{"id":48991,"date":"2014-06-12T00:01:59","date_gmt":"2014-06-12T05:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beta.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/2014\/06\/12\/section-1-growing-ideological-consistency\/"},"modified":"2025-01-29T14:04:17","modified_gmt":"2025-01-29T19:04:17","slug":"section-1-growing-ideological-consistency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beta.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/politics\/2014\/06\/12\/section-1-growing-ideological-consistency\/","title":{"rendered":"Section 1: Growing Ideological Consistency"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n\n\n

How We Define \u201cIdeological Consistency\u201d<\/h4>\n\n

Throughout this report we utilize a scale composed of 10 questions asked on Pew Research Center surveys going back to 1994 to gauge peoples\u2019 ideological worldview. The questions cover a range of political values including attitudes about size and scope of government, the social safety net, immigration, homosexuality, business, the environment, foreign policy and racial discrimination. The individual items are discussed at the end of this section, and full details about the scale are in Appendix A<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

The scale is designed to measure how consistently liberal or conservative people\u2019s responses are across these various dimensions of political thinking (what some refer to as ideological \u2018constraint\u2019). Other sections of the report look at people\u2019s levels of partisanship, engagement and policy views. Where people fall on this scale does not always align with whether they think of themselves as liberal, moderate or conservative. See the discussion at the end of this section for this analysis.\n<\/p>\n\n

To be sure, those with across-the-board liberal or conservative views remain in the minority; most Americans continue to express at least some mix of liberal and conservative attitudes. Yet those who express ideologically consistent views have disproportionate influence on the political process<\/a>: They are more likely than those with mixed views to vote regularly and far more likely to donate to political campaigns and contact elected officials.<\/p>\n\n

Moreover, consistent liberals and conservatives approach the give-and-take of politics very differently than do those with mixed ideological views. Ideologically consistent Americans generally believe the other side \u2013 not their own \u2013 should do the giving<\/a>. Those in the middle, by contrast, think both sides should give ground.<\/p>\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n

Why We Include \u201cLeaners\u201d in the Republican and Democratic Groups<\/h4>\n\n

Throughout most of this report, Republicans and Democrats include independents who lean toward the parties. In virtually all situations, these Republican and Democratic leaners have far more in common with their partisan counterparts than they do with each other if combined into a single \u201cindependent\u201d group. See Appendix B<\/a> for more detail.<\/p>\n\n

As Partisans Move Further Apart, the Middle Shrinks<\/h3>\n\n

In 2012, the Pew Research Center updated its 25-year study of the public\u2019s political values<\/a>, finding that the partisan gap in opinions on more than 40 separate political values had nearly doubled over the previous quarter century. The new study investigates whether there is greater ideological consistency than in the past; that is, whether more people now have straight-line liberal or conservative attitudes across a range of issues, from homosexuality and immigration to foreign policy, the environment, economic policy and the role of government.<\/p>\n\n

The graphic below shows the extent to which members of both parties have become more ideologically consistent and, as a result, further from one another. When responses to 10 questions are scaled together to create a measure of ideological consistency, the median (middle) Republican is now more conservative than nearly all Democrats (94%), and the median Democrat is more liberal than 92% of Republicans.<\/p>\n\n

\"Democrats<\/a><\/figure>\n\n

In 1994, the overlap was much greater than it is today. Twenty years ago, the median Democrat was to the left of 64% of Republicans, while the median Republican was to the right of 70% of Democrats. Put differently, in 1994 23% of Republicans were more liberal<\/em> than the median Democrat; while 17% of Democrats were more conservative<\/em> than the median Republican. Today, those numbers are just 4% and 5%, respectively.<\/p>\n\n

\"Republicans<\/a><\/figure>\n\n

As partisans have moved to the left and the right, the share of Americans with mixed views has declined. Across the 10 ideological values questions in the scale, 39% of Americans currently take a roughly equal number of liberal and conservative positions. That is down from nearly half (49%) of the public in surveys conducted in 1994 and 2004. As noted, the proportion of Americans who are now more uniformly ideological has doubled over the last decade: About one-in-five Americans (21%) are now either consistently liberal (12%) or consistently conservative (9%) in their political values, up from just one-in-ten in 2004 (11%) and 1994 (10%).<\/p>\n\n

\"More<\/a><\/figure>\n\n

This translates into a growing number of Republicans and Democrats who are on completely opposite sides of the ideological spectrum, making it harder to find common ground in policy debates. The share of Democrats who hold consistently liberal positions has quadrupled over the course of the last 20 years, growing from just 5% in 1994 to 13% in 2004 to 23% today. And more Republicans are consistently conservative than in the past (20% today, up from 6% in 2004 and 13% in 1994), even as the country as a whole has shifted slightly to the left on the 10 item scale.<\/p>\n\n

Are They \u201cIdeologues?\u201d Value Sorting vs. Extreme Views<\/div>