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Contents
The Public Mind

    Type to search. Planned chapters match by title only.

    Volume 1: The great sorting

    Part I

    The sort

    Party identification and ideological labels became more closely aligned, including within birth cohorts, and party gaps on different issues opened on different schedules.

    3 written, 4 planned

    This part asks when party, ideology and issue positions came to line up on one axis, and which groups moved when they did. Chapter 1.1, Party and ideology follows the link between party identification and liberal-conservative self-placement across three surveys, and Chapter 1.3, Sort dates by attitude gives each issue its own date. Chapter 1.4, Cohort change in partisan sorting asks whether the decline in conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans appears inside birth cohorts or comes from older cohorts being replaced by younger ones. Repeated cross-sections cannot follow individuals, so that chapter describes cohorts, and the share of the decline that replacement accounts for depends on assumptions the data cannot test. The planned chapters widen the frame. They ask how far apart the parties in Congress are and whether that gap led or followed the public, whether issue positions are bundled more tightly than before, whether the bundling is concentrated among the politically informed, and which gaps between the South and the rest of the country closed.

    Chapters

    1. 1.1

      Party and ideology

      The correlation between party identification and liberal-conservative self-placement rose from +0.32 in 1972 to +0.72 in 2024 in the American National Election Studies, ended higher on two other surveys, and rose in every cohort, education and region group compared.

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    2. 1.2

      Polarization in Congress

      How far apart are the parties in Congress, and did elite polarization lead or follow the public?

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    3. 1.3

      Sort dates by attitude

      By the lower bound of the 95% interval, the party gap passed 0.25 standard deviations on racial resentment in 1992, abortion in 2008 and religion in 2016; the point estimates alone put those dates at 1986 (the first reading), 1998 and 2012.

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    4. 1.4

      Cohort change in partisan sorting

      Conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans fell from 19.6% to 6.3% of partisans who place themselves on the ideology scale from 1972 to 2024; the fall appears inside cohorts born 1927 to 1974, and how much of it is cohort replacement depends on assumptions the data cannot test.

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    5. 1.5

      Constraint among issue positions

      Are Americans' issue positions more tightly bundled than they were in the 1980s?

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    6. 1.6

      Political knowledge and constraint

      Is ideological constraint concentrated among the politically informed?

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    7. 1.7

      The South

      Which political gaps between the South and the rest of the country closed, and which persisted?

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