The Development of Political Opposition Vectors in the US, 1980-2020

Sergio Galaz-Garcia, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE)
Manuel Cuerno, CUNEF Universidad
Fernando Galaz Garcia, Durham University
Telmo Periz, Basque Center for Mathematics

This investigation empirically studies the number, opinion constraint structure, and relative size of ”vectors of political opposition”–the best known of which is the liberal-conservative divide–in the American electorate from the 1980s up until the present day. For this task we develop and use Bipolar Class Analysis (BCA), a method that uses survey data to estimate vectors of political opposition (VPOs) by clustering respondents according to how similar their answers to opinion questions toggle back and forth between support and rejection values. We discuss how BCA tackles inferential issues observed for similar existing methods (like Relational Class Analysis, or RCA) and show that it produces more accurate estimations of VPOs. We apply BCA to estimate VPOs using ANES data from 1988 to 2020. Results show that liberal-conservative divide has become the dominant vector of position in the American electorate, and that this process has been organized in two stages: one in which this vector lost population but increased constraint across issues opinions along a left-right wing divide, and another, observed between 2016 and 2020, when opinions became less constrained but encompassed a larger number of people.

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 Presented in Session 134. Theorizing Axes of Conflict in US Politics