In 2011, 52 percent of American partisans said that they definitely or probably would not marry a member of the opposing party.

our feelings toward the parties grew more polarized while our average policy attitudes remained unchanged

The damage caused to the nation by shutting down the government was, from an identity standpoint, justified

In other words, though the parties are competing for real interests, they are also competing because it just feels good to win.

have even found effects of partisanship on nonpolitical outcomes, such as willingness to engage in economic transactions with outgroup partisans.

This social loosening freed Americans to rearrange their partisan, social, and civic affiliations. It also, however, led Americans to feel increasingly detached from their communities and country, and compelled them to seek comfort in increasingly homogeneous neighborhoods, towns, and churches, causing American citizens to sort themselves into geographically isolated groups that shared their culture, values, race, and politics. They disengaged from their old, community-centered groups and formed new affiliations, tailored exactly to meet their needs

Democrats consistently identified with poor people, while Republicans felt more and more like businessmen.

By 2000, Republicans overwhelmingly felt that conservatives were their kind of people. Democrats felt this way about liberals as well, but not to the same degree.

which sought the legislation of Christian morality.

After Kennedy’s death, however, Lyndon Johnson, the first president from a southern state, chose to align the Democratic Party with the northern contingent on the issue of civil rights.

The increase in partisan-ideological-identity differences is more than twice as large as the increase in partisan policy differences

Specifying ideology as a social identity makes it clear that identity-based ideological sorting is increasing more robustly than the traditional measure of ideology can indicate. Democrats and especially Republicans are feeling closer to liberals and conservatives, considering them to be groups of people that are most like them “in their ideas and interests and feelings about things.” To a much larger extent than in 1972, partisans in 2000 had found their ideological clans.

Since then, the relationship between class and party in the South has come to match and even surpass the class-party alignment in the rest of the country.

he sorting of American social groups into two partisan camps has intensified in recent decades, leading to a distinct decrease in the number of cross-cutting cleavages

The more divisions there are, and the less organized those groups are around any one division, the more peaceful and cooperative a society can be

Political action is driven not only by policy concerns but also, powerfully, by the need to feel victorious.

Decades of social-scientific evidence show that voting behavior is primarily a product of inherited partisan loyalties, social identities and symbolic attachments. Over time, engaged citizens may construct policy preferences and ideologies that rationalize their choices, but those issues are seldom fundamental

Policy preferences, over time, take a back seat to the team loyalty that is bound to grow out of these increasingly homogeneous and isolated partisan collections.

Imagine how much more intense the Robbers Cave conflict would have been had the Rattlers all been Catholic, northern, and white, while the Eagles were Protestant, southern, and black.

When winning becomes as important as or more important than the content of those policies, real people feel the consequences

People’s brains respond similarly when people are sad and when they are observing a sad ingroup member, but when they are observing a sad outgroup member, their brains respond by activating areas of positive emotion

when learning a new task, a person will learn more slowly if he or she is being observed by an outgroup member.

Tajfel and his colleagues found evidence of ingroup bias: a preference for or privileging of the ingroup over the outgroup.

For those who change political preferences most readily are those who are least interested, who are subject to conflicting social pressures, who have inconsistent beliefs and erratic voting histories. Without them—if the decision were left only to the deeply concerned, well-integrated, consistently principled ideal citizens—the political system might easily prove too rigid to adapt to changing domestic and international conditions

However, if a person is a member of one party and also a member of another social group that is mostly made up of fellow partisans, the biasing and polarizing effect of partisanship can grow stronger

, they were the prescription for a responsible electorate.

American partisans today prefer to live in neighborhoods with members of their own party, expressing less satisfaction with their neighborhood when told that opposing partisans live there

Emerging research has shown that members of both parties negatively stereotype members of the opposing party, and the extent of this partisan stereotyping has increased by 50 percent between 1960 and 2010

The “we” that is promised to win is a crucial element for understanding the election of Donald Trump and, more broadly, recent politics in the American electorate as a whole.

In very basic ways, group identification and conflict change the way we think and feel about ourselves and our opponents.

By the end of the second week, twenty-two highly similar boys who had met only two weeks before had formed two nearly warring tribes, with only the gentle nudge of isolation and competition to encourage them.

Attitude toward out-groups is not the only force driving opinion in these various cases, but it seems always to be present, and of all the forces that shape opinion, it is often the most powerful.

American elections are, first and foremost, affirmations of loyalty to party, and campaigns are, first and foremost, efforts on the part of parties to reinforce and activate their supporters

Group-centered politics has two sides, then, both us and them. It is partly about in-groups, the mobilization of in-group solidarity.

More mundane and less lofty factors were at play: partisanship, unpopular wars, frightening economic conditions, racial resentments (Campbell et al. 1960; Kinder and Dale-Riddle 2012; Parker and Barreto 2013; Rosenstone 1983; Tesler and Sears 2010; Williamson, Skocpol, and Coggin 2011).

That most citizens know so little about politics while others know so much is a fundamental fact, indispensable not only to ideology and its absence but to broader understandings of politics in mass societies as well.

Converse’s pithy formula for the distribution of political knowledge in mass publics—low mean, high variance—is very likely to hold into the indefinite future

Parties are material realities in a way that ideologies are not.

Shifts in aggregate partisanship and shifts in aggregate ideology are independent.8

in all these respects, what Converse found to be true in the United States, others have found to be true elsewhere

Ellis and Stimson’s answer is: both. Americans are liberal and they are conservative. By this they mean that Americans are, on average, sincerely inclined to support liberal policy initiatives—Social Security, spending on environmental problems, government subsidies for child care, and so on—and at the same time, Americans are, on average, sincerely inclined to describe themselves as conservative. Ellis and Stimson call this misalignment a paradox, show that it is “an enduring feature of American public opinion” (98), and do their best to explain it.

Moreover, Converse was not arguing for the end of ideology; he was claiming that in mass societies, ideology has always been out of reach of the average citizen.

While they do not place events in the context of a pattern of history or policy, neither do they place them in the context of some . . . forensic ideology.

When estimated properly, the effects of ideological identification are small on presidential voting and disappear altogether in elections where stakes are lower and information scarcer.

This summary is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It fails to consider the flourishing literature on ideological identification since Converse completed his essay. A large fraction of our effort here has gone to determining how much the broad claim of innocence must be modified in light of these new findings. Our conclusion: not much.

Americans are only slightly more separated by ideology today than they were in the 1970s; liberals and conservatives disagree with each other over policy no more today than they did before; and only recently have liberals and conservatives expressed more animosity toward each other than they did in the past.

Cognitive consistency theory stipulates that the less psychologically central attitude will be the one to change (Abelson 1968; Festinger 1957). For abundant reasons spelled out over the previous chapters, we would expect Americans to resolve their dilemma by modifying their ideological identity. When push came to shove, Americans would adjust their ideology to fit their partisanship

What we can say is that while Democrats and Republicans have grown steadily and increasingly unhappy with each other, liberals and conservatives have not.

In 2012, Congress, illegal immigrants, even atheists were more popular among the American public than Republicans were with Democrats and Democrats were with Republicans.9

indicate that the association between ideological identification and opinion on policy is not increasing. Nor, for that matter, is it decreasing.

Given this evidence, and with ideology specifically in mind, we conclude that the American electorate is very far from polarized. Nor will it be polarized anytime soon. On the current trajectory, Americans will have to wait a very long time before they find themselves in a society divided by ideology.5

the percentage doubles, from roughly 3 percent of the American public in 1972 to roughly 6 percent in 2012

the American electorate is very far from polarized

On matters of policy, most Americans take moderate positions

No. Red states and blue states are not so different

public opinion on policy in the 1950s, from an ideological point of view, was a mess. Views on social welfare had little to do with views on civil rights, and neither of these had much connection to preferences on foreign policy

Perhaps ideological innocence has less to do with the limited capacity of ordinary citizens than with the ideological neutrality of America in the 1950s. According to this argument, the United States at that time was in political recovery from the intense ideological debates of the New Deal and from the trauma brought on by the Great Depression and the Second World War. The military conflict in Korea was drawing to a close, the economy was gathering strength, and General Dwight Eisenhower, an enormously popular and unifying figure, was president.2

But on the subject of ideology, presidential candidates are generally lousy teachers. They offer their life story, criticize their opponent, embrace peace, prosperity, and the American way—but seldom spend serious time or money on articulating the ideological foundations of their program

The model proposes that on any particular issue, the public can be partitioned into one of just two discontinuous classes: the first made up of citizens who possess genuine opinions and hold onto them tenaciously; the second composed of citizens who are unacquainted with the issue and, when pressed, either confess their ignorance outright or, out of embarrassment or misplaced civic obligation, invent an attitude on the spot—not a real attitude, but a “non-attitude.” Members of the first class never change their opinion; members of the second class either admit they have no opinion or generate an opinion randomly.

Great instability in itself is prima facie evidence that the belief has extremely low centrality for the believer” (1964, 241).6

By Converse’s first test, barely one in ten Americans comes to politics with an ideology in mind. Not surprisingly, members of this select group of the ideologically inclined are unusual in other ways as well. They express special interest in politics. They are comparatively well educated. They know more about current affairs. In such circles, ideology is relatively common. Outside such circles, it is exceedingly rare

Near-ideologues, who “knew some of the words but were not convincing with the whole tune” (Converse 2006, 307), made up another 9 percent of the public.

By ideology, Count Antoine Destutt de Tracy meant those ideas drawn from competing political philosophies designed to inspire political loyalties and motivate political action (Lakoff 2011). Ideologies were “social romances”—collections of “political proposals, perhaps somewhat intellectualistic and impractical but at any rate idealistic” (Geertz 1973, 193).