As Republican voters in Illinois head to the polls, we're pleased to announce a new feature on RSF Review: the Election 2012 series. Through the campaign season, we hope to add insights, data and commentary from our scholars and research programs to the political conversation. In our first installment, RSF Visiting Scholar Delia Baldassarri discusses the conventional wisdom about political polarization in the United States—and why it may be wrong.

More on Polarization
• Website: Delia Baldassarri
• Study: Partisan Joiners: Associational Membership and Political Polarization in the United States (1974–2004)
• Study: Dynamics of Political Polarization (PDF)
• Study: Partisans without Constraint: Political Polarization and Trends in American Public Opinion (PDF)

Q: Although it is widely assumed that public opinion in America has sharply polarized over the past 40 years, your analysis of the evidence and scholarly literature suggests a more nuanced conclusion. What does the research show?

A: Over the last four decades, and especially starting in the 1990s, public opinion increasingly divided on a few specific issues, such as abortion, gay rights and the war in Iraq, while we observe relative stability and even depolarization on all remaining economic, civil rights, social, and foreign policy issues. Indeed, Americans are actually less divided in their opinion on the role of women in society, racial integration, and criminality than they were forty years ago. As new generations replace old ones, and women achieve higher positions in society, the collective mood shifts accordingly.

However, there is clear evidence of polarization among political partisans: those who are politically active, who identify with a party or strongly identify as liberal or conservative, tend to have more extreme positions than the rest of the population. In sum, while the distribution of opinions across the population has not changed a lot, with the exception of a few ‘hot-button’ issues, Republicans and Democrats are significantly more divided on a wide range of issues. This is a process of partisan alignment, which is partly consequence of the increased polarization of the parties, Congress, and political activists: since parties are more polarized, they are now better at sorting individuals along ideological lines.

A verdict has been reached in the Dharun Ravi trial. The ex-Rutgers student faced a series of charges, including bias intimidation and invasion of privacy, after he used a webcam to watch his college roommate Tyler Clementi kissing a man. The incident drew international attention after Clementi killed himself, raising difficult questions about homophobia, bullying, and the level of tolerance and diversity in American colleges. This week, we spoke with RSF Visiting Scholar Elizabeth Paluck about the Ravi trial and its implications. Paluck, a social psychologist at Princeton, studies prejudice and intergroup conflict reduction and has used large-scale field experiments to test theoretically driven interventions.

Q: A large part of the Dharun Ravi trial centered on the intentions and actions of Tyler Clementi’s peers—what they thought about his homosexuality, what they said to him and others about it and how they acted around him. What do we know about the importance of peer influence on prejudice and attitudes in school settings?

A: We think that peers have a strong influence, especially because much of the behavior that we care about unfolds in situations that are dominated by peers. Peers exert their influence by setting a standard, through their own behavior or expressions of belief, about what is appropriate and typical to do in that situation. In my field, that is what we call a social norm--a perception of what is appropriate and typical to do in the situation. Sometimes these peer-based social norms are so pervasive across situations that students internalize them as private attitudes. But the powerful thing about peer influence is that it can exert a pressure on students to behave in ways that they normally would not, or that go against the student's private attitudes.

More on Prejudice Reduction
• Website: Elizabeth Paluck
• Study: Peer Pressure Against Prejudice: A High School Field Experiment Examining Social Network change
• Study: What’s in a Norm? Sources and Processes of Norm Change
• Study: Diversity Training and Intergroup Contact: A Call to Action Research

Students report in surveys that they believe if they stand up against prejudice or bias then their peers will not like them as much. Other research shows that they are right! In those studies, students who object to teasing and harassment lose a bit of face, of their reputation, and are liked a little bit less. This is not to say that being an active bystander is a lost cause. Students have ways of shooting down prejudice or bias that can preserve their reputation, and in fact many of them do this every day, by supporting the target of harassment, or calming down someone who is doing the harassment. Many programs that urge students to stand up, speak out, are a bit less sensitive to this fact than they should be. Students can have a major positive influence on one another, and I think they have some great strategies for doing this in a sustainable way.

Q: In a 2011 paper, you looked at whether tolerance could be spread through student leaders who were trained confront expressions of prejudice. Give us a snapshot of some of the major findings and their implications for combating bullying.