Political Polarization in the American Public

Abstract

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.

Estimation of unobserved dynamics of individual partisanship: a Bayesian approach

“…In particular, African Americans tend to remain as the Democrats whereas White Americans do as the Republicans. This finding is consistent with previous claims that African Americans largely become ardent Democrats over time (e.g., Fiorina and Abrams, 2008). Race affects the dynamics of Independent partisanship as well.…”

Important Matters in Political Context

“…Scholars agree that there is increased political polarization in the United States (Abramowitz and Saunders 2008;Baldassarri and Gelman 2008;Baldassarri and Goldberg 2014;Fiorina and Abrams 2008;Prior 2013). Talking about politics is potentially uncomfortable when polarization is marked, especially in highly polarized contexts, in which the attitudes of others may not be known (Cowan and Baldassarri 2016).…”

“…People only talk about contentious issues with people they feel safe sharing their opinion with (Gamson, Fireman, and Rytina 1982). By the fall of 2004, the political polarization we now take for granted in the United States had largely solidified (Abramowitz and Saunders 2008;Fiorina and Abrams 2008) 2 , with network effects that encouraged homophilious group formation to avoid partisan dissonance (Baldassarri and Bearman 2007;Sprague 1987, 1988). To a great extent, Americans are now sorted along partisan lines and discuss politics with like-minded people.…”

“…2 The literature on political polarization is split into those who see mass polarization (i.e., the opinion distribution of the electorate has become more extreme and bimodal) (Abramowitz and Saunders 2008) and those who see party sorting (i.e., the opinion distribution remains unimodal, but the alignment of partisanship and ideology has become tighter) (Fiorina and Abrams 2008). For our purposes, this does not matter because the interpersonal network effects downstream are the same for both models.…”

Modeling the Effect of Political Polarization on the Outcome of Propaganda Battle

“…The detailed discussion of mathematical formalization of the concept of "a polarized society", is in [31], the main idea in a simple graphic form is presented in [32].…”