A Political Spectrograph: High-Resolution Examinations of the United States' Political Landscape (WP-26-13)
David Sabin-Miller, Mary McGrath, and Marisa Eisenberg
The concept of ideology is central to political discourse and dynamics, and is often cast as falling primarily on a one-dimensional scale from “left-wing/liberal” to "right-wing/conservative”, but the validity of this simple quantitative treatment is uncertain. Here the authors investigate and compare various high-resolution measures of ideology, both internal (self-identification and policy-stance agreements) and external (estimating the ideological position of political opinion statements). The authors find strong consistency between internal measures, although policy-stance agreement ideology yields a systematically centralizing and liberalizing portrait relative to more abstract “liberal/conservative” measures. More remarkably, they find that external assessments of ideology, while noisy, are largely consistent across observers, even for highly dissonant ideas and regardless of speaker identity markers. This supports the use of these responses as meaningful, comparable quantities, which general members of the public reliably project from the abstract space of political thought onto a shared one-dimensional domain.