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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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The Diverging Beliefs and Practices of the Religiously Affiliated and Unaffiliated in the United States

By on June 21, 2018 in Articles

Aaron Gullickson

Sociological Science, June 21, 2018
10.15195/v5.a16

Abstract
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Since 1990, the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation has grown substantially. Prior work has shown that between 1990 and 2000, the religiously unaffiliated population also became more religious in belief and practices, both in absolute terms and relative to the affiliated population. This curious empirical finding is believed to be driven by a dilution effect in which moderate believers disaffiliated from organized religion without giving up religious beliefs and practices. In the current article, I use data from the General Social Survey to show that this convergence of beliefs and practices of the religiously affiliated and unaffiliated ended around 2000. Since 2000, the religiously unaffiliated have decreased their belief in God and the afterlife and have not increased their prayer frequency. The trends for the affiliated have been either increasing or unchanging, and thus, the religious practices and beliefs of the religiously affiliated and unaffiliated have diverged since 2000. The change in trend for the religiously unaffiliated after 2000 cannot fully be explained by generational succession or the growing percentage of Americans raised without religion. Although the unaffiliated remain very heterogeneous in their beliefs and practices, these results point to a growing religious polarization in the United States.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Aaron Gullickson: Department of Sociology, University of Oregon
E-mail: aarong@uoregon.edu

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Michael Hout and Claude Fischer for comments on early drafts of this article. Direct all correspondence to aarong@uoregon.edu. All code and data used to conduct this analysis as well as supplementary material is available at https://osf.io/94kv6/.

  • Citation: Gullickson, Aaron. 2018. “The Diverging Beliefs and Practices of the Religiously Affiliated and Unaffiliated in the United States.” Sociological Science 5: 361-379.
  • Received: April 23, 2018
  • Accepted: May 14, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Mario Small
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a16

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Consensus, Polarization, and Alignment in the Economics Profession

By on December 5, 2016 in Articles

Tod S. Van Gunten, John Levi Martin, Misha Teplitskiy

Sociological Science, December 5, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a45

Abstract
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Scholars interested in the political influence of the economics profession debate whether the discipline is unified by policy consensus or divided among competing schools or factions. We address this question by reanalyzing a unique recent survey of elite economists. We present a theoretical framework based on a formal sociological approach to the structure of belief systems and propose alignment, rather than consensus or polarization, as a model for the structure of belief in the economics profession. Moreover, we argue that social clustering in a heterogeneous network topology is a better model for disciplinary social structure than discrete factionalization. Results show that there is a robust latent ideological dimension related to economists’ departmental affiliations and political partisanship. Furthermore, we show that economists closer to one another in informal social networks also share more similar ideologies.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Tod S. Van Gunten: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Email: tvg@mpifg.de

John Levi Martin: Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
Email: jlmartin@uchicago.edu

Misha Teplitskiy: Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University
Email: mteplitskiy@fas.harvard.edu

Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank Anil Kashyap, Brian Barry, and the Initiative on Global Markets at the Booth School of Business of the University of Chicago for providing data access.


  • Citation: Van Gunten, Tod S., John Levi Martin, and Misha Teplitskiy. 2016. “Consensus, Polarization, and Alignment in the Economics Profession.” Sociological Science 3: 1028-1052.
  • Received: October 8, 2016
  • Accepted: October 26, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a45


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