Measuring Openness to Political Pluralism

Authors

  • Patrick E. Shrout
    Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA
  • Mao Mogami
    Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA
  • Qi Xu
    Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA
  • Yasaman Ghodse-Elahi
    Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA
  • Elizabeth Mutter
    Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA
  • Matthew T. Riccio
    Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA
  • Timothy J. Valshtein
    Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA
  • V. Baadan
    Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA
  • Shahrzad Goudarzi
    Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA

Abstract

In an era of increased political polarization, it is important to measure how receptive US American citizens are to diverse political views. Being more open to diverse political viewpoints—openness to political pluralism—may involve holding emotional and intellectual tolerance, non-rigidity, and proactive motivation to seek out different political perspectives. In three preregistered studies of US residents, we present a new self-report measure of openness to political pluralism (OPP) consisting of 25 items. In Study 1 (MTurk n = 400), we verified a preregistered bifactor model with four facets, conducted initial validity analyses, and created a short five-item version (OPPS). Both OPP and OPPS have high internal consistency and test-retest reliability. In Studies 2 and 3, MTurk participants (n = 258) and Qualtrics panel participants (n = 296) completed OPP and measures of related constructs to validate our scale. OPP was modestly correlated with actively open-minded thinking (AOT) and highly correlated with open-minded cognition-political (OMC-P). Greater OPP was associated with an inverted U-shape relation to left-right political orientation. It was also correlated with more politically diverse social networks and varied information seeking. We discuss how our measure of openness to political pluralism can be used in future research.