Charting multidimensional ideological polarization across demographic groups in the USA

Bibliographic Data

ID4660429
AuthorsJaume Ojer (0000-0001-8262-1422, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), David Cárcamo (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), Romualdo Pastor-Satorras (0000-0002-4051-6007, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), Michele Starnini (0000-0002-9161-5339, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume9
Issue10
Pages2027-2037
Publication date2025-07-02
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNature Human Behaviour (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2397-3374 • E-ISSN: 2397-3374
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1038/s41562-025-02251-0
PMID40603579
OpenAlexW4411924513
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited77

Has ideological polarization actually increased in the past decades, or have voters simply sorted themselves into parties matching their ideology more closely? Here we present a methodology to quantify multidimensional ideological polarization by embedding the respondents to a wide variety of political, social and economic topics from the American National Election Studies into a two-dimensional ideological space. By identifying several demographic attributes of the American National Election Studies respondents, we chart how political and socioeconomic groups move through the ideological space in time. We observe that income and especially racial groups align into parties, but their ideological distance has not increased over time. Instead, Democrats and Republicans have become ideologically more distant in the past 30 years: Both parties moved away from the centre, at different rates. Furthermore, Democratic voters have become ideologically more heterogeneous after 2010, indicating that partisan sorting has declined in the past decade. Ojer et al. use data from the American National Election Studies to map US voters in a two-dimensional ideological space. Democrats and Republicans have grown more polarized over the past 30 years, while partisan sorting has declined since 2010

Geography · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Demography · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Law · Media Influence and Politics · Medicine · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Gerontology

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