4 ms·

I wonder if the study accurately reflects the lack of political common ground in the population. Are only 28% of us “moderates”? It’d be interesting to do the

I wonder if the study accurately reflects the lack of political common ground in the population. Are only 28% of us “moderates”? It’d be interesting to do the same analysis with photos of people taken 10, 20, 30, 40,... 100 years ago to see if the intersection (28%) grows/shrinks historically. Were we always so easily politically separable by our appearance alone? Has our appearance always revealed our political leanings, or do we now dress in order to make a political statement?

crazygringo 6y ago
There's no definitive definition of "moderate". People who want to argue most people are moderate say the political middle is the 75% middle of the bell curve, while people who want to argue most people are partisan say the political middle is only the middle 20% of the bell curve. What is accurate to say is that political views in Congress have bifurcated (not a bell curve), and that people in America have "sorted" -- decades ago many conservatives were Democrats and many liberals were Republicans, but now Republicans are virtually all conservative and Democrats are virtually all liberal. And people's political identities have become more important to them. But it also continues to be accurate that when people are surveyed according to their actual political positions on issues (as opposed to party affiliation), political views of citizens are still strongly bell-shaped -- they cluster in the middle. (Contrasted with congresspeople who cluster at two peaks.)
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > of the bell curve There is no bell curve. Political orientation is largely a self-referencing phenomenon. Outside the political elite, who have a high degree of ideological coherence, knowing a person's views on one issue is a loose predictor on their views on another. Gun-toting anti-abortion lesbians and pro-immigration free-market feminists are real, and they aren't some striking minority.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    There's a bell curve on each issue independently. This has been well established by surveys. And therefore however you want to aggregate issues into an axis, you'll invariably find the political distribution to be normal. It doesn't have anything to do with how coherent or not you find each party's platform to be. So yes, it is fair to say that political views are bell curve-shaped. It's not an artifact of political parties.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > There's a bell curve on each issue independently. This has been well established by surveys. I'd be curious to see the data. Measuring agreement is challenging. (Strongly Agree versus Agree mean different things to different people.) And polarizing issues tend to be multi-modal, thereby defying normal characterization. Where one can create an objective x-axis, e.g. with increasing strength of regulation on a topic, one frequently sees non-normal preference patterns.
      - crazygringo 6y ago
        The political scientist Morris Fiorina is who you want to start with. His book "Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America" provides a great overview with lots of data. A central finding is precisely that people appear polarized when you measure badly, but when you really delve into their nuanced beliefs with better surveys and more accurate questions, the bell curve is apparent everywhere and polarization disappears. And I don't know where one sees non-normal preference patterns. Regulation is a great example -- very few people believe in zero regulation, and very few in extreme regulation. People overwhelmingly prefer a moderate amount. Of course, whatever the objective measurement is, you may need a logarithmic scale or something else for it to show up as truly Gaussian -- as well as not limiting the range of responses. But on any modern issue of society-wide disagreement, one virtually always finds it to have a single central peak (as opposed to two peaks or more, or increasing/decreasing monotonically).

crazygringo 6y ago

There's no definitive definition of "moderate". People who want to argue most people are moderate say the political middle is the 75% middle of the bell curve, while people who want to argue most people are partisan say the political middle is only the middle 20% of the bell curve. What is accurate to say is that political views in Congress have bifurcated (not a bell curve), and that people in America have "sorted" -- decades ago many conservatives were Democrats and many liberals were Republicans, but now Republicans are virtually all conservative and Democrats are virtually all liberal. And people's political identities have become more important to them. But it also continues to be accurate that when people are surveyed according to their actual political positions on issues (as opposed to party affiliation), political views of citizens are still strongly bell-shaped -- they cluster in the middle. (Contrasted with congresspeople who cluster at two peaks.)

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> of the bell curve There is no bell curve. Political orientation is largely a self-referencing phenomenon. Outside the political elite, who have a high degree of ideological coherence, knowing a person's views on one issue is a loose predictor on their views on another. Gun-toting anti-abortion lesbians and pro-immigration free-market feminists are real, and they aren't some striking minority.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  There's a bell curve on each issue independently. This has been well established by surveys. And therefore however you want to aggregate issues into an axis, you'll invariably find the political distribution to be normal. It doesn't have anything to do with how coherent or not you find each party's platform to be. So yes, it is fair to say that political views are bell curve-shaped. It's not an artifact of political parties.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > There's a bell curve on each issue independently. This has been well established by surveys. I'd be curious to see the data. Measuring agreement is challenging. (Strongly Agree versus Agree mean different things to different people.) And polarizing issues tend to be multi-modal, thereby defying normal characterization. Where one can create an objective x-axis, e.g. with increasing strength of regulation on a topic, one frequently sees non-normal preference patterns.
    - crazygringo 6y ago
      The political scientist Morris Fiorina is who you want to start with. His book "Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America" provides a great overview with lots of data. A central finding is precisely that people appear polarized when you measure badly, but when you really delve into their nuanced beliefs with better surveys and more accurate questions, the bell curve is apparent everywhere and polarization disappears. And I don't know where one sees non-normal preference patterns. Regulation is a great example -- very few people believe in zero regulation, and very few in extreme regulation. People overwhelmingly prefer a moderate amount. Of course, whatever the objective measurement is, you may need a logarithmic scale or something else for it to show up as truly Gaussian -- as well as not limiting the range of responses. But on any modern issue of society-wide disagreement, one virtually always finds it to have a single central peak (as opposed to two peaks or more, or increasing/decreasing monotonically).