Police, Authority & Social Order

The five-scenario landscape

The cleanest single chart for this chapter is the 2024 table of partisan readings across all five force scenarios. It sorts the items by what kind of force is being asked about.

Three observations about the 2024 partisan structure.

The first is that the direction is uniform: Republicans are more supportive of police force in every scenario, with no exceptions. The magnitude of the partisan gap correlates with the moral ambiguity of the scenario. On the clearest cases — police defending themselves from physical attack, police using force against a non-threatening citizen who has only used disrespectful language — the partisan gap is small. On the borderline cases — using force to prevent escape or as a general "in some situations" principle — the partisan gap is large.

The second is that the lowest-tolerance items, the ones the proposal called "low legitimacy," are not as low as the proposal claimed. The proposal cited the polmurdr (force against a murder suspect being questioned) reading as around 11% topline support. The 2024 reading is 21%. The proposal cited the polabuse reading at 11% topline. The 2024 reading is 11% — that one matches. The polmurdr discrepancy is the larger of the two and is worth flagging: nearly one in four Republicans (23%) endorses police force against a suspect being questioned for murder. The phenomenon the proposal called "10-15% hold deeply authoritarian views willing to endorse police violence in nearly any context" is, on the 2024 data, slightly worse than that — closer to one in five Americans nationally.

The third is that the contested-middle items (polescap, polhitok) carry the chapter's central finding. The 17-to-20-point partisan gap on those items is the kind of gap that would be unremarkable on a political issue but is striking on what was, in 1973, a near-bipartisan question.

The Democratic retreat from "law and order"

The longest-running item in the chapter is polescap — approval of police force to prevent an escape. The fifty-year trajectory tells the chapter's main story.

The widening gap on polescap is the cleanest example in this chapter of asymmetric coalition movement. Both parties have moved away from the 1973 near-consensus, but Democrats moved much faster: 29 points over fifty years, versus 14 points for Republicans. The 2018 gap (17 points) and the 2022 gap (20 points) bracket the BLM-era policing debates from Ferguson through George Floyd; the contemporary reading sits roughly in the middle of that band.

The race breakdown on polescap adds the chapter's other major axis.

The race-of-respondent gap on police force has been one of the most stable findings in the GSS's policing battery. Across every wave in every decade, Black Americans have reported substantially lower approval of police use of force than White Americans, regardless of which scenario is asked. The 2024 gap of 23 points sits in roughly the same place it has sat for fifty years. Whatever the partisan dynamics on policing are doing, the racial dimension underneath them has stayed put.

The consensus ends

Figures 3 and 4 show the two ends of the force-scenario spectrum — the high-consensus self-defense case and the low-consensus disrespect case.

The two consensus ends define the field. Within their boundary — between "the citizen physically attacked the officer" and "the citizen was rude to the officer" — the contested middle is where the chapter's partisan content lives. The contested middle is where the BLM-era debates have happened. Self-defense remains bipartisan; force-as-punishment remains bipartisan; everything in between is contested.

Child-rearing values: the obedience collapse

The chapter's second battery is the GSS's child-rearing-values item. Respondents are asked to choose, from a list of five, which quality is most important for a child to learn. The list is "to obey," "to think for oneself," "to work hard," "to help others," and one of several minor categories. Each respondent picks one.

The reason the chapter pairs this battery with the police-force items is that political-psychology research (Feldman 2003; Hetherington & Weiler 2009; Stenner 2005) has used variations on these questions to measure something called authoritarian disposition — an underlying preference for order, deference, and conformity. The hypothesis is that respondents who pick "to obey" cluster with other indicators of authoritarian disposition (police-force approval, conventional moral views, in-group identification) and that the obey-vs-think-for-self contrast is informative about coalition composition.

The 2024 partisan readings turn out to be smaller than the proposal suggested — and the longer trend is even more striking.

The most striking pattern in Table 2 is not what the political-psychology literature would predict. The contemporary partisan gaps on these values are small. The largest is on "work hard," which is 8 points — Republicans more likely to endorse it. The "obey" reading, which the literature has treated as a marker of authoritarian disposition, shows essentially no partisan gap in 2024 (8% vs 8%) and has shrunk dramatically from its 1986 level (23% vs 21%).

The obey-line collapse is a real and underappreciated finding. The proposal that became this book described a 10-point partisan gap on obedience — "Republicans 21% say obey most important, Democrats 11% say obey most important." That description was accurate in the 1986 GSS wave. It is not accurate in 2024. Both coalitions report obey-as-most-important at single-digit levels, and the partisan gap is essentially zero. The political-psychology framing — that the contemporary Republican coalition is the obedience-preferring coalition — is not supported on the most direct measure the GSS has of that disposition.

The mirror-image variable, "to think for oneself," shows a small partisan widening but at a much lower magnitude than the polescap finding.

What Figure 6 shows is that the direction of the partisan order on think-for-self has actually flipped over forty years. In 1986, Republicans were modestly more likely to endorse thinking for oneself than Democrats. In 2024 the order has reversed. But the magnitudes throughout are small, and the contemporary 7-point gap is not the kind of partisan signal that would carry an authoritarianism-vs-autonomy thesis on its own.

What this chapter changes

Three observations to take into the rest of the book.

First, the partisan structure on police use of force is real, large in the contested middle, and concentrated in the post-2014 leg. The polescap series shows Democrats moving 29 points away from the 1973 bipartisan consensus, with Republicans moving 14 points over the same window. The 2024 gap of 17 points sits in the range one would expect from a domain where the public's relationship to one coalition's institutional ally — the police — has been actively contested across recent news cycles. Most of the post-2014 partisan widening lives on the Democratic line.

Second, the proposal's authoritarianism framing — that obedience-endorsing respondents constitute a Republican-aligned authoritarian segment — needs updating. The 2024 child-rearing battery shows essentially no partisan gap on the obey question, with both parties at single-digit endorsement. Whatever underlying psychological disposition the obey question was measuring in the 1980s and 1990s, it is now distributed roughly evenly across the two coalitions, and at a much lower overall level. The Republican coalition's contemporary relationship to authority is not visible on this specific item.

Third, race remains a larger axis than party on this question. The 23-point Black-vs-White gap on polescap is larger than the 17-point Democrat-vs-Republican gap, and the racial gap has held more stably across the fifty-year series than the partisan gap has. Black Americans of any political affiliation report lower approval of police use of force than White Americans of any political affiliation. Whatever the partisan dynamics on policing are doing, they are operating on top of a deeper, race-conditioned, lived-experience signal that the GSS has been documenting for half a century.

Part II of this book closes here. The next part — Part III on Social Fabric and Lived Experience — turns from political-attitude questions to the more intimate measures of how Americans report their own lives, their relationships, and their sense of where they sit in their communities. The chapters there are about the lived experience the political polarization is happening inside of, not about politics as such.