How polarised are citizens? Measuring ideology from the ground-up
We investigate whether the ideological polarisation of citizens has increased in Western democracies. We propose a novel methodology to identify individual ideologies by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation to political survey data. This approach indicates that questions related to confidence in institutions play a leading role in defining citizen ideologies, in addition to the questions associated with the traditional left-right scale. We decompose the shift in ideological positions across the population over time and measure polarisation. This reveals evidence of a `disappearing centre? in a sub-group of countries with citizens shifting away from centrist ideologies into anti-establishment `anarchist? ideologies. This trend is especially pronounced for the US.
21 February 2024
The Economic Journal 2024
https://academic.oup.com/ej/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ej/ueae010/7612240
This Journal article is published under the centre's Growth programme.