According to a new study by researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication, both Democrats and Republicans significantly underestimate the diversity of policy attitudes within their own party and among the opposing party. This discovery challenges existing beliefs about polarization and suggests that reducing these misperceptions could ease political tensions.
The study, conducted by Nicholas Dias, a joint doctoral candidate in communications and political science, associate professor Yphtach Lelkes, and Annenberg School alum Jacob Pearl and published in Political Science Research and Methods, surveyed over 9,400 participants to examine American partisans’ perceptions of political attitudes.
“We’ve long thought that Americans see the other party as more extreme, but our results suggest that a greater problem may be that Americans fail to see the diversity of views within each party,” says Dias, lead author of the study.
Participants were first asked to share their own attitude toward a particularly polarizing policy issue—abortion, gun control, immigration—and then were asked to intuit how 20 Democrats and/or 20 Republicans would respond to the same question on a scale from 0 to 10.
The results reveal that Democrats and Republicans underestimate the diversity of the other party’s policy attitudes and their own party’s policy attitudes by more than a factor of two. However, Democrats and Republicans did not significantly overestimate how extreme the average member of each party was.
Read more at Annenberg School for Communication.
