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How Conservatives Lost Confidence in Science: The Role of Ideological Alignment in Political Polarization

Confidence in the scientific community became politically polarized in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century, with conservatives displaying lower confidence in scientists than liberals. Using data from the General Social Survey from 1984 to 2016, I show that moral and economic conservatives played distinct but complementary roles in producing this divide. I find that moral conservatives exhibited low confidence in scientists before any substantial division existed between self-identified political conservatives and liberals on this issue. However, as moral conservatism increasingly consolidated under the label of political conservatism, a negative association between political conservatism and confidence in the scientific community emerged. Economic conservatives, by contrast, previously held disproportionately high confidence in scientists, but this positive relationship wanes in the beginning of the twenty-first century. These findings suggest that interpreting political polarization requires attention to the multiple dimensions along which political attitudes are organized and ideological coalitions are formed.