants, Scientists	21.089* (19.76)	−7.938* (–8.86)
S₂ Muslims, Transgender people, Gays and lesbians, Jews	2.046* (2.19)	.115 (0.14)
S₃ Black people, Hispanic people, White people, Asian Americans	−0.906 (–1.16)	−0.39 (0.06)
S₄ Christians, Christian fundamentalists, Rural Americans, Police	−3.269* (−3.92)	14.789* (19.29)
S₅ Big business, Capitalists	1.779* (2.27)	4.909* (7.04)
F	277.11	497.03
N	2134	2131

Note: OLS regression. Coefficients are standardized with t in parentheses. Analysis weighted by sample weight V200010b from ANES 2020 Time Series Study.

*p < 0.05.

Thinking back to the model of self-identification and how liberals and conservatives come to form those attachments, we are interested in how the evaluations of these groups influence how respondents feel about liberals and conservatives because that is what ultimately leads to self-identifications. What we would expect in world defined by non-bipolar ideological content is that different referents contribute to explaining variance for liberal and for conservative feeling thermometers.

What we find, however, drifts from this expectation, but does fall in line with our first hypothesis. As demonstrated in Table 3, positive feelings toward liberals are primarily a function of Factor 1, and to a lesser extent, positive feelings toward groups of Factor 2 and even lesser extent, Factor 5. The forth factor, which is comprised of feeling thermometers around Christians, Christian Fundamentalists, rural Americans, and police, negatively affects evaluations of liberals. Contrastingly, the fourth factor plays a significant role in positive evaluations of conservatives with the fifth economic-focused factor playing a significant role as well. We also see that that first factor, so important to positive evaluations of liberals, runs in the other direction for conservative evaluations. Beyond these specific results, the central question revolves around non-bipolarity in content—that the referents for “liberal” are distinct from those for “conservative.” Yet, the results reveal a different pattern than we would expect in a non-bipolar world. On two critical dimensions, the scales contribute significantly to affect for both liberals and conservatives, but, in oppositional directions. These findings suggest we may not be exchanging in such distinct currencies anymore.

In Table 4, and what we consider to be a more straightforward test of the first hypothesis, we consider direct relationships between the referent groups and the ideological labels. In particular, we correlate each potential referent group with both the liberal feeling thermometer and conservative feeling thermometer, allowing us to gauge the connection—and affective direction of that connection—the American electorate makes between the two. Instead of combining groups into schematic clusters as the factor analysis approach employs, we catalog each societal group so that readers may get a full grasp of the items in play. Simple correlational analysis, we believe, allows a cleaner look at the associations Americans make between ideological labels and societal groups, and also allows us to evaluate the statistical significance of each connection. In other words, we are interested in uncovering the symbols that animate “liberal” and the symbols that animate “conservative” in the minds of Americans, along with the potential connection or lack thereof in those symbolic referents. In a non-bipolar context, correlational analysis between feeling thermometers for liberals and conservatives and feeling thermometers for societal groups would uncover that the affective connections are distinct and not oppositional.

Table 4.

Feeling Thermometer Correlations: Societal Groups & Ideological Labels, 2020

ANES Variable	Liberal	Conservative
Black lives matter	0.667*	−0.445*
Socialists	0.636*	−0.453*
Journalists	0.621*	−0.375*
Feminists	0.614*	−0.287*
#MeToo	0.569*	−0.376*
Transgender people	0.511*	−0.305*
Illegal immigrants	0.476*	−0.322*
Muslims	0.467*	−0.199*
Gay men & lesbians	0.447*	−0.258*
Scientists	0.429*	−0.216*
Labor unions	0.403*	−0.224*
Black people	0.295*	−0.061*
Hispanic people	0.256*	−0.033
Asians	0.232*	0.003
Asian Americans	0.224*	−0.046
Jews	0.182*	0.11*
White people	0.0002	0.249*
Big business	−0.056*	0.379*
Christians	−0.196*	0.501*
Capitalists	−0.208*	0.467*
Christian fundamentalists	−0.270*	0.581*
Rural Americans	−0.292*	0.483*
Police	−0.301*	0.503*

Note: *p < .05. Analysis weighted by sample weight VCF0009z from ANES 2020 Time Series Cumulative Data file.

Table 4 lists the results, arrayed by most positively associated to most negatively associated with the liberal feeling thermometer score. It would be difficult to produce a more supportive outcome of the claim that, for the American public, referents serve both ideological labels, and in oppositional fashion. Indeed, the most negatively charged relationships for “conservative” (BLM, socialists, journalists, #MeToo, illegal immigrants) include the most positively charged for “liberal.” The pattern holds in the other direction as well. The most negatively charged societal groups of “liberal” (police, rural Americans, Christian Fundamentalists, capitalists, and Christians) also serve as the most positively charged referents for “conservative.” This bipolarity in content of associations strays rather markedly from what prior theory around the make-up of ideological identification would suggest.

Worthy of mention, however, and as expected by our third hypothesis, is that the core content of meaning of the ideological terms has not shifted over time. The liberal feeling thermometer is tightly associated with ANES items Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, illegal immigrants, transgender people, and feminists—all representative of the value of “change.” And, capitalism, rural America, police, Christianity—among the closest correlates of conservative—are likewise deeply connected to the “preservation of traditional values” in today’s political parlance. These findings underscore a persistence of the conceptions of ideological identification advanced by Conover and Feldman (1981) and Jost (2006) among others. The difference in this more contemporaneous era is simply that the negatively charged referents play a key role in the evaluation of the opposite ideological labels as well, a novel development.

Broadly speaking, these results provide evidence of a more shared ideological currency among the American public.

At the core of our argument is change over time—that Americans have not always constructed ideological meanings in such antithetical fashion. From the snapshot above we can see that now they do. To understand when these changes began developing, we turn to a longitudinal investigation of ANES feeling thermometer data, switching our focus to the core societal groups appearing consistently overtime in ANES analysis.³

Overtime Shifts

As demonstrated above, in 2020, the strongest positive correlates of the conservative label were among the strongest negative correlates of the liberal label. This held true in the other direction as well.

For a more complete longitudinal look at these shifts in associations, we plot these groups' associations with the liberal and conservative feeling thermometers over time in a set of subfigures in Figure 3.⁴ Worth noting is that this analysis is limited to the groups the ANES asked about consistently over time. While more limited than ideal, this consistency is essential to asking and answering an inquiry in which time is a leading character. Secondly, while some of the data are “spotty” (missing data for a handful of years), in general, this longitudinal look remains a fruitful avenue for pinpointing the crystallization of the ideological content bipolarity that we observe in the 2020 “snapshot” above.

What stands out, taking the figures together, is a clear shift in the structure and content of ideological meaning after 2008. Where there was once discrete meaning to the terms “liberal” and “conservative,” and thus, distinct pathways to ideological identification, the figures demonstrate an overtime development of connection of meaning between the ideological terms, and in an antithetical fashion. Across a host of societal groups in the figures—Black people, big business, Christian Fundamentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, Hispanic people, illegal immigrants, labor unions, Muslims, and people on welfare—we see varying degrees of stronger association between the groups and the ideological teams. And critically, across many of them, we observe sharply diverging lines, indicating that the groups that help define one ideology are the groups that define the other, but now in antagonistic fashion. Still, some of the shifts are less pronounced, indicating a move from a positive correlation with both ideological labels, in the case of Black people and conservatives, for example, to a null relationship. This shift, while not as antagonistic as the sharp divergence between the ideological teams and illegal immigrants, feminists, Christian Fundamentalists, gays and lesbians, and Muslims, is still important to note.

To identify with one team, in other words, is for many Americans, to distinguish oneself from the other. This longitudinal analysis further supports our notion of a new “shared currency” in ideology in the United States, and a movement away from an ideological landscape defined by non-bipolar content and structure.

Bipolar Structure

We now turn to considering empirically the effect of social sorting and affective polarization on ideological label composition by testing our second hypothesis, that the structure of ideology has become increasingly bipolar over time.

The correlation between evaluations of liberals and conservatives is a straightforward test of bipolarity: if the two labels are seen by the American electorate as opposing positions on a singular spectrum and identification with a label is predicated on a positive evaluation of it, then those who feel warmly towards one label will feel coolly towards the other, yielding a negative correlation. The more negative the correlation, the more universal this antagonistic understanding is held. To measure the connection between evaluations of the two labels over time, we will use, as established by Conover and Feldman (1981) and widely used in the discipline, the feeling thermometer items for each label which ask respondents to rate how “warmly” they feel towards the groups on a scale of 0–100. Where Conover and Feldman found that evaluations of liberals were weakly negatively correlated with evaluations of conservatives in the 1976 ANES, and Zschirnt found only a slight uptick in his evaluation of 2004 ANES data, we predict a significant upsurge in this negative association.

Analyzing simply the association between feeling thermometer items may seem like a gross reduction of a complex political and social reality. We believe, however, that for the bulk of the American electorate, political understandings are associational. Most people do not pay excruciating attention to the news and debates amongst elites; they instead read or hear the labels mentioned with certain groups in passing, flipping through radio stations, on the morning news shows, or scrolling through headlines on their phones. And, as discussed above, much of what grounds individuals' political perspectives is emotional—it is how they feel about relevant political stimuli and, as Conover and Feldman’s model posits, how and where those feelings are transferred.

We take a longitudinal lens extending from 1974 to 2020 in order to highlight and test a central tenet of our theory: change. As our hypothesis indicates, our interest is primarily in the correlational strength and direction over time, which we predict will grow, and in an increasingly negative fashion.

Figure 4 plots the overtime correlation of evaluation of the ideological labels, 1974–2020.⁵ While the connection between the electorate’s affect about the ideological teams has been moderately negatively correlated since the 1970s, with some shifts back toward more “weakly correlated” territory, this changed dramatically after 2008. As discussed above, a proliferation of situational events, including an increased racialized tenor to politics (e.g., Tesler 2016) and especially ideology, we suggest, is a key component of the post 2008 domain. This trend in negative affective charge has continued, ending in 2020 a correlation of r = – 0.489 (p < .05) in 2020 for the full electorate.⁶ This finding sharply challenges an assumption of non-bipolarity in the structure of ideological identification.

Ideology, Revisited

Social sorting and the resultant heightened affective polarization pervasive in the American political realm, alongside the rise of partisan news and the explosion of social media, has shifted how Americans view themselves and one another. We theorized that ideological identities are not immune to these forces. In fact, we have suggested, and found evidence to support, that these contemporaneous macro-level forces have altered even the most fundamental and supported attributes of ideological identity formation, content, and structure.

That the top negative correlates of each label overlap so directly with the top positive correlates of the other in the present political climate provides strong support for the central facets of our hypotheses. First, contrary to previous studies, we find that “liberal” and “conservative” share significant symbolic content. We expect, given the timing of shifts in affective polarization documented in Figure 1, that 2008 was a critical turning point. Social sorting escalated with the election of Barack Obama and the rise of partisan and social media, and the resulting increased polarized atmosphere affected the pathways to liberal and conservative identification. In brief, where symbols and groups were once tied to a single ideological label, producing distinct ideological currencies, now symbols and groups exchange in one ideological currency. Our correlational analysis from 2020 reveal perhaps an even more established ideologically affectively polarized climate than was seeded in 2008.

Supporting that conclusion is another piece of evidence: the longitudinal correlational evaluations of liberals and conservatives. We find that this association is growing more strongly negative over time, again with a critical inflection point in 2008—unambiguous support for an increasingly bipolar structure of ideology in the United States.

These findings speak to important disciplinary debates, and likewise carry relevant normative consequences. Our work contributes, we believe, to the longstanding debate over the presence of meaningful ideology among Americans. Ideology, much literature suggests, and we believe our study underscores, is a deep-seated psychological and emotional attachment that is influenced by changes in situational forces of the political and social climate. Perhaps more basically, and in line with Jost (2006) and others, our study finds ample evidence to support the notion that Americans are not innocent of ideology.

We likewise see our work as informing the conversation around the potential impact of political identities. Much research in political science begins with our political identities—specifically partisanship and ideological identification—and looks forwards, at the behavioral and psychological impacts. Our study has trained its attention in the other direction, working to understand how shifts in the situational forces of the American political landscape have altered the very pathway to ideological attachments. We see affective polarization as the central, culminating, measurable consequence of a myriad of other forces—social sorting, partisan and social media, heightened racialization of the political sphere, among others. Affective polarization is an incredibly powerful environmental and situational force that manufactures an antagonistic environment in which citizens develop important self-conceptions and conceptions of their fellow citizens, such as their own ideological identifications and their beliefs about the guiding ideologies of others. That citizens are now developing these conceptions in an already antagonistic environment, and are entering the electorate more polarized than their predecessors (Phillips 2022), will likely only perpetuate animus. Second, that evaluations of “liberals” and evaluations of “conservatives” are more related than before and that the two are animated by overlapping referents, symbols, and groups is a testament to these identities to serve as powerful heuristics. In the face of lackluster evidence for strong issue polarization in the mass public, our results deepen our conviction that the ideological labels serve as potent heuristics in U.S. politics, ones capable of significant electoral consequences. That is, the shifts we outline may not represent the public knowing more clearly what liberal and conservative mean in terms of policy change, but the labels themselves are powerful enough to affect behavior without policy awareness. Affective polarization, and the forces feeding it, have made so crystal clear in-groups and out-groups that the American public sees the labels as antagonistic, and primarily from an emotional, social, and cultural differentiation stance. In a growing affectively polarized environment, the recognition that the ideological “other” represents a conflicting vision for society and for the United States likewise grows. That these notions are based almost entirely on symbolic, socially, and culturally defined grounds—and not policy distinctions—poses unsettling implications for democracy.

An example, we think, illustrates the formidable role of ideology in politics. Public Policy Mood (Stimson 1991), a widely used and cited measure of policy liberalism in the United States, sat at its all time high when last estimated in 2022, meaning the public’s preference for liberal policy was at its zenith.⁷ How do we explain, alongside that, a steady and even increasing appetite for a candidate like Donald Trump? We would argue: ideology.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Toward a Shared Ideological Currency: Ideological Affective Polarization & the Changing Structure of Ideology in the U.S.

Supplemental Material for Toward a Shared Ideological Currency: Ideological Affective Polarization & the Changing Structure of Ideology in the U.S. by K. Elizabeth Coggins, and Kathleen J. Gruschow in Political Research Quarterly

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editor, the anonymous reviewers, the Front Range American Political Science Association, the members of the American Politics Research Group at UNC Chapel Hill, Neil Malhotra, Peter Enns, and Patrick Egan for their helpful comments. We are especially grateful to Pamela Conover for her inexhaustible support.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

K. Elizabeth Coggins

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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