Abstract While partisan cleavages in the United States are well documented, less is known about how the ideological positioning of state political parties shapes individual-level partisan sorting and issue alignment. This article examines whether citizens’ ideological and policy positions are influenced by the extremity of their own party and by the overall level of polarization between state parties. Using data from the Cooperative Election Study (2014–2020) merged with Shor–McCarty measures of state party ideology, we find that state party positioning matters for mass sorting. Individuals are more likely to align with their party’s issue stances when their own party is ideologically extreme, but greater polarization between state parties is associated with weaker issue alignment. These results highlight the asymmetric ways in which citizens respond to their partisan environments, demonstrating that state-level party positioning—not just national polarization—plays an independent role in shaping partisan sorting in the United States.
Goidel et al. (Wed,) studied this question.