Marketing unit, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Apr 23;15(4):e0231794. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0231794. eCollection 2020.
The current political discourse in the United States focuses on extreme political polarization as a contributor to ills ranging from government shutdowns to awkward family holidays. And indeed, a large body of research has documented differences between liberals and conservatives-primarily focused on Republicans and Democrats in the United States. We combine large international surveys and more fine-grained surveys of United States citizens to compare differences in opinion between Republicans and Democrats to the full range of world opinion on moral issues (N = 37,653 in 39 countries) and issues of free speech (N = 40,786 in 38 countries). When viewed in the full distribution, polarization between Democrats and Republicans appears relatively small, even on divisive issues such as abortion, sexual preference, and freedom of religious speech. The average Democrat-Republic overlap is greater than 70% of the country pair overlaps across eight moral issues, meaning that 70% of the country pairs are more dissimilar from each other than Democrats and Republicans are dissimilar; similarly, the average Democrat-Republic overlap is greater than 79% of the country pair overlaps across five freedom of speech issues. These results suggest that cross-cultural comparisons are useful for putting differences between political partisans within the same country in context.
当前，美国的政治言论主要集中在政治极端分化上，这种现象导致了从政府停摆到尴尬的家庭节日等各种问题。实际上，大量研究已经记录了自由派和保守派之间的差异——主要集中在美国的共和党人和民主党人之间。我们结合了大型国际调查和对美国公民的更精细调查，将共和党人和民主党人之间的意见差异与道德问题（39 个国家的 37653 人）和言论自由问题（38 个国家的 40786 人）的全球意见进行了比较。从整体分布来看，民主党的两极分化和共和党的两极分化看起来相对较小，即使是在堕胎、性偏好和宗教言论自由等有分歧的问题上也是如此。8 项道德问题中，民主党的平均重叠度高于共和党的重叠度，这意味着 70%的国家对之间的差异大于民主党的重叠度；同样，在五个言论自由问题中，民主党的平均重叠度高于共和党的重叠度。这些结果表明，跨文化比较有助于将同一国内的政治党派之间的差异置于背景之中。
