Value Disagreement and Partisan Sorting in the American Mass Public

Abstract

Decades ago, research described American political culture in terms of consensus. Contemporary research, however, reaches opposite conclusions, arguing that the “culture war” that now defines American politics stems from value disagreements among partisan and ideological groups. What factors are at work in this transition from consensus to dissensus? This manuscript pulls from two literatures—one on American core political values and another on partisan-ideological sorting and affective polarization—and argues that the term dissensus best describes value preferences among individuals whose partisan and ideological identities are aligned. Among others, however, preferences on core political values are largely in consensus. First, using data from 2006 and 2019 and fitting geometric models of value preferences, I show that strong value disagreements exist primarily among sorted partisans. Next, I explore possible implications of such alignments and find that relationships among value preferences, political attitudes, and political behaviors are significantly stronger in sorted partisans. I close with a discussion of how theories undergirding affective polarization and partisan-ideological sorting can help the discipline better understand value conflict in the American mass public.