Political polarization: left and right in Canada and the U.S.
Part 1 of a new series on political ideology
Are Canadians becoming more politically polarized? To some, this seems self-evident: intense polarization is something we can feel. Others aren’t so sure, finding only “mixed evidence” that Canadians are becoming more politically divided. Of course, the answer is shaped by how the issue is defined – whether, for instance, the issue is the behaviour of the majority of the population, or the people at the fringe.
I’m going to take a look at polarization in a three-part series on political ideology in Canada and the United States. In this first part, I’ll examine where Canadians and Americans place themselves on the left-right political spectrum, and how this has changed over time.
Here’s the survey question this is based on (from the AmericasBarometer):
The following scale goes from left to right, where “1” means LEFT and “10” means RIGHT. Nowadays, when we speak of political leanings, we talk of those on the left and those on the right. In other words, some people sympathize more with the left and others with the right. According to the meaning that the terms "left" and "right" have for you, and thinking of your own political leanings, where would you place yourself on this scale?
The question used in the American survey is the same, but instead of “left” and “right” it asks about “liberal” and “conservative” – terms that don’t work for this purpose in Canada because they’re also the names of the main political parties.
Here’s a look at where Canadians place themselves on the left-right scale in 2023.
If you’re good at math, you’ll have noticed that a 10-point scale of integers has no exact mid-point. But, as the chart shows, Canadians bunch up in the political centre, with relatively few at either end. One in two Canadians hover very close to the middle ground (48% choose either 5 or 6), and 67 percent place themselves between “4” and “7” – which, for our purposes, will be defined as the political centre. That leaves 16 percent on the left (between 1 and 3 on the scale) and 16 percent on the right (between 8 and 10).
How does this distribution vary across the country? The differences are modest. Atlantic Canadians (21%) are a little more likely to place themselves on the left, while Albertans (22%) are a little more likely to place themselves on the right – but over 60 percent in every region place themselves in the middle. Men (20%) are a little more right-wing than women (14%); as are people under the age of 45 (21%) compared to those age 45 and older (13%). Racialized Canadians (21%) are also more likely to place themselves on the right than those who identify as white (15%). These differences are nuances, not schisms.
The comparison between Canada and the United States is more telling.
The American line is flatter – there are fewer people in the middle – and it kicks upwards at either end. Measured this way, there is less centre ground in American politics, and more polarization. The proportion that places themselves in the centre is 20 percentage points lower in the U.S. than in Canada (47% compared to 67%). And, compared to Canadians, Americans are more likely to place themselves both on the left (25% compared to 16%) and on the right (28% compared to 16%).
The key question, though, is whether either country is becoming more polarized. Over time, are fewer people placing themselves in the political centre?
In fact, there has been very little change over time. The pattern in Canada today is very close to where it stood a decade ago. Neither the experience of the pandemic, nor the waning popularity of the current federal government, has pushed people further to the right or left. If anything, there has been a slight decline since 2014 in the proportion of Canadians on the right of the spectrum, from 24 percent to 16 percent.
The pattern is broadly similar in the U.S. The centre ground there – which is narrower than that in Canada – is not shrinking, and has grown a bit since the previous survey. And, since 2014, the right has shrunk even more in the U.S. than in Canada (a 13 percentage-point drop). This may seem counter-intuitive given the rise of Trumpian Republicanism – but keep in mind that, while that movement motivates some, it alienates others.
We have no way of knowing, of course, whether people’s sense of what it means to be on the political left or right has shifted over time. But we can say that, in Canada at least, twice as many people place themselves in the centre than on the two ends of the ideological spectrum, with little change over time.
How this shapes electoral politics will be the subject of the second part of this series.
The findings featured in this post are from the Canadian portion of the 2023 AmericasBarometer. The AmericasBarometer is a biennial comparative survey of democratic values and behaviours that covers countries in North, Central and South America, as well as a significant number of countries in the Caribbean (the 2023 survey covers 25 countries). The project is led by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) at Vanderbilt University.
The survey is the most comprehensive source of information about support for democracy in Canada. Follow the Environics Institute to catch more reports from this survey.
The 2023 AmericasBarometer in Canada survey was conducted by the Environics Institute for Survey Research, in partnership with LAPOP at Vanderbilt University. It was conducted online with a representative sample of 2,500 Canadians (aged 18 and over) between July 20 and August 4, 2023. The author is solely responsible for any errors of presentation or interpretation.
AmericasBarometer data for the United States were supplied by the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University, which takes no responsibility for any interpretation of the data. The 2023 survey in the U.S. was conducted online with a representative sample of 1,500 Americans (aged 18 and over) between July 21 and July 26, 2023 (note that the ideological scale question was only asked to 993 respondents).
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