Multidimensional Political Attitudes and Polarization Across 141 Countries

Abstract

Societies worldwide are described as increasingly polarized, yet issue polarization -- how divided a society is over political positions -- has been measured almost entirely on a single left-right axis developed in Western democracies. Whether that axis describes political division elsewhere is largely untested, because no survey measures political attitudes on multiple dimensions across many countries. Here, we harmonize 1,299 items from nine cross-national survey programs and 23 national election studies to place 1.14 million people from 141 countries on four dimensions: social liberalism, economic left-right, democratic commitment, and anti-elite sentiment. A single left-right axis does not describe political division in most of the world. The median within-country correlation between a person's social and economic positions is -0.015. Societies differ instead in what they are divided about, and they do so by region. European countries divide most often over social liberalism, East Asian and Arab countries over democratic commitment, Latin American countries over economic left-right, and African countries over anti-elite sentiment. Of the 81 countries measured on all four dimensions, 39 are most divided on a dimension no left-right scale would capture. Most political disagreement lies within countries rather than between them, at 58 to 88 percent of the variance. Ideological constraint, long treated as a property of mass publics, holds in nineteen of the eighty-three we can test, most strongly in the United States at +0.70, and there it is concentrated among the politically attentive. Understanding political conflict therefore requires asking not how polarized a society is but what it is polarized about. Our released item bank and fitted parameters place respondents from any future survey on the same scale without re-estimation, once that survey's items are harmonized to the bank.