thank you for your interest in my blog, and your interesting comment. Actually, your comment is exactly why I believe science should be open: to be able to disagree and to individually and collectively further our ideas.

First of all, you’re completely right that I just was jotting down some thoughts that sprung to my mind, without doing thorough research. And indeed, I am familiar with the DiMaggio, Evans and Bryson paper, as well as Mouw and Sobel’s response. Much of this empirical research shows that the culture war thesis does not hold, as far as the culture war thesis is interpreted as an increased polarization of the general public opinion on moral issues. So, indeed, I shouldn’t have used the term Culture War, for as you argued it strongly refers to Hunters work. the term as you

What I should have pointed out in my original contribution, is that the techniques used by both Dimaggio et al. and Mouw and Sobel only indicate whether or not the complete population of individuals had -on average- increasingly different (e.g. extreme) attitudes on specific issues. The polarization between individuals is, however, something different than the polarization between groups.

It is very well possible that specific attitudes in favor of, or against, an issue become more strongly associated with specific groups while the overall distribution of attitudes remains unchanged. This happens when those members of a group that have attitudes that diverge from the ‘norm’ of their own group ‘trade places’ with similarly exceptional members of another group. This ‘trading places’ can either be adjusting ones own attitudes, or by becoming a member of another group.

To give an example: Democrats (or, more precisely, voters for the democratic party) average are more liberal on abortion than Republicans, but of course some Democrats will be conservative on abortion, while some Republicans have liberal attitudes on abortion. There will even be Democrats that are much more conservative on abortion than some Republicans are. Now, if these conservative Democrats `trade places’ with these liberal Republicans, the overall distribution of attitudes towards abortion does not (necessarily) change. The average attitudes towards abortion amongst Democrats and amongst Republicans, however, does become more diverged. In addition, as a result of these sorting mechanisms, the attitudes become more similar amongst members of the Democrats and of the Republicans.

So, it is possible that the overall level of polarization between individuals in a population remains stable, while the polarization between members of different groups increases. Since the methods employed by Dimaggio et al., Mouw, and Sobel were designed to detect polarization between individuals, their finding of no polarization does not mean that there was no polarization between (members of) specific social groups.

The research I quote by Carmines and Woods indeed finds that members of the Democratic and of the Republican parties have become more polarized on abortion. This is something found by several other scholars as well. For instance, Andrew Gelmann wrote a very nice book on American voting. It is called `Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State’. I quote from the first chapter (available online; link):

What’s new is polarization -the increasingly ideological nature of poli­tics. Both parties are now more cohesive on issues than they were in the days of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and even Ronald Reagan. Liberal Democrats face off against conserva­tive Republicans in Congress with little middle ground, and voters within each party are also more likely to agree with each other on issues ranging from taxes to gay rights to foreign policy (p. 4).