Limerick-based researchers examine 'ideological' gap between Republicans and Democrats in the US
A UNIVERSITY of Limerick study has revealed that the ideological gap between Republicans and Democrats has widened over the last three election cycles in the United States.
The analysis of US election data shows a trend of increasing polarisation and a growing ideological distance between Republicans and Democrats from 2012 to 2020.
The data came from the American National Election Survey who recruit around 5,000 participants prior to each US presidential election.
The UL research found that ideological distance and polarisation increased with each election cycle since 2012, with a “striking increase” from 2016 to 2020.
The lead author of the study was Alejandro Dinkelberg, a PhD student in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UL..
“It is interesting to see that the Republicans are spread out and move further away from each other,” Alejandro observed.
The researchers show that the trend to 2020 illustrates that Democrats and Republicans in this sample become more distinct from one another, but also that Democrats generally become ideologically more similar to each other.
Republicans become more scattered, possibly showing that Trump-era politics resulted in polarisation within the Republican identity as well as between Republicans and other parties.
“We might not see political attitudes drift off to extremes, however, we can observe missing common ground between Republicans and Democrats,” clarified UL postdoctoral researcher and co-author of the study Dr Pádraig MacCarron.
Polarisation and the hardening of attitudes could put brakes on America’s ability to find popular solutions to pressing social issues, he added.
“Nowadays, people are more likely to connect with people with similar opinions due to the omnipresence of opinions, comments and identifications in online social networks like Twitter.
“We want to understand how this happens and what the important influential factors are,” Dr Quayle, of UL’s Psychology Department concluded.