Toward a Shared Ideological Currency: Ideological Affective Polarization & the Changing Structure of Ideology in the U.S.

• Published date: 01 December 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129241261697
• Author: K. Elizabeth Coggins,Kathleen J. Gruschow
• Date: 01 December 2024

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(4) 1364–1380

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129241261697

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Toward a Shared Ideological Currency:

Ideological Affective Polarization & the

Changing Structure of Ideology in the U.S.

K. Elizabeth Coggins

1

and Kathleen J. Gruschow

1

Abstract

Much scholarly attention has focused on partisan affective polarization, a growing animosity between Democrats and

Republicans in the mass public. Less notice has been given to affective polarization among the ideological teams, liberals,

and conservatives. Yet, we suggest that given ideology’s particular inf‌luence in U.S. politics, ideological affective po-

larization has important and distinct consequences. We begin by offering evide nce that ideological affective polarization

both exists and has increased sharply in recent years. We theorize that this shift alters the way individuals cometo form

attachments to ideological identities, as well as the structure and tenor of ideology in the United States.

Keywords

ideology, ideological identif‌ication, affective polarization

The recent trend toward affective polarization amongst the

American public is both an anecdotal—felt and reported

by many—and an empirically supported f‌inding (e.g.,

Enders, 2021;Finkel et al., 2020;Iyengar, Sood, and

Lelkes 2012;Iyengar and Westwood 2015). Scholars have

identif‌ied its roots in both ideological and social sorting of

partisan coalitions (e.g., Abramowitz and Webster 2018;

Iyengar et al. 2019;Levendusky 2009;Mason 2015,

2016,2018;Mason and Wronski 2018) and the rise of

partisan and social media (Berry & Sobieraj 2014;

Druckman et al. 2019;Finkel et al. 2020;Lelkes, Sood,

and Iyengar, 2017;Settle 2018). Furthermore, and

pointing to the unlikelihood of retreat, recent work has

demonstrated new age cohorts are entering the electorate

more affectively polarized than their predecessors

(Phillips 2022), and that the onset of partisan polarization

emerges in adolescence (Tyler and Iyengar 2023).

Much empirical research has trained attention on the

troubling political consequences of affective polarization.

For example, Hetherington and Rudolph (2015) f‌ind that

citizens’levels of basic political trust in government is

highly contingent upon in- and out-party control. Perhaps

more egregiously, Graham and Svolik (2020) demonstrate

that only a small number of citizens prioritize democratic

principles when they are pitted against their partisan

identif‌ications. Polarization, their work demonstrates,

sharply undermines the public’s ability to serve as a

democratic check. Compelling research likewise reveals

that non-political consequences of affective polarization

are no less pervasive. McConnell et al. (2018) f‌ind that

partisanship often “spills over”beyond political settings,

affecting cooperation across various situations typical in

everyday life, while Iyengar and Westwood (2015)

document remarkable partisan discrimination in sur-

vey experiments of scholarship allocations for gradu-

ating high-school seniors. Further, Shafranek (2021)

f‌inds that college students prefer roommates who share

their political leanings, while Huber and Malhotra (2017)

show that online dating preferences are heavily reliant on

political homophily. In brief, there is no shortage of

evidence that polarization has sincere and wide-ranging

political and non-political ramif‌ications.

While the disciplinary and democratic implications of

this extensive body of work is unquestionably important,

focusing the analytical lens in the other direction—

considering how affective polarization may inf‌luence

the micro-level formation of partisan and ideological

1

Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Colorado College, Colorado College, 14 East Cache La Poudre Street,

Colorado Springs, CO 80903, USA.

Email: kcoggins@coloradocollege.edu

group attachments that underlie it—remains relatively

unexplored.

This empirical gaze guides the present study. Research

in political psychology has done much to help us un-

derstand dispositional and motivational forces that drive

ideological identities (for an overview, see Jost 2021).

While some research in this f‌ield has likewise considered

how these attachments are shifted by situational or en-

vironmental forces, such as system threat (Jost et al.

2003), fear of death (e.g., Landau et al. 2004), and ter-

rorism (e.g., Willer 2004), this body of research has fo-

cused less on potential alterations to the underlying

process by which individuals form their ideological at-

tachments in the wake of these situational shifts to their

environments. In the present study, we do exactly this by

asking how the rise in ideological affective polarization

has durably affected the underlying content and structure

ideological identif‌ications in the U.S.

Focusing on ideology (instead of partisanship) is a

deliberate choice, one informed by ideology’s particular

potency in the political realm. Ideological attachments are

primarily symbolic in nature (e.g., Conover and Feldman

1981), less informed and inf‌luenced by cognitive content

like policy and issue-based positions. Instead, ideology is

best understood as “gut-level,”driven by connections to

symbols and groups that have an affective charge for most

Americans. Ideology “is increasingly argued to be at least

partially anchored in rapid, implicit evaluations that

spring from deep psychological and dispositional mech-

anisms”(Hatemi, Charles, and Smith, 2019;Hibbing,

Smith, and Alford, 2013). All of this, in turn, makes

ideology particularly powerful as a political and heuristic

tool. That is, the gut-level, symbolic nature of ideology

means it easy for politicians to cue—calling oneself a

“conservative,”for example, has immense summative—

and extra-political—power. So does calling one’s oppo-

nent “out”as a “liberal.”Ideological terms transcend

politics and signal—without need for political

sophistication—morality, worldviews, and values. In

other words, ideology can simplify politics so that issue

positions are often secondary.

We argue that, for ideological self-identif‌ication, the

impact of persistent heightened animosity in the political

and social realms, alongside other accompanying devel-

opments like the explosion of partisan news and social

media, have been substantial, shifting what the terms

“liberal”and “conservative”mean, and in turn, the pro-

cess by which Americans come to identify with an

ideological team. In other words, we argue that the

contemporaneous situational force of affective polariza-

tion has altered the very content and structure of ideo-

logical identif‌ications in the United States. The result is a

reciprocal relationship in which changes to in political

realm alter the meaning of the ideological identities

themselves, and those ideological identities in turn drive

certain behaviors and conceptualizations of the political

realm.

Our study proceeds as follows: we begin by situating

our study in the broader debate around ideology and its

existence among the American public. We then rely upon

compelling, extant literature to overview the shift in

political climate, demonstrating that ideological affective

polarization is indeed prevalent in the United States. Then,

we build upon the work of Conover and Feldman (1981)

to develop and rethink a micro-level model of self-

identif‌ication in the wake of increased affective polari-

zation. We thus review their model and the key f‌indings

that have guided understandings of ideological social

identity to ground our proposed revisions. In brief, we

suggest that we are no longer operating in an environment

concomitant with their f‌indings around the content and

structure of ideological identif‌ication, which they elo-

quently summarized in their seminal work by positing,

“that liberals and conservatives view the political world

not from different sides of the same coin, but rather, if you

will, from the perspective of entirely different currencies”

(624). In other words, we call into question non-bipolarity

in both the content and the structure of ideological

identif‌ication in the U.S. Specif‌ically, in the wake of the

contemporaneous situational force of sharp increases in

affective polarization, we challenge the hypothesis that (1)

“liberal”and “conservative”are not structured as two ends

of a single dimension and that (2) the “criterial referents,”

or symbols and groups, that form the bulk of the content of

ideological label meaning are unidirectional in nature. To

test empirically our hypotheses, we leverage both

“snapshot”and longitudinal data from the American

National Election Study (ANES) that help us develop a

deeper understanding of the evolving meaning of the

ideological groups in the U.S. These investigations un-

cover both a bipolar nature of ideology in the United

States and a shared, but oppositional, symbolic meaning

of ideological labels—two empirically changed features

of ideology. In our revisions to this model, we rely heavily

upon an understanding of ideology from the social psy-

chology lens, like that of Jost (2006;2021) and others

outlined in the next section. Pushing back against long

held perceptions of a non-ideological American public,

Jost (2006) argues for a deeply ideological public, and one

that is increasingly so. Our results support this f‌inding. We

conclude by considering the implications for these

changes in the nature and structure of ideological identity.

Differing Perspectives on Ideology

Ideology—specif‌ically its existence and inf‌luence among

the public—has been long debated in the political science

literature. Converse (1964) argued that much of the

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