Case Study 2: The Perception Gap — How Americans Misjudge the Other Side

"The opinions held by your political opponents are, on average, less crazy than you think they are. The fact that you don't know this is itself part of the problem." — Adapted from More in Common's "Perception Gap" report (2018).

What the research found

In 2018, the research organization More in Common published a study titled The Perception Gap. They asked roughly 2,000 Americans two questions about a list of policy positions. First: "What do you, personally, believe?" Second: "What percentage of the OTHER party do you think holds the corresponding extreme view?"

Then they compared the second answer (the perception) to the first answer (the actual distribution). The gap between perception and reality was the "perception gap."

The findings were striking — and uncomfortable for both sides:

• Republicans estimated that 54% of Democrats "do not believe that Israel has a right to exist." The actual share among Democrats: 9%.
• Democrats estimated that 39% of Republicans "want most immigrants to be deported regardless of circumstances." The actual share among Republicans: 18%.
• Republicans estimated that 49% of Democrats "believe police are bad people." The actual share among Democrats: 15%.
• Democrats estimated that 49% of Republicans "believe that property rights are more important than human rights." The actual share among Republicans: 21%.

Across the full set of questions, both Republicans and Democrats systematically estimated the other party's positions as more extreme than they actually were. The errors went in both directions. Democrats overestimated Republican extremism by an average of about 17 percentage points; Republicans overestimated Democratic extremism by an average of about 19 percentage points. Both sides were wrong by similar magnitudes.

The findings have been replicated in subsequent More in Common reports (2020, 2022, 2024) and in independent academic work (Westfall et al. 2015, Druckman et al. 2022, Yudkin et al. 2019). The numbers shift as new issues come and go, but the structure is stable: each side believes the other side is more extreme than the data shows.

Who has the largest perception gaps?

The single most striking sub-group finding is that the most politically engaged Americans have the largest perception gaps. Specifically:

• Americans who consume more political news have larger perception gaps than those who consume less.
• Americans who post about politics on social media have larger perception gaps than those who do not.
• Americans with higher self-reported political knowledge have larger perception gaps than those with lower knowledge.
• Americans with college and graduate degrees have larger perception gaps than those without.

This is a difficult finding for several reasons. The intuitive theory — that more engagement and information should produce more accurate views of fellow citizens — is wrong. The actual relationship is the opposite. People who pay the most attention to politics have the most distorted picture of the other side.

The mechanisms appear to include:

• Selective exposure. Politically engaged Americans consume media that tends to align with their priors. The media diet emphasizes the most extreme voices on the other side as evidence of the other side's craziness.
• Social-media virality. Algorithms reward content that generates strong reactions. Reactions are stronger to extreme positions than to moderate ones. Both sides see disproportionate samples of the other side's most extreme actors.
• Social sorting. Politically engaged Americans are increasingly likely to live in homogeneous social networks. They have fewer close friends or family members of the other party. The information they receive about the other party comes overwhelmingly from political media rather than personal interaction.
• Motivated reasoning. Politically engaged Americans, who have invested more in their identities, have stronger motivation to interpret evidence in ways that confirm those identities — including by interpreting the other side as more threatening.

Lower-engagement Americans, paradoxically, are the most accurate about the other side. The 30% of Americans who tell pollsters they pay little attention to politics turn out to estimate the other party's positions much more accurately than the 30% who pay close attention. Their lower information diet, ironically, includes less of the distorting filter.

The actual policy distance vs. the perceived distance

The perception-gap research connects to a deeper finding from political science: the actual policy distance between the median Democrat and median Republican is smaller than each side believes.

If you measure ideology by the seven-point liberal-conservative self-placement question on the ANES — where 1 is "extremely liberal" and 7 is "extremely conservative" — the median Democrat falls around 3 (slightly liberal of center) and the median Republican around 5 (slightly conservative of center). The distance is two points on a seven-point scale.

But when you ask Democrats to place "the typical Republican" on the same scale, they typically place that person at 6 or 7 (very conservative or extremely conservative). When you ask Republicans to place "the typical Democrat," they typically place that person at 1 or 2. Each side perceives the other as roughly four to five points away on the seven-point scale, when the actual median distance is about two.

The misperception is double the reality. This is an important empirical fact. The polarization that Americans experience in their relationship with the other side is roughly twice the polarization they actually have.

Issue-by-issue breakdown

Several specific issues are worth looking at in detail.

Immigration

When Democrats are asked what percentage of Republicans believe in zero immigration or deportation regardless of circumstances, they typically estimate 35–50%. The actual share is around 18%.

When Republicans are asked what percentage of Democrats favor open borders with no enforcement, they typically estimate 30–45%. The actual share is around 11%.

Both sides have a much smaller absolutist contingent than the other side believes. The actual immigration debate, to a substantial degree, is between people who agree on the broad framework (legal immigration with some enforcement; a path to legal status for long-resident undocumented immigrants in some categories) and disagree on the specifics. The popular narrative — open-borders Democrats vs. mass-deportation Republicans — describes about 15–20% of each party's actual policy distribution.

Race and policing

When Republicans are asked what percentage of Democrats want to "defund the police," they typically estimate 30–40%. The actual share — depending on how you operationalize "defund" — is somewhere between 8% (full abolition) and 25% (significant reallocation to social services). The slogan, which became politically toxic for Democrats in 2020–2022, far exceeded the actual position of the Democratic median.

When Democrats are asked what percentage of Republicans believe racism is no longer a problem in America, they typically estimate 50–65%. The actual share is around 30%, with another 30–40% believing racism is a problem but a smaller one than commonly portrayed.

Religion and culture

When Democrats are asked what percentage of Republicans want to establish Christianity as the official national religion, they typically estimate 25–35%. The actual share that explicitly holds this view ("Christian nationalism" in the operational sense) is around 10%, with another 20% sympathetic to some Christian-traditionalist policy preferences without endorsing official establishment.

When Republicans are asked what percentage of Democrats are hostile to religion, they typically estimate 35–50%. The actual share that endorses anti-religious positions is around 12%, though a larger share holds secular policy preferences without anti-religious animus.

Abortion

When pollsters ask Democrats and Republicans what percentage of the other party favors "no restrictions ever" or "no exceptions ever" — the absolutist positions on each side — both groups estimate around 30%. The actual share holding either absolutist position is closer to 10%. Most Americans, in both parties, hold positions somewhere in between, with the parties differing on the specifics of "in between."

What the research does NOT find

The perception gap research has been strong-claimed and over-claimed in some popular discussions. To be careful about what it does and does not establish:

The perception gap does NOT mean the policy disagreements are unreal. Republicans and Democrats genuinely disagree about important things. The median position of each party on most issues is genuinely different. Disagreement is real. The perception gap is about the magnitude of the disagreement and about how the minorities of each party are being treated as representative.

The perception gap does NOT mean both sides are equally extreme. On any specific question, one side may be more extreme than the other. The asymmetry has to be assessed empirically. The perception-gap finding is about the misperception, not about which side is "really" more extreme.

The perception gap does NOT mean polarization is unreal. Americans really are polarized — on partisan identity, on social distance, on trust. They just are less polarized on policy than they are on identity. This is the Lilliana Mason ("Uncivil Agreement") finding: the polarization is sorted around partisanship more than around ideology.

The perception gap does NOT mean political conflict will fade if both sides "just talk." Conflict that arises from genuine differences in values and interests does not disappear when misperceptions are corrected. The perception gap is one source of conflict; there are others.

Implications

The perception-gap research has both hopeful and worrying implications.

Hopeful: Americans on both sides are closer on many policy issues than each side believes. There are coalitions to be built across the partisan divide that are unrecognized by partisans on each side because they assume the other side holds positions that the other side does not actually hold. The political work of correcting perceptions, where it can be done, is real and feasible.

Worrying: The perception gap is not random misinformation that an effective communication campaign would solve. It is produced by structural features of the contemporary information environment — partisan media, algorithmic social media, social sorting, motivated reasoning at high levels of political engagement. Solutions would have to address the structural drivers, not just the symptoms.

Worrying: Even if Americans were closer on policy than they think, they are not closer on identity. Lilliana Mason's Uncivil Agreement (2018) and Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized (2020) make a related argument: American polarization is increasingly identity-based, with political party becoming a megapackage of demographic identities (urban vs. rural; college vs. non-college; religious vs. secular; majority vs. minority on various dimensions). Identity-based conflict can be intense even where policy disagreement is moderate. The perception-gap finding suggests there is more policy room for compromise than each side thinks; it does not suggest the identity conflict is mild.

Worrying: The most politically engaged are the most misperceiving. The Americans who participate most actively in the political process — running campaigns, donating, organizing, posting, attending events — have the most distorted view of fellow citizens. The system as a whole is being driven by people whose perceptions are systematically off.

What this means for the textbook reader

If you are a Chapter 17 reader, the lesson of the perception-gap research is methodological as much as substantive: don't trust your own perception of the other side. You almost certainly believe the other party is more extreme than it is. You almost certainly believe its members are more uniform than they are.

The remedy is not to abandon political engagement but to engage with better information. Read the actual polling data, not the media's filtered presentation of it. Read writers from the other side at their best, not at their worst. Distinguish the median voter of the other party from the loudest voices in its activist base — both for your own party and for the other.

The exercises for this chapter (especially Exercise 3, the perception-gap measurement on yourself and your peers) are designed to make these gaps visible at the small scale where you can observe them directly. Once you have measured the gap in your own circle, the More in Common research stops being abstract and becomes a description of the world you live in.

Public opinion is measurable. So are the misperceptions of public opinion. Both matter for the politics that follows.

Sources: More in Common, "The Perception Gap" (2018) and subsequent reports through 2024, available at moreincommon.com. Ahler & Sood, "The Parties in Our Heads: Misperceptions About Party Composition and Their Consequences," Journal of Politics (2018). Yudkin et al., "Perception Gap: How False Impressions are Pulling Americans Apart" (More in Common 2019). Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized (Avid Reader Press, 2020).