Replication Data for: Open-Ended Survey Responses and Political Conceptualizations in a Polarized Erahttps://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/U5FFYEAllamong, MaxwellHarvard Dataverse2026-06-052026-06-05T22:35:30ZA canonical finding in American political behavior is that the mass public can be divided into four “levels of conceptualization” at which they think about politics: ideologues, group benefits, nature of the times, and no issue content. While few Americans conceptualized politics ideologically in decades past, continued party polarization and sorting raise important questions about whether—and if so, why—more people are thinking ideologically today. Combining thousands of open-ended survey responses from the American National Election Studies with a supervised machine learning approach, we find more ideological language today than the original 1960 analysis, particularly among Republicans, though ideology is still not the dominant framework for most. We then show that several factors growing alongside party polarization—such as sorted political identities and recognition of party differences—relate to ideological conceptualizations while partisan strength does not, suggesting that even today to be partisan is not necessarily to be ideological.Social Sciencespublic opinionpolarizationtext analysismachine learning2026-06-05Allamong, Maxwell2026-02-05CC0 1.0