Opinion Polarization: Important Contributions, Necessary Limitations

In our 1996 article “Have Americans’ Social Attitudes Become More Polarized?” (AJS 102 [3]: 690–755) we addressed the substantive question of whether or not polarization on 18 morally charged social issues had increased over a period of approximately two decades. That article examined all of the then-available years of data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and the National Election Study (NES). The approach was necessarily broad, entailing more than 200 separate analyses of polarization within the population as a whole, within subgroups of the population and between groups. Moreover, each examination in turn required the use of three or four statistical models. Our major conclusion was that little polarization had occurred over these years and that the American public was by many criteria more unified in its views in the 1990s than it had been in the 1970s. The most important exception to this generalization, based on analyses of data from both the NES and the GSS, was that the population’s attitudes toward abortion had been polarizing. The results of Mouw and Sobel’s analysis of the NES data suggest that attitudes toward abortion had not been polarizing, thus challenging the one qualification we made to our central