HASAre we witnessing growing political polarization? Is it the political debate that polarizes or the opinions of the population? in his book Elections and social inequalities in France 1789-2022 (Seuil, 2023), Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty maintain that it is social situations and in particular economic inequalities that determine the vote more than opinions and “identities”. They support their position with statistical tools hitherto unmatched at the level of French municipalities. But when it comes to opinions, simple objective observation seems very difficult and systematic statistics impossible. However, one branch of the social sciences is attempting to address this challenge by relying on rigorously developed opinion surveys.
Ongoing research, recently presented by Southern Methodist University economics professor Klaus Desmet at the Paris School of Economics, proposes a new method for measuring ideological polarization. Their analyzes focus on the United States, but it would be (relatively) easy to reproduce them for France, since they are based on international surveys (those of the World Values Survey), which ask large samples of people in many countries about the values they hold. that they adhere to (in political, religious, ethical, economic matters, etc.).
Desmet’s objective is to form groups based on shared values and measure both their homogeneity and the distance that separates them. Based on reasonable assumptions, you can gather all respondents into groups (the number of your choice), so that each member of one group is closer to the others than to those in other groups.
Applying his method in the United States since 1981 (date of the first survey, followed by six others since then), he chooses to focus on the case of two groups. First, he notes that the relative size of the two groups is quite stable (almost 60% of respondents in one, 40% in the other), and that the ” distance “ Ideology between the groups has barely changed since 1981, refuting the idea of a polarization of values. It verifies an already known result, according to which the opinions that mainly separate groups are, at least in the United States, religious and ethical rather than economic or social, and that they do not significantly distinguish people according to their race, class or gender.
Marked difference in ideology.
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