Opinion Polarization: Important Contributions, Necessary Limitations

larized? ” (AJS 102 [3]: 690–755) we addressed the substantive question of whether or not polarization on 18 morally charged social issues had increased over a period of approximately two decades. That article ex-amined all of the then-available years of data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and the National Election Study (NES). The approach was necessarily broad, entailing more than 200 separate analyses of polari-zation within the population as a whole, within subgroups of the popu-lation and between groups. Moreover, each examination in turn required the use of three or four statistical models. Our major conclusion was that little polarization had occurred over these years and that the American public was by many criteria more unified in its views in the 1990s than it had been in the 1970s. The most important exception to this generalization, based on analyses of data from both the NES and the GSS, was that the population’s attitudes toward abortion had been polarizing. The results of Mouw and Sobel’s analysis of the NES data suggest that attitudes toward abortion had not been polarizing, thus challenging the one qualification we made to our central We would like to thank Ted Mouw for sharing the Stata code for his procedure and for discussing it with us. We would also like to thank Rob Mare, Vincent Fu, and Steven Nock for close readings of a previous draft. Direct correspondence to Bethany