TY - JOUR
T1 - Pluralistic Collapse
T2 - The “Oil Spill” Model of Mass Opinion Polarization
AU - DellaPosta, Daniel
N1 - Funding Information:
I benefited greatly from helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper from Gary Adler, Dave Baker, Marjan Davoodi, Fedor Dokshin, Liam Essig, Diane Felmlee, Roger Finke, Sang Won Han, Melissa Hardy, Minjae Kim, Michael Macy, John McCarthy, Victor Nee, Eric Plutzer, Charles Seguin, and participants in the Culture and Politics Workshop as well as the Innovative Methods Working Group at Penn State. Marjan Davoodi and Kelli Knipe provided helpful research assistance in the early stages of this project. I also gratefully acknowledge support during the writing of this article from the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Penn State. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2018 meeting of the International Network of Analytical Sociologists, the 2019 meeting of the American Sociological Association, and the Economic Sociology Colloquium at Cornell University in 2019. The usual disclaimers apply.
Publisher Copyright:
© American Sociological Association 2020.
PY - 2020/6/1
Y1 - 2020/6/1
N2 - Despite widespread feeling that public opinion in the United States has become dramatically polarized along political lines, empirical support for such a pattern is surprisingly elusive. Reporting little evidence of mass polarization, previous studies assume polarization is evidenced via the amplification of existing political alignments. This article considers a different pathway: polarization occurring via social, cultural, and political alignments coming to encompass an increasingly diverse array of opinions and attitudes. The study uses 44 years of data from the General Social Survey representing opinions and attitudes across a wide array of domains as elements in an evolving belief network. Analyses of this network produce evidence that mass polarization has increased via a process of belief consolidation, entailing the collapse of previously cross-cutting alignments, thus creating increasingly broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs. Further, the increasing salience of political ideology and partisanship only partly explains this trend. The structure of U.S. opinion has shifted in ways suggesting troubling implications for proponents of political and social pluralism.
AB - Despite widespread feeling that public opinion in the United States has become dramatically polarized along political lines, empirical support for such a pattern is surprisingly elusive. Reporting little evidence of mass polarization, previous studies assume polarization is evidenced via the amplification of existing political alignments. This article considers a different pathway: polarization occurring via social, cultural, and political alignments coming to encompass an increasingly diverse array of opinions and attitudes. The study uses 44 years of data from the General Social Survey representing opinions and attitudes across a wide array of domains as elements in an evolving belief network. Analyses of this network produce evidence that mass polarization has increased via a process of belief consolidation, entailing the collapse of previously cross-cutting alignments, thus creating increasingly broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs. Further, the increasing salience of political ideology and partisanship only partly explains this trend. The structure of U.S. opinion has shifted in ways suggesting troubling implications for proponents of political and social pluralism.
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U2 - 10.1177/0003122420922989
DO - 10.1177/0003122420922989
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85085947844
VL - 85
SP - 507
EP - 536
JO - American Sociological Review
JF - American Sociological Review
SN - 0003-1224
IS - 3
ER -