United We Divide?: Education, Income, and Heterogeneity in Mass Partisan Polarization

Abstract

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to debating both the general importance of "economic" and "cultural" issues to mass political choices, and how the relative importance of these two issue dimensions vary across time and across citizens. In this paper, we shed light on the foundations of these debates by exploring heterogeneity in how citizens have reacted to 40 years of elite party polarization on these issues. We focus on heterogeneity across two lines of difference central to popular and scholarly discourse on this topic: income and formal education. We develop and test several expectations regarding the roles of income, education, and the intersection of the two, in shaping mass response to changes in the elite context. We find that mass party polarization on economic issues is most acute among highly educated citizens with relatively low incomes, while polarization on cultural issues has occurred largely among economically affluent, but less educated, citizens.

Keywords: polarization, partisanship, issue evolution