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Depolarization, Repolarization and Redistributive Ideological Change in Britain, 1983–2016

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2019

Gidon Cohen Open the ORCID record for Gidon Cohen [Opens in a new window]  and
Sarah Cohen Open the ORCID record for Sarah Cohen [Opens in a new window]
Gidon Cohen*
Affiliation:
School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University
Sarah Cohen
Affiliation:
Department of Social Sciences, Northumbria University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines party sorting, elite cue and ideological polarization accounts of polarization dynamics. The study tests their differing expectations about trends in redistributive ideological polarization and partisan polarization in the British case using repeated cross-section and panel data. The authors reject party sorting accounts, which require ideology to be stable and changes in party support to drive partisan polarization, because they find that ideology trends with elite polarization and that ideological change causes partisan polarization. The authors reject elite cue accounts, which maintain that it is mainly partisans’ ideology that follows elite polarization, because they find virtually identical trends for initially ideologically similar non-partisans too. The study thus finds support for an ideological polarization account in which changes in elite polarization are associated with general changes in citizen redistributive ideology.

Keywords

polarizationpartisanshipideologyredistributioncore valuesmulti-level model
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 1181 - 1202
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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