Have American's Social Attitudes Become More Polarized?

TLDR

American social attitudes are widely claimed to be increasingly polarized, yet empirical support for this claim is limited. The study uses repeated General Social Survey and National Election Survey items over two decades to test whether attitudes have become more dispersed, flatter or bimodal, ideologically constrained, or more divergent between paired social groups. Results reveal little evidence of polarization overall, except for attitudes toward abortion and greater opinion gaps between Republican and Democratic identifiers.

Abstract

Many observers have asserted with little evidence that Americans' social opinions have become polarized. Using General Social Survey and National Election Survey social attitude items that have been repeated regularly over 20 years, the authors ask (1) Have Americans' opinions become more dispersed (higher variance)? (2) Have distributions become flatter or more bimodal (declining kurtosis)? (3) Have opinions become more ideologically constrained within and across opinion domains? (4) Have paired social groups become more different in their opinions? The authors find little evidence of polarization over the past two decades, with attitudes toward abortion and opinion differences between Republican and Democratic party identifiers the exceptional cases.