TODAY'S headlines bring us an interesting little point-counterpoint about political polarisation. First of all, we have a report filed from the annual meeting of Society for Personality and Social Psychology. It's "downright wrong", writes Stephanie Pappas, to say that Americans are becoming more divided: "In fact, political polarization among the public has barely budged at all over the past 40 years." The Washington Post, on the other hand, notes that Barack Obama has a partisan approval gap of 68%—that is, 80% of Democrats approve of the job he's doing, compared to 12% of Republicans—the largest partisan gap for any president's third year of office ever recorded. "What do those numbers tell us?" ask Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake. "Put simply: that the country is hardening along more and more strict partisan lines."

In other words, we have two sets of researchers taking up a potentially serious question and coming up with totally contradictory conclusions. The fundamental difference is methodological. Mr Cillizza and Mr Blake are looking at Gallup tracking polls, which stretch back about 60 years. Ms Pappas focuses on the work of a psychologist, John Chambers of the University of Florida, who measured the difference between "actual" and "perceived" polarisation by examining thousands of answers to the American National Election Survey alongside the polling data. If you look at the polls, he found, you do see that people think things are more polarised, and that partisans on both sides perceive a higher degree of polarisation than independents. But if you get down to people's views on policy issues—defence spending, women's rights—the country is not much more polarised than it was in the 1970s.

Alongside these data sets, we have completely different premises about how to interpret them. The Cillizza/Blake view is that a president's partisan approval gap is an indicator of political polarisation more broadly. The Chambers view is that "perceived" polarisation is less significant than the "actual" polarisation that can be measured by the responses to policy questions.

Both of these approaches are open to criticism. With regard to the president's approval rating, the problem is that the president isn't the party, and so the president's job approval rating isn't a perfect proxy for polarisation more generally. I'm not even sure that job approval is a great proxy for how polarising the president himself is, unless we're defining polarisation by the partisan approval gap itself. "Do you approve of the job Barack Obama is doing?" is a yes-or-no question that doesn't allow for variations like "I hate him with a passion that surprises and alienates casual observers" or "I've been disappointed by his pragmatism, but he's better than Mitt Romney" and so on. It may be that any president's partisan approval gap is a leading indicator of polarisation, because the president is a highly visible avatar of one party's platform, but the president is also an individual figure, so we can't make too much of that.

I like Mr Chambers' distinction between actual and perceived polarisation, because it reinforces my casual impression that you hear much more partisan rhetoric on television than you do in real life. However, we should be cautious about the idea that we can measure "real" political polarisation simply by asking people about their substantive views. There's not a perfect overlap between policy preferences and partisan identification, much less the intensity of partisan preference. So the finding that Americans aren't getting more contentious about policy questions is interesting, but the connection to political polarisation is a little tenuous. Mr Chambers seems to implicitly acknowledge as much:


Mr Chambers's conclusion about the independents—that they perceive less polarisation than partisans on either side—strikes me as the most compelling finding here. That might be surprising, if you think that independents are people who have been driven out of the major parties because they're turned off by the fighting, or it might strike you as common sense, if you see independents as people situated between the two parties. In either case, as independents are now the biggest "party" in the United States, their revival seems to corroborate his overarching argument that partisanship is not as intense as we perceive. 

(Photo credit: AFP)