I Don't Need Your Attitude: Recognizable Belief Patterns Lead to More Animosity and Disagreement

An expanding body of evidence indicates that substantive disagreement fuels partisan animosity. Pundits often use terms like "ideological disagreement" to denote a range of things, often distant from how the concept is used in belief constraint studies. These studies argue that individuals do not uniformly hold or organize their opinions. Building on this literature, I argue that we should distinguish between disagreement with centrists and opinionated people, and between those with recognizable belief structures (ideologues) and those whose beliefs are not ideologically aligned. I hypothesize that these types of low-constraint opinion mismatches result in different levels of expected disagreement and mutual animosity. This is because ideologues can predict disagreement on unobserved issues. I distinguish between ideological and non-ideological disagreements through two survey experiments with representative US samples (N = 2,000 each, conducted in January 2024 and May 2024). Using evaluations of hypothetical profiles of fellow citizens, I demonstrate that centrism and belief structures significantly influence personal affinity. In the first study, disagreement with centrists results in almost four times lower animosity than with different-minded people. Moreover, ideological alignment results in almost three times hotter feelings, even with the same levels of substantive disagreement. In the second study, I test the proposed mechanism, finding that ideologically aligned individuals expect higher agreement and disagreement in instances of the same substantive disagreement. This is particularly true for those who know "what goes with what." These findings highlight the role of ideology in policy disagreement and political animosity.