On the relationship between party polarization and citizen polarization
Abstract
Do party policy offerings simply reflect public opinion or do parties shape public demand for policies? Theories of party position-taking and the operation of democracy expect parties to track their supporters’ positions, while scholarship of public opinion has shown voters often adopt the position of their preferred parties. We apply both of these theoretical expectations to the relationship between citizen polarization and party polarization and additionally argue that the relationship between them should be stronger among politically more engaged and sophisticated citizens. We draw on aggregated survey data from 174 cross-national and national election studies from 19 established democracies, to assess the extent to which citizen polarization responds to party polarization, the extent to which parties respond to changes in citizen polarization, and whether these relationships differ across different groups of citizens. We estimate seemingly unrelated error-correction models employing data on party and citizen positions from 1971 to 2019. Our findings suggest that citizen polarization follows party polarization and also that politically engaged and sophisticated citizens are more responsive to changes in party polarization than the politically less engaged and unsophisticated. In contrast, we find little evidence that party polarization responds to changes in citizen polarization.
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Biographies
Mert Moral received his Ph.D. in political science at the State University of New York at Binghamton, United States, in 2017. He is currently assistant professor of political science at Sabancı University, Turkey. His research interests include voting behavior, political participation, democratic representation, political polarization, and political and survey methodology. His research has been published in, among others, American Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly, and Electoral Studies. Dr. Moral has been recipient of the Young Scientist Award of The Science Academy, Turkey, and co-principal investigator of the Turkish election studies in 2018 and 2019.
Robin E Best received her Ph.D. in political science at the State University of New York at Binghamton, United States, in 2007. She is currently associate professor of political science at Binghamton University (SUNY). Before joining Binghamton University, she had positions at the University of Missouri, Leiden University (the Netherlands), and Syracuse University. Her research and teaching interests include political parties, elections, electoral rules, voting behavior, and representation in democratic systems of government. Her research has been published in, among many others, Political Analysis, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, European Journal of Political Research, and Party Politics.
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Article first published online: January 7, 2022
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