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Apr 16, 2024 · Political polarization is the ideological distance between opposed parties. If the differences are large, it can produce logjams, standoffs, and inflexibility in Congress and state and local governments. Though it can be frustrating, political polarization is not necessarily dysfunctional.
Apr 16, 2024 · Political polarization is about the relations between political opponents, and intransigent polarization is about being unwilling to learn from, accommodate, or agree to anything proposed by opponents.
Political polarization (spelled polarisation in British English, African and Caribbean English, and New Zealand English) is the divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes.
Jun 9, 2023 · In contradistinction to its cluster-analytic conception in U.S. political science, outside academia as well as in the comparative study of politics outside the United States, the notion of political polarization commonly denotes relations of intense conflict, not mere divergence or disagreement.
- 2 j ≤ l;
- III. The First Election
- IV. Fixed Party Locations: A Benchmark
- A. The Second Election
- l > l t < t
- l t
- B. The Third and Subsequent Elections
- VI. Theoretical and Empirical Implications of the Model
- VII. Extending the Model: Applications and Conjectures
- B. Voter Updating
- E. Convergence and Polarization in US History
- VIII. Conclusion
otherwise, she abstains. If indifferent between the parties, she randomizes, although this tie-breaking rule will be unimportant. The constant l 0 is > the region of tolerance, beyond which a citizen prefers to abstain rather than express a preference for either party. This voting rule is rationalized by a simple utility function. If party J ∈ fD, ...
With policy-motivated parties and uncertainty over the election outcome, the first election presents the parties with a classic trade-off between the probability of winning and the policy outcome. By inching toward the cen-ter, a party increases the chance it wins the election, but at the cost of a less attractive policy should it win. As has been ...
After the first election, the winning party is installed in office and voters update their preferences. This changes the distribution of ideal points in two ways: the ideal points of voters compress toward the party positions, and gaps open up. The gaps appear because voters update whereas abstain-ers do not, such that at the margin between them a ...
The gaps in the distribution of ideal points fundamentally change the in-centives of the parties. The equilibrium positions in the first election bal-ance the incentive to converge to gain more votes against the incentive to diverge to a better policy position. Starting from the same positions, that trade-off now collapses. The gap(s) in the center...
The equilibrium implies that even small changes in the distribution of voter ideal points can lead to substantial and immediate polarization of the parties. This is because voter updating of any size causes a gap to open up in the distribution, and it is this gap that induces tit-for-tat divergence, such that the parties unwind their positions to t...
order condition: eventually, as polarization increases, a point is reached at which the parties find it profitable to deviate and jump to the center. Fail-ure occurs because, in effect, the logic of divergence is too powerful and the parties otherwise get too far apart too quickly. To see this, note that the distribution of ideal points in the seco...
Voters update their ideal points again after the second election, the par-ties respond, and the process iterates. As this process continues, the parties progressively polarize, continuing until they reach their ideal points, at which they stabilize. This can take a few elections, or it can take many, depending on the party ideal points themselves a...
The features of polarization described in the previous section, with the ex-ception of turnout, resonate with the data. Polarization of elites has been significant, and it occurred earlier, faster, and to a greater extent than po-larization of voters. The model also rationalizes the ostensibly distinct phe-nomenon of negative partisanship. All vote...
The power of our model is in its simplicity, that a simple amendment to voter behavior can generate a feedback loop between elite and mass be-havior and drive rich dynamics. To focus on the feedback loop, we chose to keep the rest of the model as simple and transparent as possible. This raises two questions: To what extent are the predictions of th...
For simplicity, we posited a simple voter updating rule that is linear and, more importantly, operates exclusively through the act of voting. This chan-nel of feedback is empirically supported, as we noted above, although it is not the only way that behavior can feed back into preferences. Indeed, Beasley and Joslyn (2001) provide evidence that the...
The focus of our paper is on the era of polarization that began in the sec-ond half of the twentieth century and has run through to the present day and, presumably, into the future. The evolution of political preferences did not begin with this era, of course, and before the era of polarization there was anextended period of convergence. In fact, t...
To return to the motivating question of what causes polarization, our answer is that it is complicated. We show that the necessary ingredient for polar-ization is the interaction of voters and elites. Voter updating is necessary, yet on its own does not guarantee polarization. It is only when updating is combined with the strategic maneuverings of ...
Political polarization has become one of the most discussed challenges facing contemporary democracies and has been associated with a range of ills, from political instability to democratic backsliding (Iyengar et al. Reference Iyengar, Lelkes, Levendusky, Malhotra and Westwood 2019).
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Jun 1, 2021 · Following McCoy et al., we can define polarization as ‘a process whereby the normal multiplicity of differences in a society increasingly align along a single dimension, cross-cutting differences become instead reinforcing, and people increasingly perceive and describe politics and society in terms of “Us” versus “Them”’. 5 As ...
