Common Problems (original) (raw)

Dynamics of Political Polarization

This article accounts for two puzzling paradoxes. The first paradox is the simultaneous absence and presence of attitude polarization, the fact that global attitude polarization is relatively rare, even though pundits describe it as common. The second paradox is the simultaneous presence and absence of social polarization, the fact that while individuals experienced attitude homogeneity in their interpersonal networks, their networks are characterized by attitude heterogeneity. These paradoxes give rise to numerous scholarly arguments. By deploying a formal model of interpersonal influence over attitudes in a context where individuals hold simultaneous positions on multiple issues we show why these arguments are not mutually exclusive and how they meaningfully refer to the same social setting. It follows that the results from this model provide a single parsimonious account for both paradoxes. The framework we develop may be generalized to a wider array of problems, including classic problems in collective action.

The Polarization of American Politics

The Journal of Politics, 1984

Elected officials in the United States appear to represent relatively extreme support coalitions rather than the interests of middle-of-the-road voters. This contention is supported by analysis of variance of liberal-conservative positions in the United States Senate from 1959 to 1980. Within both the Democratic and the Republican parties, there is considerable variation in liberal-conservative positions, but two senators from the same state and party tend to be very similar. In contrast, two senators from the same state but from different parties are highly dissimilar, suggesting that each party represents an extreme support coalition in the state. Moreover, the distribution of senators is now consistent with the hypothesis that, in the long run, both parties are equally likely to win any seat in the Senate. This result suggests that there is now competition between equally balanced but extreme support coalitions throughout most of the United States.

Varied Effects of Policy Cues on Partisan Opinions

Although citizens often arrive at the same views as their political party"s leaders, they also respond to information about policy targets and effects. Accounting for political context encourages a variable view of how partisanship shapes opinions in policy debates. In three survey experiments associated with policies supported by both Democrats and Republicans, I find that both aspects of policy argumentation and the actors making the arguments can enable partisanship to affect public opinion. This process is highly conditional, however: sometimes polarization occurs only with the presence a single politician; in other areas, polarization is likely following presentation of evidence by either partisan side. The effect of policy information on partisan polarization is variable across political and policy contexts.

Toward a conditional model of partisanship in policymaking

Do parties matter for policies? Despite the vast number of contributions to this old question, empirical findings remain highly contrasted and fail to demonstrate a substantial partisan influence. Nevertheless, this article argues that we should not conclude that parties are irrelevant for understanding policies. After an overview of the available empirical findings, it emphasizes that studies of legislative and governmental politics provide solid reasons for expecting a partisan influence and that we could make sense of the contradictory results by exploring the conditions under which parties matter. The final section identifies potential institutional, political, contextual and issue-specific determinants of partisanship in policymaking.

The Onward March of (Asymmetric) Partisan Polarisation in the Contemporary Congress

Issues in American Politics edited by John W. Dumbrell. New York and London: Routledge, 2013

For decades now, congressional parties have been the most significant political organisations on Capitol Hill as class and cultural issues have produced increasingly sharp ideological divisions between Democrats and Republicans engendering congressional parties that are cohesive and ideologically polarised parties to an extent that would have been unknown to members of the Congress in the mid-twentieth century and to the framers of the US Constitution in the late eighteenth century. As we have moved into the second decade of the twenty-first century, both partisanship and partisan polarisation in the Congress have strengthened even further from 10 or 20 years ago, at the same time that American voters care neither for the Congress as an institution nor its parties. Polarisation, however, has not been symmetric: For, typically ignored in many journalistic accounts, congressional Republicans have moved much more sharply to the right than have congressional Democrats to the left, never more so than since the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. There is no shortage of examples of the effects of asymmetric partisan polarisation on contemporary policymaking in Washington, most notably, over the debt increase in late 2011. This episode also demonstrates the level of political uncertainty that polarisation engenders: policy outcomes in each chamber have necessarily become much more volatile while the probability of congressional-presidential agreement in writing major legislation decreases under conditions of split-party government, whereas it increases significantly. This pattern of policymaking is a far cry from the naïve anti-party expectations of the US Constitution’s framers; and, apparently, not what most Americans want.

Ideological Polarization, Sticky Information, and Policy Reforms

Public Economics eJournal, 2004

We develop a dynamic two-party political economy framework, in which parties seek to maximize vote share and face the trade-off between catering to their respective core constituencies on the one hand and ‘middle of the road’ voters with no partisan affiliation on the other hand. In contrast to ideology-driven individuals, ‘middle of the road’ voters care about the state of the economy in the sense that a policy reform is desirable for them when the fundamentals of the economy change. However, information is “sticky” in the sense that the process of information diffusion about the state of the economy, which is determined by some exogenous stochastic process, is imperfect. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we show that an increase in ideological polarization may enhance social welfare by mitigating the friction in information flow.

Polarization and gridlock in parliamentary regimes

The Legislative Scholar, 2018

In presidential regimes, gridlock-the inability to enact policy change despite elite or mass demands-derives from the combination of fixed terms and the interdependency of the separately elected legislative and executive branches. The potential consequences of this have been examined extensively in a comparative context, inspired by Linz's (1990) work on the potential for regime-threatening paralysis in presidentialism. Most scholarly work on gridlock focuses on the US case, where the combination of a weak president, divided government, supermajority rules, and centralized agenda control make gridlock a persistent phenomenon (Binder 2004). As the causes of gridlock in the US depend on the policy preferences of elites, party polarization in the US Congress has restricted cooperation between parties and exacerbated the consequences of gridlock (Barber and McCarty 2015). In what follows, we discuss the possibilities for gridlock in parliamentary regimes and discuss the role of elite polarization in relation to this. We then use the Swedish case as an empirical example.

The Ideology Trap: Explaining Polarization and Persistence in Politics

Abstract This paper develops an explanation of why office holders may act partisan even on non-partisan issues. To this end, we analyze a dynamic model in which politicians that are both policy-motivated and office-motivated are better informed than the voting public about an underlying state of nature that determines the desirability of a given policy measure. We show that partisanship and polarization may emerge in equilibrium even if politicians and voters are in complete agreement as to which is the optimal course of action.

Cross-National Partisan Effects on Agenda Stability

Studies of policy attention find only mixed support for a partisan impact, instead showing that policy attention reacts more to world events. Yet, a rigorous examination of the ways in which change in the partisan composition of government matters for the distribution of policies across issues has yet to be completed in a cross-national framework. Combining data on policy output from the Comparative Agendas Project, we present a detailed investigation of parties' effect on agenda stability in six advanced industrial democracies over time. We consider parties as dynamic organizations by arguing that parties' organizational characteristics and goals interact with their electoral context to determine their impact on policy attention. The results show that parties' influence on the policy agenda depends on economic conditions, the type of government, the government's seat share, and the number of parties in the governing cabinet, particularly following a major transition in government.