Lauderdale, Benjamin E;
Blumenau, Jack;
(2025)
Polarization over the priority of political problems.
American Journal of Political Science
10.1111/ajps.12957.
(In press).
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Abstract
What drives ideological division about political problems? When prioritizing which problems are most in need of redress, voters might disagree about the severity of individual outcomes that constitute such problems; the prevalence of those problems; or whether such problems are amenable to solution by government action. We field a large survey experiment in the United Kingdom and the United States and develop a new measurement approach that allows us to evaluate how ideological disagreements change when respondents consider the individual badness, social severity, and priority for government action of a set of 41 political problems. We find that large ideological divergences are observed in beliefs about social severity and priority for government action, not individual problem badness, and only in the United States. An important implication of these results is that perceptions of problem prevalence are a key source of polarization over problem-prioritization in the United States.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Polarization over the priority of political problems |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/ajps.12957 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12957 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). American Journal of Political Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Midwest Political Science Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Political Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10196414 |
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