What is a political typology?

Most descriptions of American politics use one of two shortcuts: party (Democrat, Republican, independent) or a single line from left to right. A political typology takes a different route. It sorts people into groups whose members share a pattern of values, whatever party they belong to and wherever they’d put themselves on the line.

The best-known example: Pew’s Political Typology

Pew Research Center’s political typology dates back to 1987, when the first edition, a Times Mirror study conducted by Gallup, found 11 groups in the American electorate. The ninth edition, “Beyond Red vs. Blue,” came out in June 2026, based on a survey of 10,357 adults in November 2025.

Its nine groups, with their shares of U.S. adults, run roughly from left to right:

• Leftward Progressives, 7%
• Loyal Liberals, 11%
• Left-Out Left, 12%
• Order and Opportunity Left, 18%
• Tuned-Out Middle, 9%
• Pragmatic and Polite Right, 11%
• Unconventional Right, 12%
• Faith First Conservatives, 12%
• No Apologies Right, 9%

Pew calls the two groups at each end “anchors.” The right anchors (No Apologies Right and Faith First Conservatives) make up 21% of the public, and the left anchors (Leftward Progressives and Loyal Liberals) 17%. They are the most ideological, partisan and politically active groups. The other five, with mixed values, “make up a majority of the public.” As Pew puts it: “Many Americans hold a complex mix of values and beliefs that don’t always fit neatly into either major party.”

How a typology is built

Pew’s method starts with a fixed set of values questions, 30 of them in 2026, about government, the economy, immigration, religion, race, gender and sexuality, foreign policy and politicians themselves. A statistical clustering technique then sorts respondents into groups whose answers are as similar as possible. Party identification is deliberately left out, so if a group turns out to be mostly Democrats or mostly Republicans, that’s a finding, not an assumption.

The number of groups isn’t fixed in advance. Analysts compare solutions and pick one that is, in Pew’s words, “strong from a statistical point of view, persuasive from a substantive point of view, and representative of the general patterns seen across the various models run.”

Pew also offers a Political Typology Quiz using 24 of the 30 questions. It matches you to the group whose typical answers are closest to yours. As Pew notes, it “does not consider how strongly someone may care about one issue over another.”

Other typologies

• Hidden Tribes (More in Common, 2018). A study of 8,000 Americans found seven groups and argued that “America is not split into two tribes, as we’re sometimes told.” It described two-thirds of Americans as an “Exhausted Majority” who are more flexible, open to compromise and tired of polarized politics, set against the 33% in the “wings.”
• Four quadrants (Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, 2017). Lee Drutman placed 2016 voters on an economic scale and a social and identity scale, producing four groups: liberals, conservatives, populists and libertarians. More on that in Liberal, conservative, or neither?
• Academic work. Political scientists Stanley Feldman and Christopher Johnston argued in 2014 that “two dimensions—economic and social ideology—are the minimum needed to account for domestic policy preferences.”

What typologies show that a single line can’t

Typologies surface “similarities and differences in Americans’ values that are often hidden under broader partisan and ideological labels,” Pew says. In Pew’s 2026 data, about 15% of Republicans and Republican leaners hold values that place them left of center overall, and a similar share of Democrats hold values that place them right of center.

They also catch differences a left-right line ignores, such as trust. In the 2026 typology, Pew found that engagement and skepticism toward politicians don’t line up: “some groups are highly engaged and skeptical of politicians, while others are highly engaged and have more generous views of the motivations of elected officials. The combination of these views splits groups on both the left and the right.”

The limits

• The results depend on the questions. “If your group is distinctive because of issues and values other than the ones we asked about, we probably couldn’t find you,” Pew’s Scott Keeter explained in 2014.
• And on the analysts’ choices. Pew itself cautions that “different solutions are possible using the same data depending on the algorithm used for partitioning, the ways in which the variables are coded, and even the order in which respondents are sorted.”
• Groups change between editions. None of the nine group names from Pew’s 2021 typology carried over to 2026. Keeter has pointed to “more continuity than change” over the decades, though: Pew has nearly always found two strongly conservative groups divided over social issues, and a group of across-the-board liberals.
• They describe rather than explain. A cluster shows who holds similar views, not why.

How We the Panel’s nine types differ

Our nine types borrow the idea, not the method. Instead of finding groups by clustering a survey, the quiz uses a fixed map with two scales: the economy, from shared responsibility to self-reliance, and society, from change to tradition. Three positions on each make a three-by-three grid, and a third scale, trust in the political system, adds a trait: Outsider or Institutionalist.

The cut-offs are fixed and the same for everyone, so a type means the same thing next year as it does today. That matters for a panel: when someone’s views shift, we can see them move across the map, rather than watch the map itself be redrawn. The trade-off is that a fixed map is simpler than a statistical portrait, and our method page explains how we plan to check it against national survey data.