Ideological Polarization and its affects on Political Engagement By Jackson Berridge & Bryce York

Introduction

​      Polarization in United States politics is perhaps the most salient feature of the US political climate today. This is an important issue as that climate is not only characterized by significant polarization, but by significant ideological consequence That volatile climate exists within a democratic context where political engagement on the part of the citizen is absolutely essential. This study looks at two potential fallouts of that polarization and ideological consequence as it may affect an individual’s likelihood to think that getting involved in politics is important. The survey in which the data for this study was collected took place the week before November 3rd, 2020 – the presidential election where more voters turned out than any other election in US history. Being involved in politics is about much more than just voting, but if more people voted during the 2020 US presidential election than ever before in history, and if the two parties and the citizens of the US are possibly as polarized as they have ever been, then maybe there is a relationship there. This study was conducted using data collected from Fort Lewis College (FLC), which is a relatively small Liberal Arts college in southwest Colorado. These results then are not emblematic of the entire US population, but they do tell an impactful and important story none the less. 

The questions were: ​

      How does perceived ideological polarization of the Democratic and Republican parties affect how important an FLC student sees getting involved in politics as being?
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      How does an FLC student’s perceived ideological distance from the opposing ideological party influence how important it is for them to get involved in politics?

The hypotheses were:

H1: Increased levels of perceived ideological polarization between the Democratic and Republican parties increases how important it is for an FLC student to get involved in politics.

H2: Increased magnitude of perceived ideological distance from the ideologically opposed major political party increases how important it is for an FLC student to get involved in politics.

H1 background: ​

​      The study “Elite polarization and mass political engagement: Information, alienation, and mobilization” by Jae M. Lee [1] looks at mass alienation and mobilization as factors of how people with different levels of education behave in political situations. Lee uses the ANES survey (1972-2004) to conduct his study similarly to how this FLC study will be using and applying this data to find different results of importance of political involvement and polarization. Lee fins that “where parties have distinct ideological platforms [they] tend to display more connections between voters' left-right positions and their vote.” [2]This FLC study uses the same questions taken from the ANES survey to measure perceived ideological measurements of the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as a similar question to political engagement. Instead of measuring political engagement through voting behavior, it is a measurement of how important it is for a respondent to personally be involved in politics. Our second hypothesis looks more at the effects of left-right placement and voting tendencies discussed in Lee’s article, whereas our first hypothesis pertains to the effects of polarization on pure political engagement itself.  
      “The Quantity and the Quality of Party Systems: Party System Polarization, Its Measurement, and Its Consequences” (by Russel J. Dalton [3] argues that numerous differentiating ideals have less of an impact on civic engagement than polarization. The author also claims that the most important piece of the puzzle is the quality of the existing competition between parties. Dalton works to show us why our political parties became polarized and he uses the power behind polarization as a predictor for voter turnout. Dalton argues that polarization between parties can increase their support by creating a rival with another competitive party, thus creating a party system with less options but more support. This FLC study, and testing the first hypothesis in particular, looks at the impact of how ideologically polarized parties are (as perceived by a respondent) might be affecting how important it is to the respondent for them to be politically engaged. 

H2 background:

      In addition to the article “Elite polarization and mass political engagement: Information, alienation, and mobilization,” the second hypothesis of this FLC study rests some inception on ideas presented in the article “Reassessing Proximity Voting: Expertise, Party, and Choice in Congressional Elections” by Danielle A. Joesten and Walter J. Stone. [4] This article leads to a different idea of how ideological party polarization may affect the likelihood of an individual to be politically engaged – how the ideology of a party relates to the individual, not an opposing party. What they find is that “voter distance from the … ideological cut point … are associated with enhanced levels of … voting.” [5]The second hypothesis in this study tests a similar question – how the ideological cut point of a party (not a candidate) may affect a citizen’s view of the importance of being politically engaged themselves (not likelihood to vote as the Joesten and Walter study uses).
       A third study which our second hypothesis draws similarities to is “Ideological Voting in 1980 Republican Presidential Primaries” [6] by Mark J. Wattier. Wattier tests whether someone is more likely to vote for a candidate whom they are ideologically close to. Included in the test of the second hypothesis is a juxtaposition with a respondent’s view of how important it is for them to be politically engaged as it is affected by the magnitude of how ideologically similar they see themselves being to their associated ideological party. Wattier finds that “when primary voters perceived a difference in candidate ideologies, they usually supported the candidate closer to their own ideology.” [7] This FLC study operates with a similar difference in measurements to the studies germane to the first hypothesis and the first hypothesis test itself, so it does not necessarily correlate with Wattier’s, as this FLC study will not be looking at voting tendencies but rather personal importance of being politically engaged.

FLC Engagement Study assumptions, methodology, and measurements: 
​

  H1: Variable data was acquired in a survey with 175 participant’s responses recorded. Both hypotheses were tested using the same independent variable. The question for measuring the carriable was phrased: “How important is it for you personally to get involved in politics?” The answers ranged from 0 – 4, with 0 = not at all important and 4 = Extremely important. The dependent variable for testing hypothesis 1 was a measure of the ideological divide between the Democratic and Republican parties, as identified by the respondent. The question for that variable was phrased: “If 1 is extremely liberal, and 7 is extremely conservative, what would you rate the Democratic and Republican parties as being? Or have you not thought about this much? The answer for “have you not thought about this much” also included whether or not the candidate knew how to identify the parties. The answers of respondents who answered “don’t know / haven’t thought about it” for only one party were not used to test this hypothesis, as there was no way to reliably measure how ideologically polarized they saw the parties as being. Hypothesis 1 was tested by measuring the absolute value of the numerical difference between how the respondents identified the parties as being and correlating those results (as a scaled variable) with how those respondents answered the question above pertaining to political involvement. 

H2: In order to test the second hypothesis, each party was computed to be of a binary liberal or conservative ideology. This was done to generate a reliable assumption about the parties’ ideological affiliations. The party’s ideological affiliations were determined by observing that 98.9% of respondents identified the Democratic party as being left-of-center and identified the Republican party as being right-of-center on the 1-7 scale (determined by the above question pertaining to perceived party ideology). Additionally, in order to test the second hypothesis, each respondent was computed to be of a binary liberal or conservative ideology. This was done to generate a reliable assumption of the respondents’ ideological affiliations. This was determined using similar methodology as the party affiliation identification, where the question was phrased: “Where would you place yourself on the following ideological scale, where 0 is very liberal, 5 is centrist, and 10 is very conservative?” The answers were then translated to fit a 7-point scale rather than an 11-point scale. The conversion was as follows: 0 = 1; 1,2 = 2; 3,4 = 3; 5 = 4; 6,7 = 5; 8,9 = 6; 10 = 7. The conversion was made so that the measurements may be more precisely compared to the variable that was used to determine how ideologically liberal or conservative a respondent identified the Democratic and Republican parties as being.

​      The respondents who identified as left-of-center (1-3) on the 1-7 scale were determined to be liberal and the respondents who identified as right of center (5-7) were determined to be conservative, for the purposes of testing hypothesis 2. Respondents who answered (4) on the 1-7 scale were labeled as centrist and being not distant from either party, as they had no determinable party affiliation using this methodology and thus no determinable opposing ideological party. The answers of respondents who answered “don’t know / haven’t thought about it” for either or both parties were not used to test this hypothesis, as there was no reliable way to measure their opposing party. The variable that was used to determine the degree of separation from a respondent’s opposing party was a combination of those who identified as liberal and those who identified as conservative, and the absolute value of the measurement of ideological difference between them and the opposing ideologically affiliated party. This created a scaled variable measurement of the magnitude of the perceived ideological difference between the respondents and their ideologically opposed parties (as perceived by the respondent), resulting in a 0-6 scale where 0 = centrists; with 1 being the lowest degree of separation from the opposing party possible; and 6 being the highest degree of separation from the opposing party possible). This variable was then graphed and was run through a Pearson correlation with how those respondents answered the question above pertaining to political involvement. Graph 3 features results from an inverse of this test, where degrees of ideological separation from their associated party were used as the independent variable. 

Hypothesis 1 test results:

H1 Discussion: 

​      The hypothesis test as a correlation between how ideologically distant the respondents see the Democratic and Republican parties as being [PartyDiffs] and how important being personally involved in politics [PoliImp] was to a respondent provides sufficient evidence to suggest that the more polarized an FLC student sees the parties as being, the more important being politically engaged is to them. These strictly data driven findings are consistent with those of Lee and Dalton. However, when the results are graphed (Graph 1), they tell a more nuanced, almost different story. Those FLC students who believe that the parties are ideologically identical are entirely driving the positive correlation, which displayed the lowest average level of all respondents of seeing their own involvement with politics as being important. One degree of separation, as perceived by the respondents, appears to induce he most consequential view of their own political involvement, as indicated by the average answer of all those who see the parties as being minimally ideologically different. This average level of perceived consequence of personal political involvement decreases with each degree of separation. Identifying specifically what is driving this decrease is beyond the scope of this analysis, but it may be that the more ideologically distant FLC students perceive the parties as being, the more disillusioned they feel by the political process in general and so are less likely to see themselves being politically involved as important. 

Hypothesis 2 Test Results:

H2 Discussion:

      Testing hypothesis 2 through correlating how ideologically distant the respondents see themselves as being from their apposing ideologically affiliated party [OppoDist] and how important being personally involved in politics [PoliImp] was to a respondent provides very sufficient evidence to accept hypothesis 1. Thus, there is a very strong likelihood that the further ideologically removed a respondent saw themselves as being from the opposing party increased how important it was to them to be personally involved in politics. These results are shown on Graph 2, with a majority of the variability in the results being explained by this model (the coefficient, of r2 being .649. This supports the findings of Lee, Joeston and Stone, and Wattier.
      However, intuition of biases which may be implicit in this analysis from Wattier’s article informs us that these results may simply be a function of how ideologically similar a respondent saw themselves as being to their own party. The results of this test can be seen in Graph 3, where, if the aforementioned intuition was credible, there would be an expected negative correlation between how ideologically distant the respondents see themselves as being to their associated ideologically affiliated party [SameDist] and how important being personally involved in politics [PoliImp] was to a respondent. In reality the results revealed that the opposite may be true, with the graph showing that there is a significant positive correlation with how distant a respondent saw themselves as being from their own ideological party and how likely they were to view their own involvement in politics as being. So, in addition to an FLC student being driven to personally get involved in politics the further they are from their opposing party, it appears that ideological distance from their own associated party is also a strong impetus for being involved in politics. Although, these analyses revealed that the former still may be a stronger a catalyst than the latter as the slope of the coefficient for opposing party ideological distance is steeper than that of associated party ideological distance, but also that ideological distance from a respondent’s associated party was a stronger predictor of how important being politically involved was to them – seen through the coefficient of Graph 3 being .854, which is higher than that of Graph 2 at .649. 

Conclusion:

​      An impactful and important story indeed, this study has found reason to believe that the more polarized the Democratic and Republican parties are, the more individual political engagement on US college campuses happens as a consequence. This is good, it means that democracy is working to some degree. Citizens are the ones responsible for how a democracy operates, and if the parties are not ideologically beholden to US citizens, then we should be getting more involved. That feels like democracy in action. Across the multiple dimensions of analysis that have been explored in this study, a picture emerges which illustrates a population of college students largely committed to ensuring that their voices are heard, that they are taken seriously, and that they themselves make a difference – a commitment to being politically engaged, because ideological polarization at every echelon of US politics matters to them. 

Works Cited

[1] Jae Mook Lee, “Elite Polarization and Mass Politicla Engagement: Information, Alienation, and Mobilization,” Journal of International and Area Studies 20, no. 1 (2013): 89–109.

[2] Ibid.

​[3] Russell J. Dalton, “The Quantity and the Quality of Party Systems: Party System Polarization, Its Measurement , and Its Consequences,” Comparative Political Studies 41, no. 7 (2008): 1–22.

[4] Danielle A. Joesten and Walter J. Stone, “Reassessing Proximity Voting: Expertise, Party, and Choice in Congressional Elections,” Journal of Politics 76, no. 3 (2014): 740–53, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381614000140.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Mark J. Wattier, “Ideological Voting in 1980 Republican Presidential Primaries,” The Journal of Politics 45, no. 4 (1983): 1016–26, https://doi.org/10.2307/2130423.

​[7] Ibid.
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