CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 7Electoral Systems and Political ParticipationCultural Differences and ValuesSocial and Intergroup Psychology

Putting Within-Country Political Differences in (Global) Perspective

Open access
Garcia-Rada, Ximena, Norton, Michael I.·2020·PLOS ONE
DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0231794PMC PMC7179846
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

The current political discourse in the United States focuses on extreme political polarization as a contributor to ills ranging from government shutdowns to awkward family holidays. And indeed, a large body of research has documented differences between liberals and conservatives-primarily focused on Republicans and Democrats in the United States. We combine large international surveys and more fine-grained surveys of United States citizens to compare differences in opinion between Republicans and Democrats to the full range of world opinion on moral issues (N = 37,653 in 39 countries) and issues of free speech (N = 40,786 in 38 countries). When viewed in the full distribution, polarization between Democrats and Republicans appears relatively small, even on divisive issues such as abortion, sexual preference, and freedom of religious speech. The average Democrat-Republic overlap is greater than 70% of the country pair overlaps across eight moral issues, meaning that 70% of the country pairs are more dissimilar from each other than Democrats and Republicans are dissimilar; similarly, the average Democrat-Republic overlap is greater than 79% of the country pair overlaps across five freedom of speech issues. These results suggest that cross-cultural comparisons are useful for putting differences between political partisans within the same country in context.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1371/journal.pone.0231794

Cites

33 of 33 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Levels of polarization in the USA are smaller than (or similar to) levels observed in other countries.

    “For example, there is evidence that ideological, issue and affective polarization have increased rapidly in the USA in the past few decades339,340, but it is also true that levels of polarization in the USA are smaller than (or similar to) levels observed in other countries65,341.”

    From Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts (2022) · cites this paper as [341]

    The Abstract reports that Democrat–Republican differences on moral and free-speech issues are relatively small compared with differences between pairs of countries. The Discussion clarifies that the study compares political groups within the United States with other countries; it does not establish that polarization within other countries is as high as, or higher than, polarization within the United States. No page numbers are available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 34 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Garcia-Rada, X., & Norton, M. I.
Affiliations
Harvard University (US)
Corresponding author
Norton, Michael I.
ORCID
Venue
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Published
2020-04-23
Volume
15
Issue
4
Pages
e0231794
ISSN
1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0231794
PMC
PMC7179846
OpenAlex
W3019566074
Cited by
7
References
34
Citations by year
2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 1
FWCI
4.32
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Cultural Differences and Values
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
Keywords
political polarization, cross-cultural comparison, Democrats and Republicans, moral attitudes, abortion, sexual preference, religious freedom
MeSH terms
Humans, Politics, Public Opinion, United States

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review