Moral tolerance, redistribution attitudes and left-right partisanship are not more polarized across countries: Polarization trends in 28 countries (1990-2022)

Abstract

Extreme polarization is undesirable, as it renders democratic consensus impossible. But are societies really becoming increasingly polarized? Using the Integrated Value Survey (191,069 individuals, 28 countries, 1990-2022), this article shows that preferences for redistribution and moral attitudes are not becoming more polarized across countries; on the contrary, moral attitudes and redistribution preferences have even become more homogeneous in many countries. However, the US and other selected countries have experienced more polarization into the extremes of left-right political affiliations. In the US, this stronger polarization into left and right also increasingly aligns with moral attitudes and redistribution preferences. In this sense, attitudes about morality and redistribution are increasingly sorted along political lines in the US, but hardly in other countries. Illustrating what type of polarization occurs where and when, our study shows for the first time that attitude polarization is not a general secular trend across countries. This advances on existing research, which is typically limited to studying polarization in a single country, for a single attitude, or at a single point in time.