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

Cohen, Gidon and Cohen, Sarah (2021) Depolarization, Repolarization and Redistributive Ideological Change in Britain, 1983-2016. British Journal of Political Science, 51 (3). pp. 1181-1202. ISSN 0007-1234

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Abstract

In this article we examine party sorting, elite cue and ideological polarization accounts of polarization dynamics. We test their differing expectations about trends in redistributive ideological polarization and partisan polarization in the British case using repeated cross-section and panel data. We reject party sorting accounts, which require ideology to be stable and changes in party support to drive partisan polarization, because we find that ideology trends with elite polarization and that ideological change causes partisan polarization. We reject elite cue accounts, which argue that it is mainly the ideology of partisans that follows elite polarization, because we find virtually identical trends for initially ideological similar non-partisans too. We thus find support for an ideological polarization account where changes in elite polarization are associated with
general changes in citizen redistributive ideology.

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