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Rising Educational Divides in Attitudes: How Polarization across Cohorts Can Mask Age-Related Polarization

By on August 19, 2025 in Articles

Fabian Kratz

Sociological Science August 19, 2025
10.15195/v12.a21

Abstract

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The question of whether attitudes become more polarized over time has stimulated significant scientific and political debate. This study is the first to show that polarization processes can occur both across cohorts and with rising age and that cohort-based polarization may obscure age-related polarization. I introduce the age polarization and cohort polarization hypotheses, which propose that attitudes become increasingly polarized both as individuals age and across successive cohorts. I use multi-cohort panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and leverage one of its longest-running attitude measures: concerns about immigration. I show that education-specific differences in immigration concerns intensify both across cohorts and with rising age and that age related polarization only becomes apparent when cohort-based polarization is taken into account. These findings contribute to debates on polarization processes in attitudes over time and advance the literature on heterogeneity in the liberalizing effect of education.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Fabian Kratz: Department of Sociology, University of Munich, LMU. E-mail: fabian.kratz@lmu.de
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Daniel Krähmer, Madison Garrett, Lena Jost, Philipp Lersch, Josef Brüderl, and participants at the RC28 Conference in Milan (2025) for their helpful comments.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: STATA code for replication is available on the author’s Open Science Framework page: https://osf.io/um8f7/. The data sets were provided by the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Study at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). Access to the SOEP data requires signing a data assignment contract, which can be requested here: https://www.diw.de/en/diw_01.c.601584.en/data_access.html. For more information, visit https://www.diw.de/en/diw_01.c.838578.en/edition/soep-core_v37eu__data_1984-2020__eu-edition.html.

  • Citation: Kratz, Fabian. 2025. “Rising Educational Divides in Attitudes: How Polarization across Cohorts Can Mask Age-Related Polarization” Sociological Science 12: 486-510.
  • Received: May 23, 2025
  • Accepted: July 6, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Peter Bearman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a21

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Becoming an Ideologue: Social Sorting and the Microfoundations of Polarization

By on August 1, 2022 in Articles

Craig M. Rawlings

Sociological Science August 1, 2022
10.15195/v9.a13

Abstract

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This article elaborates and tests the hypothesis that the sociopolitical segregation of interpersonal networks (i.e., social sorting) is at the root of recent polarization trends in the United States. After reviewing recent trends, the article outlines the micro-level pathways through which social sorting along sociopolitical lines leads individuals to become more ideological in their identities and attitude structures. It then tests these pathways using panel data from the General Social Survey, which includes detailed measures of individuals’ social ties, ideological identification, and attitudes across a wide array of issues. Results show two dominant pathways through which more socially sorted individuals become more ideological: a short pathway directly linking social sorting to more extreme ideological identities, and a longer pathway linking social sorting to more extreme ideological identities through an increasingly ideological alignment of individuals’ attitude structures. The shorter pathway predominates among conservatives and the longer pathway among liberals. These micro-level pathways are shown to generalize to different macro-level polarization trends in identities and attitude structures for conservatives and liberals. Findings therefore uphold core sociological principles while providing stronger social-structural foundations for a growing body of mainly psychological research on ideological asymmetries.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Craig M. Rawlings: Department of Sociology, Duke University
E-mail: craig.rawlings@duke.edu

Acknowledgments: For helpful comments on earlier drafts, I thank Chris Bail and Clayton Childress. I am grateful for insights provided by several members of Duke University’s Worldview Lab, including Christopher Johnston, Nicholas Restrepo Ochoa, and Steve Vaisey. For useful comments at a conceptual stage of this work, which was presented at the 2019 Network Ecology mini-conference at Stanford University, I thank Delia Baldassarri, Amir Goldberg, John Levi Martin, and Dan McFarland. Any errors or omissions are my own. Address correspondence to Craig M. Rawlings, Dept. of Sociology, Duke University, 270 Reuben-Cooke, 417 Chapel Dr., Durham, NC 27708.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Rawlings, Craig M. 2022. “Becoming an Ideologue: Social Sorting and the Microfoundations of Polarization.” Sociological Science 9: 313-345.
  • Received: March 13, 2022
  • Accepted: June 7, 2022
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v9.a13


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Gender Flexibility, but not Equality: Young Adults’ Division of Labor Preferences

By on January 21, 2020 in Articles

Brittany N. Dernberger, Joanna R. Pepin

Sociological Science January 21, 2020
10.15195/v7.a2

Abstract
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Rising acceptance of mothers’ labor force participation is often considered evidence of increased support for gender equality. This approach overlooks perceptions of appropriate behavior for men and gender dynamics within families. We use nationally representative data of 12th-grade students from Monitoring the Future surveys (1976 to 2014) to evaluate changes in youths’ preferred division of labor arrangements. Over this period, contemporary young people exhibited greater openness to a variety of division of labor scenarios for their future selves as parents, although the husband-as-earner/wife-as-homemaker arrangement remained most desired. Using latent class analysis, we identify six configurations of gender attitudes: conventionalists, neotraditionalists, conventional realists, dual earners, intensive parents, and strong intensive parents. There are no gender egalitarian configurations—exhibiting equal support for both parents’ time at work and time at home. Our findings indicate researchers must distinguish between adoption of gender egalitarian principles and gender flexibility in dividing time at work and at home.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Brittany N. Dernberger: Department of Sociology, University of Maryland
E-mail: bdernber@terpmail.umd.edu

Joanna R. Pepin: Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin
E-mail: JPepin@prc.utexas.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Kelly Raley, Melissa Milkie, Philip Cohen, and Sarah Flood for generously reading previous versions and providing invaluable feedback. This article was presented at the University of Maryland’s Gender,Work, and Family/Stratification working group, the Family Demography working group at the University of Texas, and at the 2018 American Sociological Association’s annual conference. We thank all the audience participants for their thoughtful comments. Replication code for data access and all paper analyses are available at https://osf.io/m3xwy/.

This research was supported by grant P2CHD042849, Population Research Center, and grant T32HD007081, Training Program in Population Studies, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin; and grant P2CHD041041, Maryland Population Research Center, awarded to the University of Maryland, by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Dernberger, Brittany N., and Joanna R. Pepin. 2020. “Gender Flexibility, but not Equality: Young Adults’ Division of Labor Preferences.” Sociological Science 7: 36-56.
  • Received: November 20, 2019
  • Accepted: December 14, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a2


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