For more than two decades political scientists have discussed rising elite polarization in the United States, but the study of mass polarization did not receive comparable attention until fairly recently. This article surveys the literature on mass polarization. It begins with a discussion of the concept of polarization, then moves to a critical consideration of different kinds of evidence that have been used to study polarization, concluding that much of the evidence presents problems of inference that render conclusions problematic. The most direct evidence-citizens' positions on public policy issues-shows little or no indication of increased mass polarization over the past two to three decades. Party sorting-an increased correlation between policy views and partisan identification-clearly has occurred, although the extent has sometimes been exaggerated. Geographic polarization-the hypothesized tendency of like-minded people to cluster together-remains an open question. To date, there is no conclusive evidence that elite polarization has stimulated voters to polarize, on the one hand, or withdraw from politics, on the other.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. This article reports the findings of a series of experiments on committee decision making under majority rule. The committee members had relatively fixed preferences, so that the process was one of making decisions rather than one of problem solving. The predictions of a variety of models drawn from Economics, Sociology, Political Science and Game Theory were compared to the experimental results. One predictive concept, the core of the noncooperative game without side payments (equivalent to the majority rule equilibrium) consistently performed best. Significantly, however, even when such an outcome did not exist, the experimental results did not display the degree of unpredictability that some theoretical work would suggest. An important subsidiary finding concerns the difference between experiments conducted under conditions of high stakes versus those conducted under conditions of much lower stakes. The findings in the two conditions differed considerably, thus calling into question the political applicability of numerous social psychological experiments in which subjects had little or no motivation. American Political Science Association

OF ALL POSSIBLE POLITICAL ACTIONS the voting decision has re ceived the most attention from behavioral political scientists. Prob ably we have compiled and analyzed more data on candidate choice and turnout than on any other form of political behavior.Of course,. this heavy emphasis comes as no surprise. The voting act is the fundamental political act in a democracy. It is the most widespread political act. Furthermore, on the surface, at least, the voting act would appear to be one of the simplest (and there fore, most understandable) political acts. A heavy scholarly focus on the voting act follows naturally from these considerations.While our data base expands, however, our theoretical super structure remains far from finished. It is fair to say that political science has relied chiefly on models rooted in the sociological, and later the social-psycho!Ogical tradition.' These models hold that

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