March 29, 2024

American Political Divide is Worse than Ever


Image by DonkeyHotey, Flickr, Creative Commons


By Jessica Taylor / 10.05.2017

The partisan split in America is the highest it has been in two decades, with Republicans and Democrats holding vastly disparate views on race, immigration and the role of government, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.

Pew has been measuring attitudes on policy issues and political values going back to 1994, and its latest check-in finds — perhaps unsurprisingly — that Americans are more divided than ever.

“The fact that Republicans and Democrats differ on these fundamental issues is probably not a surprise, but the magnitude of the difference is striking, and particularly how the differences have grown in recent years and where they’ve grown,” Carroll Doherty, Pew’s director of political research and one of the authors of the study, told NPR.

Pew asked more than 5,000 respondents this summer about 10 specific political issues — including government regulation and aid, same-sex marriage and environmental regulations — and found that, on average, there was a 36-point gap between Republicans and Democrats. That’s a whopping 21-point increase since it began tracking those questions 23 years ago.

Partisanship has risen markedly since 2004, the year President George W. Bush was re-elected, and has hit a new high.

Two decades before, there was about a 15-point gap between Republicans and Democrats on these issues, but it wasn’t that much more pronounced than differences in race or religion.

Now, how you identify politically is — by far — the starkest divider of how Americans see certain issues.

The widest two gaps were in views about race and government aid to the poor. Overall, 41 percent of Americans said that racial discrimination is the reason black people struggle to get ahead, which is the highest mark in the survey’s history; 49 percent, however, still said that African-Americans who couldn’t advance were responsible for their own situation.

    

    

    

Source: Most recent surveys conducted June 8-18 and June 27-July 9. / Credit: Pew Research Center

But broken down along party lines, there’s a huge 50-point gap between the way Republicans and Democrats see the issue — almost two-thirds (64 percent) of Democrats think some African-Americans struggle to get ahead because of discrimination, while just 14 percent of Republicans think so.

Back in 1994, 39 percent of Democrats thought the same thing — a 25-point uptick — while just a quarter (24 percent) of Republicans thought so, a 12-point drop in the two decades since.

There’s also a 47-point gap between Democrats who believe that government should do more to help the needy (71 percent) and Republicans who agree with that statement (just 24 percent). Democrats’ belief that the government needs to do more to help is up from 58 percent in 1994.

A minority of Republicans have held that belief, and even fewer do today than a decade ago. The percentage saying so has fallen 21 points since 2007.

On immigration, there’s also a wide chasm between the parties — 84 percent of Democrats say immigrants have strengthened the country with their “hard work and talents.”

That’s a 52-point increase since 1994.

But the percentage of Republicans saying immigrants help the country is half that (42 percent). A plurality of Republicans (44 percent) believe immigrants are a burden, but that 42 percent is actually higher than in 1994 for Republicans.

There is evidence of a generational shift among Republicans on social issues, with more support among younger Republicans for immigration and same-sex marriage, for example.

On immigration, 62 percent of Republicans under 30 said immigrants strengthen the country (20 points higher than the GOP overall). Just 31 percent of Republicans 65 and older believed the same thing.

Majorities in both parties also now said that being gay should be accepted by society. But the margin is far wider among Democrats than Republicans — more than 4 in 5 (83 percent) Democrats said so, while just more than half (54 percent) of Republicans agreed. Because Democratic support has exploded, the gap between the two parties has actually gotten wider despite broader acceptance by people in both.

On other issues, like environmental regulations (and whether they have hurt the economy) and use of the military versus noninterventionism, the parties have also moved in very different directions over the past two decades.

As is the case with all the issues Pew tested, Doherty explained that with each party being pulled further into its corner, it has been harder for legislators in Washington to reach any type of middle-ground consensus.

“These gaps on these fundamental values are underlying some of the divisions you see between Democrats and Republicans in Congress when they debate specific issues,” Doherty said.

Democrats and Republicans more ideologically divided than in the past

Distribution of Democrats and Republicans on a 10-item scale of political values

  

Notes: Ideological consistency based on a scale of 10 political values questions. The blue area in this chart represents the ideological distribution of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents; the red area, of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. The overlap of these two distributions is shaded purple. / Source: Most recent survey conducted June 8-18. /Credit: Pew Research Center