Do Polarized Issues Carry More Weight in Voter Decision-Making? Insights From the 2022 Congressional Midterm Elections

Abstract

This paper investigates whether polarized issues weigh more heavily in voters’ electoral choices. To address this question, we formulate a methodology that uses conjoint experiments to measure how responsive respondents’ electoral choices are to agreeing or disagreeing with candidates’ policy positions on policy issues, which we argue reflects their importance. Our approach is grounded in the potential outcomes framework and designed to minimize the burden on respondents. Immediately after the 2022 congressional midterm elections, we implemented this approach on a nationally representative sample of 2,109 U.S. registered voters. Using the resulting estimates, we measure the correlation between issue importance and their polarization. We consider two types of political polarization: policy and partisan polarization. Our findings reveal that partisan polarization exhibits a strong and significant correlation with issue importance, whereas policy polarization does not. This offers new insights into the electoral behavior of American voters.