Separate ways, part 2

 A few weeks ago, I had a post about liberal and conservative confidence in medicine, science, and education.  There was a gradual divergence starting in the 1990s, which accelerated in the last few year.  This post will look at confidence in other institutions.  The figures will show the gap between confidence among self-rated liberals and conservatives:  positive values mean conservatives have more confidence than liberals, negative mean that liberals have more confidence than conservatives.  First, "the executive branch of the federal government."

This operates like a measure of presidential approval:  liberals have more confidence when a Democrat is president, conservatives have more when a Republican is president, and the swings have increased pretty steadily.

Next, the institutions I talked about in my previous post:

I show smoothed estimates in order to give a general sense of the trends (although for some reason the lines don't show up well).  

Next, major companies, banks and financial institutions, and organized labor.

The gaps generally declined from the 1970s to 1990s and have grown since them.  For business, the gap is now about as large as it was in the 1970s; for finance and labor, the gaps are somewhat bigger.  

For the press and TV, the gaps grew gradually until recently, when they started to grow more rapidly, with a big jump in the Trump/Biden years.  

For organized religion, the gap has grown steadily since the 1970s.  For the military, it declined from the 1970s to 1980s and has grown since then.  It's now a little larger than it was in the 1970s. (I put these two together simply to reduce the number of separate figures, not because I think they have anything in common).

 

Finally, two other parts of the federal government:  Congress and the Supreme Court.  

There is one big outlier:  the Supreme Court in 2022, when liberal confidence dropped sharply, presumably because of the abortion decision (I think the shift from 2021 to 2022 is the largest year-to-year change in the data).  Before then, there was a gradual shift from liberals generally being more confident to conservatives being more confident, which makes sense given the ideological drift of the court.  For Congress, there's not much trend, but the year to year changes seem reasonable given what was happening.  

What's the overall picture?  Historically, many people didn't understand the terms "liberal" and "conservative," or interpreted them in idiosyncratic ways.  Understanding has grown over the years, so the match between the labels and people's views on specific issues has grown:  for example, people who like organized labor and distrust business are more likely to call themselves liberals.  This development would mean that the gaps would tend to gradually increase, so I'll focus on the departures from the general trends.  First, there have been some sharp increases in the last decade or so--this is important, but not surprising.  Second, between the 1970s and about 1990, the gaps in confidence for business, finance, labor, and the military all declined--that is, there are some cases of "depolarization."  This happened despite the apparent shift of the Republican party to the right under Reagan.  Why?  In a previous post, I suggested that the Democrats became less critical of the military.  Although I'm less sure, you can also make a case that the Democrats became less critical of business and less closely aligned with organized labor.  The way the story is told now, this didn't happen until Bill Clinton came along, but Clinton was just the most successful example of a type that had been around for a while.