Policy Polarization among Party Elites and the Significance of Political Awareness in the Mass Public

• Author: Benjamin Highton,Ryan L. Claassen
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912908322415
• Published date: 01 September 2009
• Date: 01 September 2009
• Subject Matter: Articles

538

Political Research Quarterly

Volume 62 Number 3

September 2009 538-551

© 2009 University of Utah

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Policy Polarization among Party Elites

and the Significance of Political

Awareness in the Mass Public

Ryan L. Claassen

Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

Benjamin Highton

University of California, Davis

This article analyzes opinions about abortion, racial, and social welfare policies, comparing their determinants among

citizens with different levels of political information over the past several decades. Hypothesizing that growing elite

partisan polarization may have exacerbated the political implications of differences in political awareness, the authors

examine how increasing clarity of party–policy linkages among political elites influences party–policy linkages in the

mass public. The results show that only the well informed responded to the growing elite polarization by becoming

more partisan in their opinions. Apparently, in the absence of the motivation to develop coherent opinions, even a

simplification of the political environment does not close the gaps between those who are more and less aware about

politics.

Keywords: polarization; party identification; issues; political awareness

The political significance of the low and unequal

distributions of political awareness, knowledge,

sophistication, and engagement in the mass public

remains one of the central questions for public opin-

ion scholars. To some, the dual facts that many

people are politically ignorant and that political igno-

rance is associated with ongoing social, economic,

racial, ethnic, and gender cleavages in society are

cause for great democratic concern (e.g., Delli

Carpini and Keeter 1996; Althaus 1998, 2003).

Others acknowledge the “low mean, high variance”

aspect of the political awareness distribution but

express at least some skepticism about the “minimal-

ist” implications (e.g., Popkin 1991; Sniderman,

Brody, and Tetlock 1991; Lupia 1994; Lupia and

McCubbins 1998; Lupia, McCubbins, and Popkin

2000). Taking note of the ample availability and

opportunities to use “shortcuts” and “heuristics,”

these scholars argue that many citizens are capable,

despite their lack of political knowledge, to form

coherent political views.1

Easily reconciling the divergent views is unrealis-

tic. But there are commonalities from which to build

to analyze the relationship between political aware-

ness and the nature of public opinion. In this article,

we focus on the “choice context” (Sniderman 2000),

which refers to the larger political environment in

which citizens acquire political information and form

their opinions. Aspects of the choice context include

the media environment (Althaus 2003; Jerit, Barabas,

and Bolsen 2006; Prior 2007), electoral institutions

(Lupia and McCubbins 1998), the level of policy

debate (Claassen and Highton 2006), and location in

the electoral calendar (Nicholson 2003). By investi-

gating how the political context relates to the connec-

tion between political awareness and public opinion,

we shift attention from whether political information

matters to focus instead on the conditions that mini-

mize or exacerbate the effects of political information

on public opinion.

The part of the political environment we examine

in this article is the party system, specifically the

Ryan L. Claassen, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Kent

State University; e-mail: rclaasse@kent.edu.

Benjamin Highton, Associate Professor of Political Science,

University of California-Davis; e-mail: bhighton@ucdavis.edu.

Authors’ Note: A previous version of this article was presented

at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Political Science

Association, Philadelphia. We appreciate advice and criticism

from Bob Huckfeldt, Cindy Kam, Rick Lau, Walt Stone, Nick

Valentino, and Liz Zeichmeister.