Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

The cleavage of citizens’ political ideologies has become a worldwide issue. While political polarization has existed in America since 1970s and increased dramatically afterwards (Abramowitz & Saunders, 2008), it is widely suspected that today’s political values are vastly different from the past (Dalton, 2006). Without lifelong guaranteed jobs and stable income, individuals in a modern society tend to distrust established social institutions, creating their own political identities based on self-relevant issues (Wells, 2015). It is important to conduct a nuanced examination of the differences of today’s political ideologies from the past and how citizens’ prioritization of political issues have played a role in the process of the political polarization.

Acknowledging self-related issues would also inspire citizens’ transformation of political values (DiMaggio, Evans, & Bryson, 1996). DiMaggio and colleagues (1996) proposed a spiral procedure for the transformation of polarization and political values. Along with the modernization of society, the original social groups would be diversified into subgroups. A variety of issues would be framed via elites and mainstream media, further intensifying the intragroup divisions and citizens only tended to actively participate in political discussion about their opinions to the self-relevant issues. However, citizens could be easily manipulated to vote for the candidates by symbolic appeals without deliberating their issue congruence with the candidates. This procedure provided a promising starting point for future studies.

We believe that the shifting political values, self-related political issues, and current issue frames by elites and media could potentially explain the unique dynamics of the 2016 United States presidential election, with a unique group of voters, self-identified as “independents,” and abundant divisions among Democrats and Republicans. In order to examine the contemporary ideology trends and explain the dynamics with the factors of social issues, this study identifies and explains clusters of political independents (N = 1,010) using national survey data collected during the final month of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. A factor analysis is conducted on individuals’ attitude and perceived importance of various political issues.

Four independent clusters are identified based on their underlying political values: anti-establishment conservatives, anti-establishment liberals, pro-establishment moderates, ambivalent moderates. The two anti-establishment clusters were characterized as skeptical of the current political system and during the primary, Sanders received strong supports from both clusters while they ended up voting for different candidates in the final election. The two moderate clusters were scored moderate in both economic and social ideology scale. They had highest proportion of an undecided voters.

We also distinguished different sets of political issue domains that are perceived to be important for each of the independent clusters. Specifically, our preliminary results of factor analysis divides important issues into three groups: the left-leaning, right-leaning, and saliently framed issues. The result shows support to DiMaggio et al.’s claim (1996) regarding the important role of issue frames by elites and media and demonstrates how the issue perception of independent voters affects their voting decisions in the primary and final election.