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A political spectrograph: High-resolution examinations of the United States’ ideological landscape

Fig 5

External assessments.

(a) Average ideological estimation and (b) acceptance of statements as a function of general ideology, divided by statement pool (left/center/right panels). Gaussian-weighted moving average trendlines () are shown for unmarked (solid) and marked (dot-dashed) treatment conditions. (a) We see overall “flat” trends for the three pools’ ideological positions, indicating a general universality of the abstract ideological scale (there remains differences in interpretation between individuals for any given statement—see Fig A5 in the SI—but there does not appear to be systematic observer-ideological bias in those differences). (b) We see clear “linear” trends in agreement for the liberal and conservative statement pools, and a centrally-peaked trend for the centrist statement pool. Comparing trend lines: We see little, if any, impact of speaker party-identity information in most cases. A slight liberalizing effect on liberal-statement estimation was not replicated in the other sample (see Figs. B5 and B10 in the SI).

Fig 5

doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0347096.g005