394 results
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2. Public Value and Ethical Challenges in the COVID-19 Pandemic Response.
- Author
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Liou, Kuotsai Tom and Liou, Alex K.
- Subjects
PUBLIC value ,COVID-19 pandemic ,PUBLIC health administration ,PREPAREDNESS ,PUBLIC health ethics ,POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,PUBLIC officers - Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major public governance issue in the United States since 2020. Public officials at all levels of government have provided important policies to control the spread of the pandemic and reduce its impact to society. This paper examines public value and ethical challenges that are related to the government's pandemic responses. The paper first provides a review of value and ethical studies in public administration and public health crisis. It then examines value concerns and ethical challenges in COVID management and policy cases and the influence of political polarization to the value challenges. The paper concludes with discussions about the pandemic's comprehensive challenges to the traditional professional management and suggestions of public value studies and trainings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
3. Polarizing Online Elite Rhetoric at the Federal, State, and Local Level During the COVID-19 Pandemic.
- Author
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Heseltine, Michael
- Subjects
COVID-19 pandemic ,POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,POLITICAL elites ,RHETORIC ,PUBLIC officers - Abstract
Times of national and international crisis are often unifying events which lower levels of division within the public and between political elites. Yet, COVID-19 pandemic responses in the United States have been viewed as markedly polarized. Using a comprehensive dataset of over four million social media posts sent by local, state, and federal level political officials between January 2020 and September 2022, this paper explores the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic was a rhetorically unifying or divisive event, and whether rhetorical responses differed across levels of government. The results show that federal level officials were less likely to message about COVID-19 and were more likely to do so in a polarizing fashion compared to state and local officials. Temporally, in the early stages of the pandemic there was indeed a collective rhetorical de-polarization across all levels of government. However, as the pandemic progressed, COVID-related messaging became more polarizing, especially among Republicans. Evidence also emerges of dynamic responsiveness from elected officials, with relativeness attentiveness to COVID increasing and polarizing rhetoric decreasing during time periods when local case counts were relatively high. These findings suggest that rhetorical unity is still possible, even in times of high political polarization, but that this unity is also short-lived and tempered by political and electoral considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
4. Detecting political biases of named entities and hashtags on Twitter.
- Author
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Xiao, Zhiping, Zhu, Jeffrey, Wang, Yining, Zhou, Pei, Lam, Wen Hong, Porter, Mason A., and Sun, Yizhou
- Subjects
TAGS (Metadata) ,POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,SUPERVISED learning ,NOUN phrases (Grammar) ,TRUST ,SOCIAL media ,FERTILITY preservation - Abstract
Ideological divisions in the United States have become increasingly prominent in daily communication. Accordingly, there has been much research on political polarization, including many recent efforts that take a computational perspective. By detecting political biases in a text document, one can attempt to discern and describe its polarity. Intuitively, the named entities (i.e., the nouns and the phrases that act as nouns) and hashtags in text often carry information about political views. For example, people who use the term "pro-choice" are likely to be liberal and people who use the term "pro-life" are likely to be conservative. In this paper, we seek to reveal political polarities in social-media text data and to quantify these polarities by explicitly assigning a polarity score to entities and hashtags. Although this idea is straightforward, it is difficult to perform such inference in a trustworthy quantitative way. Key challenges include the small number of known labels, the continuous spectrum of political views, and the preservation of both a polarity score and a polarity-neutral semantic meaning in an embedding vector of words. To attempt to overcome these challenges, we propose the Polarity-aware Embedding Multi-task learning (PEM) model. This model consists of (1) a self-supervised context-preservation task, (2) an attention-based tweet-level polarity-inference task, and (3) an adversarial learning task that promotes independence between an embedding's polarity component and its semantic component. Our experimental results demonstrate that our PEM model can successfully learn polarity-aware embeddings that perform well at tweet-level and account-level classification tasks. We examine a variety of applications—including a study of spatial and temporal distributions of polarities and a comparison between tweets from Twitter and posts from Parler—and we thereby demonstrate the effectiveness of our PEM model. We also discuss important limitations of our work and encourage caution when applying the PEM model to real-world scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
5. Partisan polarization, historical heritage, and public health: Exploring COVID‐19 outcomes.
- Author
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Curtis, Craig, Stillman, John, Remmel, Megan, Pierce, John C., Lovrich, Nicholas P., and Adams‐Curtis, Leah E.
- Subjects
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,COVID-19 pandemic ,PUBLIC health officers ,COVID-19 ,PUBLIC health - Abstract
Copyright of World Medical & Health Policy is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
- Published
- 2023
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
6. Policy Regime Decay.
- Subjects
NUTRITION policy ,AGRICULTURAL policy ,CONGRESSIONAL hearings (U.S.) ,LEGISLATIVE voting ,PARTISANSHIP ,POLARIZATION (Social sciences) - Abstract
Copyright of Policy Studies Journal is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
7. The limited promise of interracial friendship: political partisanship moderates the association between having Black friends and anti-Black implicit bias.
- Author
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Nelson, Kristen Novella
- Subjects
- *
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *POLITICAL science , *RACIAL & ethnic attitudes - Abstract
Some studies show that people with friends of different races also have lower levels of implicit racial bias. Yet, other studies do not replicate this finding. The omission of political parties from this research may explain its contradictory results, given the central role that race has played in the polarization of US society. Recent scholarship shows that political partisanship influences whether intergroup friendships improve explicit (i.e. conscious) attitudes. However, no studies have asked if friendships with African Americans have differing effects on white Democrats' and Republicans' anti-Black implicit bias. This paper examines this question by analyzing Race IAT and survey responses from 1,868 white Americans. Results reveal that white Democrats and Republicans maintain friendships with African Americans at similar rates. Yet, having Black friends only predicts weaker anti-Black implicit bias among white Democrats. This finding suggests that partisan differences in interracial friendship dynamics may shape implicit racial attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
8. Reality Behind "One People, One Vote": Redistricting Manipulation and Partisan Politics in the United States.
- Author
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Su Jiangli and Wang Ruijie
- Subjects
PARTISANSHIP ,POLITICAL parties ,POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,VOTING ,GOVERNMENT policy ,GERRYMANDERING ,BALLOTS - Abstract
Although political parties are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the two-party electoral system is wellestablished in American elections and gerrymandering naturally occurs to benefit the party that controls both a state's legislative chambers and the governor's office. Tracing the evolution of partisan gerrymandering and examining the gerrymandering practices, this research finds that redistricting manipulation enabled by two-party electoral system, is a tale as old as time and it has continued for over two hundred years, rising or falling depending on the intensity of partisan politics. In 21st century, political polarization and gerrymandering have been feeding off each other. When the redistricting process is manipulated by entrenched partisan gerrymanders, it has become counterproductive to fair representation, competitive election, and translating public will into policies. As long as the foxes are allowed to guard the hen houses, partisan politicians will continue to abuse "one person, one vote" principle and pick voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
9. Individual and institutional dimensions of affective polarisation: A proposal for an analytical framework.
- Author
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Romero-Martín, Gonzalo, Caraballo-Pou, María Ángeles, and Merchán-Hernández, Carmen
- Subjects
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,POLITICAL elites ,CONSENSUS (Social sciences) ,POLITICAL oratory - Abstract
Copyright of Revista Española de Sociología is the property of Federacion Espanola de Sociologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
10. The Asymmetric Polarization of Immigration Opinion in the United States.
- Author
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Ollerenshaw, Trent and Jardina, Ashley
- Subjects
- *
PUBLIC opinion on emigration & immigration , *PUBLIC opinion on immigrants , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *IMMIGRATION policy , *DEMOCRATS' attitudes , *REPUBLICANS - Abstract
In this paper, we analyze trends in Americans' immigration attitudes and policy preferences nationally and across partisan and racial/ethnic groups. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Democrats and Republicans shared similarly negative attitudes toward immigrants and high levels of support for restrictionist immigration policies. Beginning in the 2010s and continuing through the early 2020s, however, Democrats' aggregate immigration opinions liberalized considerably. We observed increasingly liberal immigration preferences among Democrats of all racial and ethnic backgrounds after 2016, but this trend was especially pronounced among white Democrats. Among Republicans, opinion on immigration remained mostly stable over this period, although in some cases it became more conservative (e.g. border security) and more liberal on others (e.g. amnesty). The marked liberalization in immigration opinion among Democrats has left partisans more divided on immigration than at any point since national surveys began consistently measuring immigration opinion in the late twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
11. Affective Polarization: Over Time, Through the Generations, and During the Lifespan.
- Author
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Phillips, Joseph
- Subjects
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,PARTISANSHIP ,OLDER people ,TRUST ,SOCIAL processes ,POLITICAL socialization - Abstract
The continual rise of affective polarization in the United States harms trust in democratic institutions. Scholars cite processes of ideological and social sorting of the partisan coalitions in the electorate as contributing to the rise of affective polarization, but how do these processes relate to one another? Most scholarship implicitly assumes period effects—that people change their feelings toward the parties uniformly and contemporaneously as they sort. However, it is also possible that sorting and affective polarization link with one another as a function of age or cohort effects. In this paper, I estimate age, period and cohort effects on affective polarization, partisan strength, and ideological sorting. I find that affective polarization increases over time, but also as people age. Age-related increases in affective polarization occur as a function of increases in partisan strength, and for Republicans, social sorting. Meanwhile, sorting only partially explains period effects. These effects combine such that each cohort enters the electorate more affectively polarized than the last. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
12. Does Political Participation Contribute to Polarization in the United States?
- Author
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Argyle, Lisa P and Pope, Jeremy C
- Subjects
POLITICAL participation ,POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,POLITICAL science ,POLITICAL doctrines - Abstract
Polarization and participation are often connected in the political science literature, though sometimes the causality runs participation to polarization and sometimes the causality runs in the reverse direction. In some accounts there is an expectation that increasing participation and increasing polarization generate an ongoing spiral effect. In this paper we evaluate the over-time relationships between polarization and participation by assessing evidence in existing panel and aggregate data. We find that people with more extreme attitudes are more likely to participate in politics. However, only one particular form of participation—persuading others—appears to predict later levels of polarization. Therefore, only persuasion has the necessary correlation and temporal ordering for a feedback loop with more extreme ideology. The implication is that the discipline should pay more attention to interpersonal persuasion as a form of participation in American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
13. AUTHORITARIANISM AND AFFECTIVE POLARIZATION: A NEW VIEW ON THE ORIGINS OF PARTISAN EXTREMISM.
- Author
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LUTTIG, MATTHEW D.
- Subjects
AUTHORITARIANISM ,POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,RADICALISM ,PARTISANSHIP ,DEMOCRATS (United States) ,REPUBLICANS ,IDEOLOGICAL conflict ,WORLDVIEW ,PSYCHOLOGY - Abstract
What drives affective polarization in American politics? One common argument is that Democrats and Republicans are deeply polarized today because they are psychologically different--motivated by diametrically opposed and clashing worldviews. This paper argues that the same psychological motivation--authoritarianism--is positively related to partisan extremism among both Republicans and Democrats. Across four studies, this paper shows that authoritarianism is associated with strong partisanship and heightened affective polarization among both Republicans and Democrats. Thus, strong Republicans and Democrats are psychologically similar, at least with respect to authoritarianism. As authoritarianism provides an indicator of underlying needs to belong, these findings support a view of mass polarization as nonsubstantive and group-centric, not driven by competing ideological values or clashing psychological worldviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
14. Inequality, identity, and partisanship: How redistribution can stem the tide of mass polarization.
- Author
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Stewart, Alexander J., Plotkin, Joshua B., and McCarty, Nolan
- Subjects
PARTISANSHIP ,POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,EQUALITY ,SOCIAL evolution ,PUBLIC goods ,INTERGROUP relations - Abstract
The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes toward out-party members and policies has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as intergroup and racial conflict, have been identified as important contributing factors to this phenomenon known as “affective polarization.” Research shows that partisan animosities are exacerbated when these interests and identities become aligned with existing party cleavages. In this paper, we use a model of cultural evolution to study how these forces combine to generate and maintain affective political polarization. We show that economic events can drive both affective polarization and the sorting of group identities along party lines, which, in turn, can magnify the effects of underlying inequality between those groups. But, on a more optimistic note, we show that sufficiently high levels of wealth redistribution through the provision of public goods can counteract this feedback and limit the rise of polarization. We test some of our key theoretical predictions using survey data on intergroup polarization, sorting of racial groups, and affective polarization in the United States over the past 50 y. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
15. The problem of polarization.
- Author
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Grafstein, Robert
- Subjects
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,EXTREMISTS ,INCOME redistribution ,VOTERS ,FEAR & politics ,IDEOLOGY ,NEGOTIATION ,VOTING - Abstract
This paper offers a unified political economy explanation of political extremism and moderation regarding income redistribution. Unlike the standard spatial voting model, the explanation herein recognizes that extremists are distinguished not only by their political positions, but also by the intensity with which they hold them. The paper uses an extension of Aumann and Kurz’s (Econometrica 45(5):1137-1161,
1977 ) bargaining model to endogenize moderation and extremism in the context of democratic voting. The extension shows that low-income voters tend to be bolder in their redistributive demands and high-income voters tend to be more tenacious in defending them. These hypotheses are evaluated empirically using the Political Action Panel Study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
16. How Are We Apart? Continuity and Change in the Structure of Ideological Disagreement in the American Public, 1980-2012.
- Author
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Park, Barum
- Subjects
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,SOCIAL conditions in the United States, 1980- ,PARTISANSHIP ,CULTURE conflict ,PUBLIC opinion -- Social aspects ,PUBLIC opinion ,IDEOLOGY & society ,ATTITUDE (Psychology) - Abstract
Even after two decades of intense research, social scientists are still in disagreement over whether the American public is polarized. Starting from the premise that disagreement is multifaceted, this paper attempts to clarify how and which aspects of ideological disagreement have changed over the past few decades. Three major structural features of ideological disagreement that have been discussed under the umbrella term "polarization" are identified from the literature--polarization, partisan sorting, and dimensional alignment--and redefined into analytically distinct and non-overlapping concepts. Two different scaling methods are applied to the American National Election Studies from 1980 to 2012 in order to examine changes in how citizens organize their attitudes regarding concrete political and social issues (operational ideology) and their self-identifications with the ideological labels "liberal" and "conservative" (symbolic ideology). Results show at best mixed evidence of growing polarization. Partisan sorting has increased over time on both symbolic and operational ideology. However, it is mainly the symbolic side on which disagreement across partisan lines is most pronounced. Finally, contrary to the popular notion of a culture war dividing the United States, the public has become less polarized on moral issues, and the moral dimension of citizens' operational ideology has become dealigned from the economic and civil rights dimension over the past decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
17. Polarization Reconsidered: A New Take on Congressional Change Over the Last 40 Years.
- Author
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Rippere, Paulina S.
- Subjects
- *
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *POLITICAL change , *UNITED States legislators , *LEGISLATIVE voting , *POLITICAL development , *MEMBERSHIP - Abstract
Although the literature on congressional change has established that both the House and Senate have become increasingly polarized along party lines over time, this conclusion is limited primarily to patterns of voting behavior. An exploration of another legislative practice, bill cosponsorship, reveals that while partisan polarization in the House has increased over time, the same is not necessarily true for the Senate. Using data on bill cosponsorship for the 93rd through 110th Congresses, this paper presents two conclusions. First, over time, House members have become more exclusive in their cosponsorship decisions, associating primarily with members of their own party. Second, and in contrast to this, the cosponsorship ties among senators have become more bipartisan; in recent years, more senators have adopted ?50-50 networks,? or cosponsorship networks composed of equal numbers of members from both parties. These results suggest that the increasing partisan polarization for which this era has become known may not be as prevalent as we have thought. Rather, when we scratch below the surface of roll call behavior and explore the informal relationship-building activities of legislators, we find that differences in the institutional structures of the House and Senate, such as membership size and length of term, may create different behavioral outcomes in each chamber. This paper contributes to our understanding of congressional development by examining the polarization story from a new angle and recognizing that the House and Senate are two unique institutions, each requiring its own theoretical framework to be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011
18. Partisan News Before Fox.
- Author
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Groeling, Tim and Baum, Matthew
- Subjects
- *
PARTISANSHIP , *JOURNALISM & politics , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *AMERICAN newspapers , *VOTING - Abstract
How do partisan media affect polarization and partisanship? The rise of Fox News, MSNBC, and hyper-partisan outlets online gives this question fresh salience, but in this paper, we argue that the question is actually not new: prior to the broadcast era, newspapers dominated American mass communication. Many of these were identified as supporting one party over the other in their news coverage. While scholars have studied the composition and impact of the partisan press during their 19th-century height, the political impact of the gradual decline of these partisan papers remains relatively under-examined. The unnoted vitality and endurance of partisan newspapers (which constituted a majority of American newspapers until the 1960s) represents a huge hole in our understanding of how parties communicate. As a consequence of this omission, scholars have ignored a potentially vital contributing factor to changing patterns of partisan voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2010
19. A Factional Spatial Theory of Congressional Organization.
- Author
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Smith, Steven
- Subjects
- *
FACTIONALISM (Politics) , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *POLITICAL parties - Abstract
Two arguments about theories of congressional parties and organization are made in this paper. First, theory must focus more directly on the often-competing factions within the majority party. Other analyses emphasize the polarization between the parties—the intra-party cohesiveness and inter-party differences—but this paper proposes that factions within the majority party usually compete for control of the party and the House and often produce winners and losers. Second, while other analyses treat negative and positive forms of agenda power as distinguishable and subject to different dynamics, I argue that (1) the two forms of agenda manipulation are essential for agenda control and are likely to develop together and (2) legislators' preferences for the agenda power allocated to their parties are dependent on their factional location. In short, we should reorient the discussion of congressional organization and agenda power. Factional politics within legislative parties should be central to our accounts of the distribution of power in Congress. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2009
20. The Changing American Electorate: Partisanship and Polarization, 1992-2004.
- Author
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Beck, Paul and Gunther, Richard
- Subjects
- *
VOTERS , *PARTISANSHIP , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *UNITED States elections , *SOCIAL networks , *UNITED States political parties , *PSYCHOLOGY - Abstract
The American electorate can be seen as two contrasting electorates -- one partisan (Democrats vs. Republicans), the other non-partisan. Partisans are more politically attentive/involved, strongly inclined to view candidates and campaign through their partisan âlenses,â and more partisan in voting behavior than nonpartisans. This paper will examine how these two electorates have changed between 1992 and 2004. Its data primarily come from two national surveys, conducted as part of the Comparative National Election Project (CNEP) in the two âbook-endâ years, which focused uniquely on information sources in the election campaigns. ANES data will complement the CNEP data, especially between 1992 and 2004, to establish whether these years were unrepresentative outliers. Some observers suggest, while others deny, that the American electorate has polarized during this time. The paper will examine polarization from the perspective of information sources as well as behavior. Preliminary analysis suggests that partisans, in contrast to nonpartisans, were exposed by 2004 to more homogeneously partisan information through the availability of TV and (especially) radio talk shows and their more partisan social networks. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2009
21. Polarization in American Legislatures: Empirical Tests of Congressional Theory.
- Author
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Birkhead, Nathaniel
- Subjects
- *
LEGISLATIVE bodies , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *PARLIAMENTARY practice , *REALIGNMENT (Political science) - Abstract
In this paper, I use an original set of roll call data from several state legislatures to evaluate existing theories of legislative polarization. Congressional theory presents party polarization as a function of legislative rules changes, changes in party strategy, electoral realignment, legislator replacement or redistricting. Although these theories provide leverage on the issue of polarization, the inferences that we can draw are somewhat limited because they are all generated from one series of data. Rather, to determine whether the causes of polarization are endogenous or exogenous to Congress, we need to test for polarization in different institutions but similar contexts. The American state legislatures provide such an opportunity, as shifts among the electorate are similar, while changes to legislative rules and redistricting differ. The findings from this paper provide a refinement of legislative theory while doing so in a novel way: using data from the legislatures of the American states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2009
22. The Effect of Partisan Redistricting on Polarization in the House.
- Author
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Ryan, Josh
- Subjects
- *
PARTISANSHIP , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *VOTERS , *VOTING - Abstract
Party polarization among members of Congress has been increasing in recent years. While the evidence for this increasing polarization is substantial, the reasons for it have remained elusive. This paper proposes that partisan redistricting is one cause of polarization in the House of Representatives. While this explanation is not new, the theory developed in this paper uses median voter theory to explain how district level polarization can increase, while at the same time national levels of polarization among the voting public do not. Median voter theory provides an explanation of how the composition of voters within partisan redistricted districts incentivize House Members to become more ideologically extreme. Thus, partisan redistricting causes Members to change their behavior within the House in order to appease their more ideologically extreme constituency. A quantitative analysis is performed on Congressional districts using a statistical matching technique designed to demonstrate a statistically significant difference in ideological extremity among those Members within districts that have been gerrymandered as opposed to Members in non-gerrymandered districts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2008
23. Congressional Polarization and the Legislative Agenda.
- Author
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Ilderton, Nathan A.
- Subjects
- *
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *POLITICAL parties , *PARTISANSHIP , *TIME series analysis - Abstract
Research examining party polarization in Congress has concentrated on documenting the sources of polarization, but little work has been done regarding the consequences of polarization. This paper takes a step towards remedying this oversight by examining the affects of party polarization on the size and content of the legislative agenda. Using time series analysis, the study examined the affects of partisan polarization on the legislative agenda. As the parties in Congress become more ideologically distinct the majority party has more incentive to control the agenda. Additionally, members of the minority party should look to place more significant bills on the agenda to try to force the majority party into a negative voting record. Therefore, it is expected that higher polarization will lead to a larger number of significant issues being placed on the congressional agenda and to an increased effort by the majority party to control the floor agenda. This paper examined the number of significant issues on the agenda and percentage of bills on the House floor introduced by majority members. Time series models using data from the 80th (1947-48) through the 107th (2000-01) found evidence that polarization leads to an increase of majority party bills on the floor agenda, but found no evidence for any effect on the overall size of the significant issue agenda. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2008
24. Linking Congressional Districts Across Time: Redistricting and Party Polarization in Congress.
- Author
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Carson, Jamie L., Crespin, Michael H., Finocchiaro, Charles J., and Rohde, David W.
- Subjects
- *
APPORTIONMENT (Election law) , *REPRESENTATIVE government , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *ELECTION law - Abstract
The potential sources of the polarization observed in Congress have been attributed to a variety of factors. In this paper, we seek to more directly link patterns of polarization in the U.S. House to underlying changes in representatives? constituencies resulting from redistricting. As districts become more liberal or conservative over time, we should expect members representing these districts to alter their behavior to reflect these trends. Using a new dataset linking congressional districts over time, we examine whether changes within districts contribute to polarization in the U.S. House. We show that while there is an overall increasing trend of polarization, districts that have undergone significant changes as a result of redistricting have become even more polarized. This finding has direct implications for analyses examining aggregate levels of polarization in Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2004
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
25. Polarization on the U.S. Supreme Court.
- Author
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Plagens, Gregory K.
- Subjects
- *
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *DECISION making , *JUDICIAL process , *JUDGES , *JUSTICE administration & politics - Abstract
One view of American politics many scholars share is that of government divided along partisan and ideological lines. In question is the extent of the division, as well as the cause and the degree to which it interferes with efficient decision making. Amidst the divided government literature the concept of polarization has arisen to describe what is perceived to be extreme partisan or ideological division. Polarization conjures up images of individuals or groups in diametrical opposition or antagonistic situations, a state that should be of interest to anyone concerned about effective decision making and governance. Although much of the research on divided government and polarization examines Congress and the executive, some effort is made to extend the argument to the judicial branch. This paper examines the effort and applies empirical tests to determine whether claims of polarization on the Supreme Court can be further supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2004
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
26. Learning from Shared News: When Abundant Information Leads to Belief Polarization*.
- Author
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Bowen, T Renee, Dmitriev, Danil, and Galperti, Simone
- Subjects
OBJECTIVITY in journalism ,OPTICAL polarization ,NEWS consumption ,POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,FAKE news ,MEDIA literacy - Abstract
We study learning via shared news. Each period agents receive the same quantity and quality of firsthand information and can share it with friends. Some friends (possibly few) share selectively, generating heterogeneous news diets across agents. Agents are aware of selective sharing and update beliefs by Bayes's rule. Contrary to standard learning results, we show that beliefs can diverge in this environment, leading to polarization. This requires that (i) agents hold misperceptions (even minor) about friends' sharing and (ii) information quality is sufficiently low. Polarization can worsen when agents' friend networks expand. When the quantity of firsthand information becomes large, agents can hold opposite extreme beliefs, resulting in severe polarization. We find that news aggregators can curb polarization caused by news sharing. Our results hold without media bias or fake news, so eliminating these is not sufficient to reduce polarization. When fake news is included, it can lead to polarization but only through misperceived selective sharing. We apply our theory to shed light on the polarization of public opinion about climate change in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
27. Political polarization, congressional redistricting, and trade liberalization.
- Author
-
DeVault, James
- Subjects
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,FREE trade ,CONGRESSIONAL apportionment ,ELECTION districts ,POLITICAL affiliation - Abstract
During the last 50 years, political polarization in the US House of Representatives has intensified. One explanation for this trend emphasizes the importance of congressional redistricting. This paper analyzes the relationship between political polarization and redistricting in the context of two trade liberalization bills. The results of the paper indicate that redistricting has not contributed significantly to party polarization over trade policy although it has produced a partisan shift in favor of trade liberalization. Redistricting does not appear to impact political polarization largely because district-level characteristics currently are dominated by broader, national factors such as party affiliation. The results of the paper clearly demonstrate this point by showing that changes in party affiliation have a much greater impact on voting behavior than changes in district characteristics. The paper also finds, however, that institutional control of the redistricting process at the state level has influenced political polarization with respect to trade policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2013
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
28. The Temptation of Executive Authority: How Increased Polarization and the Decline in Legislative Capacity Have Contributed to the Expansion of Presidential Power.
- Subjects
EXECUTIVE power ,POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,UNITED States politics & government ,EXECUTIVE orders - Abstract
This paper argues that our increasingly polarized politics has led to political stalemate and policy gridlock in Congress which, in turn, have contributed to a change in the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches of government; specifically, executive power has increased at the expense of a diminished legislature. The paper will trace the extent to which Congress has become increasingly polarized and how this increased polarization has reduced Congress's capability and productivity while simultaneously increasing policy gridlock resulting in the expansion of executive power (and judicial authority) relative to legislative authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
29. Character analysis: A methodology for the study of political debate.
- Author
-
Thornton, Ashley and Sylvan, David
- Subjects
- *
POLITICAL debates , *IMMIGRATION law , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,FOREIGN relations of the United States - Abstract
Character analysis provides a means of studying political debates. By identifying the types of persons evoked by speakers and writers, it is possible to glean information about key features of a given speech or written passage, as well as about debates as wholes. In this paper, we put forward a methodology for identifying characters evoked by proponents and opponents of particular bills or resolutions put forward in the United States Senate, notably on foreign policy, on the welfare system, and on immigration. Preliminary analysis shows that the methodology is feasible and that the degree of polarization between opposing sides is high regardless of the closeness of the eventual vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2014
30. EXPLAINING PARTY POLARIZATION GIVEN VOTERS WITH CONVERGENT PREFERENCES: A MARKETING MODEL OF BRANDING.
- Author
-
Bruhl, Robert H.
- Subjects
- *
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *VOTERS , *UNITED States political parties , *ELECTION law , *ECONOMIC models - Abstract
Over the past few electoral cycles, the two major American political parties have both pursued strategies of polarization. At the same time, opinion polls have shown the American electorate to be generally centrist in its policy preferences. Under the current economic models of voter behavior, these two developments present a paradox. More precisely, the current economic models of voter behavior, as exemplified by Anthony Downs, would predict both parties to adopt policy positions directed towards the distributional center of the electorate, and not toward the outskirts of the distribution as observed. While this paradox might simply be interpreted as a failure of the economic model to describe voter behavior, denying the relevance of that model--in which thoughtful decisions are presumed to be based on preferences--would seem imprudent. Alternatively, there is an economic model of behavior that would resolve this paradox. In particular, we might consider the marketing model of branding, in which a producer creates a brand based on its opposition to another brand and identifies features disliked by consumers to repel those consumers from the opposing brand. In a duopoly, such repelled consumers have no other option than to fall to the opposing brand. This paper presents such a model as it might be applied to the two major American political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2014
31. When Efforts to Depolarize the Electorate Fail.
- Author
-
Professor, Matthew S Levendusky
- Subjects
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,VOTER attitudes ,AMERICANS ,SUSPICION ,POLITICAL psychology ,PREJUDICES ,PARTISANSHIP ,UNITED States political parties - Abstract
The mass public has become affectively polarized—ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party, with negative consequences for politics. Drawing on work in political and social psychology, this paper tests two mechanisms for reducing this discord, both of which have been shown to reduce similar biases in other settings: heightening partisan ambivalence, and using self-affirmation techniques. A population-based survey experiment shows that neither strategy reduces affective polarization in the aggregate. But this null finding masks an important heterogeneity: Heightening partisan ambivalence reduces affective polarization for ideological moderates, but increases such discord for those with more extreme ideological identities. Efforts to depolarize the electorate can make it more deeply divided, with important implications for our understanding of contemporary politics and the durability of affective polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
32. Partisan sorting and behavioral polarization in the American electorate.
- Author
-
Mason, Lilliana
- Subjects
- *
POLITICAL participation , *ACTIVISM , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *PREJUDICES - Abstract
The political identity sorting that has been observed to occur during the past 50 years has caused the nation as a whole to hold more overlapping political identities, which has strengthened the activism, bias and anger that result from strong and highly aligned identities, even though issue positions have remained moderate. In this paper I offer a clear definition of polarization and a theory-based explanation of the mechanism by which polarization has increased over the last few decades. Specifically, I view polarization in terms of political behavior, not issue positions, and I believe that it has been increasing over the last 50 years as a result of political identity sorting. This theory is informed by work in social psychology that makes concrete predictions about the psychological results of group membership. Using this theoretical background, I argue that political identity and the alignment of political identities is able to drive political participation, political bias, and political anger, even when issue positions are moderate. The more strongly aligned the political identities, the stronger the effect of identity on behavior. I support these hypotheses using data drawn from a nationally-representative sample collected by Polimetrix from a National Science Foundation grant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012
33. INTERNATIONAL POLARITY AND AMERICA'S POLARIZATION.
- Author
-
Parent, Joseph M. and Bafumi, Joseph
- Subjects
- *
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *POWER (Social sciences) , *INTERNATIONAL relations , *PRESIDENTIAL candidates , *EMPIRICAL research - Abstract
There is a growing consensus that the United States is undergoing a period of political polarization, particularly among elites. The causes of this polarization remain underresearched. We argue that changes in the international distribution of power influence America's polarization. To demonstrate the argument, this paper analyzes changes in power and polarization quantitatively and qualitatively from 1945 to 2005. A key finding is that greater relative power on the world stage increases polarization and some of its correlates. The argument also gauges the extent of international influence on domestic polarization and makes novel predictions on when and why polarization will end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011
34. Battleground States and Polarization in Presidential Elections, 1976-2008.
- Author
-
Peterson, Mark
- Subjects
- *
POLITICAL candidates , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *REPUBLICANS ,UNITED States presidential elections - Abstract
This paper examines three related questions concerning polarization among the states in nine U.S. presidential elections, 1976-2008. First, what trends can be observed in the number of polarized and battleground states? Second, are polarization trends related to regional shifts? Third, has polarization benefitted either party in the Electoral College?Polarization of each state is measured according its deviation from the two-party national election results for each election. A "polarized" state is operationally defined as more than 10% from the national vote for any election, with "battleground states" operationally defined as within 4% of the national vote.The data indicate a clear trend toward greater polarization and fewer battleground states, marked in particular by the 1992 and 2000 elections. The 2008 election did not interrupt this trend.The most profound regional trend is found in nine southern states, where Republican presidential candidates have gained an overwhelming advantage, with seven states at least 10% more Republican than the nation in 2008. By way of contrast, in 1984 no southern state gave Republicans a 5% advantage.Techniques similar to Abramson, et al. (2006) are used to evaluate Electoral College advantages by creating "hypothetical" tie elections. The adjusted data suggest a trend away from a strong Republican Electoral College advantage. This is related to "supermajorities" Republicans have accumulated in the south, which represent "wasted" votes for Electoral College competition. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2010
35. Party Polarization and the Declining Importance of Economic Growth.
- Author
-
Murakami, Michael
- Subjects
- *
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *ECONOMIC history , *ECONOMIC development , *POLITICAL parties , *PRESIDENTIAL elections - Abstract
This paper investigates how the degree of polarization between the two major political parties is affecting the importance of objective economic conditions for voters in the United States. I find that as the Democratic and Republican parties have grown more ideologically distinct over the last 40 years, individuals have grown increasingly immune to economic growth when casting votes in congressional and presidential elections. The declining importance of objective macroeconomic conditions appears to be driven by a concomitant rise in the significance of racial and social issues among voters with weak partisan ties. These results are confirmed in analysis of aggregate election outcomes for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1890-2008: greater party polarization is associated with a weaker relationship between economic growth and the percentage of seats gained or lost by the president's party. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2009
36. Migration, Polarization and Geographic Sorting in U.S. Congressional Elections: Evidence from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study.
- Author
-
McDonald, Ian
- Subjects
- *
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *EMIGRATION & immigration , *ELECTION of legislators , *UNITED States elections , *POLITICAL attitudes , *GEOPOLITICS - Abstract
Do domestic migrants in the U.S. tend to choose destinations with matching political preferences? This straightforward question is difficult to address with traditional survey and census data, for several reasons: precise data about migration in political surveys is rare, while datasets with more migration detail do not contain responses to political opinion. This paper analyzes migration using the Cooperative Congressional Election Study of 2006. The addresses of respondents were then matched against the US Postal Serviceâs public change of address database, which includes updated addresses for respondents. In this way, the dataset provides very precise detail about recent migrations, in addition to the significant number of political opinion and demographic questions in the survey. The study focuses on residents who moved far enough to have changed U.S. Congressional district between from 2006 to 2007; these comprised approximately 1400 of the 33,000 CCES respondents. I then propose and test a formal model of geographic sorting, analyzed with a hierarchical random effects model. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2009
37. Taming the Floor: Vote Skipping and Omnibus Spending Bills in the U.S. Congress.
- Author
-
Hanson, Peter
- Subjects
- *
PRACTICAL politics , *UNITED States political parties , *PUBLIC spending laws , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *PARTISANSHIP - Abstract
The article presents a research paper which focuses on the political parties' tendency of using their agenda-setting powers to work around pivotal voters and meet their own goals. It refers to legislative history of the annual appropriations bills in the U.S. Congress during 1976-2009, and shows the leaders' practice of approving spending bills in omnibus packages rather than individually. It uses spatial models to show changes in partisan polarization with changes in pivotal voters' location.
- Published
- 2009
38. It's All Relative: Party Polarization, Alienation, and Trust in Government.
- Author
-
O'Brien, Scott
- Subjects
- *
POLITICAL parties , *CITIZENS , *POLITICAL alienation , *TRUST , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) - Abstract
This paper analyzes polarization and alienation as competing predictors of trust in government. I define "alienation" as a citizen's perceived ideological proximity to each major political party. I define "polarization" as the ideological distance a citizen perceives between the parties, without regard to the citizen's ideological self-placement. Using the cumulative ANES, I find strong support for alienation effects but not for polarization effects; when it comes to predicting trust, ideological positions of the parties only matter relative to citizens' personal ideological placements. I find this relationship is robust across both time and measures of trust. In addition, I suggest that alienation is misspecified in the literature as a citizens' ideological distance from the closest political party only. Instead, ideological distance from both major parties should matter when it comes to explaining trust in the American context. My results confirm these expectations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2008
39. Exploring the Causes of District Polarization.
- Author
-
McGhee, Eric and Krimm, Daniel
- Subjects
- *
ELECTION of legislators , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *ELECTIONS , *POLITICAL parties - Abstract
This paper uses party registration data from the states that provide it to estimate the separate effects of residential self-selection and shifting party coalitions on district polarization in US House Elections. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2008
40. Intra-Party Factional Competition and Partisan Change.
- Author
-
Atkinson, Matthew
- Subjects
- *
POLITICAL change , *POLITICAL parties , *PARTISANSHIP , *ETHNIC groups , *POLITICAL campaigns , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *POWER (Social sciences) - Abstract
Extraordinary moments of political change originate in the struggle for control over a major party's political agenda. Yet in spite of intra-party competition's role in structuring the political order, most research explaining conflict displacement focuses on inter-party competition. This paper develops a study of partisan change among non-South white ethnics that demonstrates the mass-level partisan effects of elite-level factional changes within the Democratic party. I show that around the turn of the 20th century the party faction with which most white ethnics were affiliated suffered declining influence within the party, and that as a result the issues emphasized in Democratic presidential campaigns rarely appealed to this coalitional group's partisan attitudes. The eventual mass-level partisan change that developed among white ethnics proceeded when the Democrat's liberal faction secured its grasp on the party's agenda. Partisan polarization on race -- a simple, salient issue -- served as the proximate stimulus for partisan attitude change among white ethnics. In fact, the vast majority of partisan conversion among non-South racial conservatives occurred among white ethnics, suggesting that the struggle for power within the Democratic party was a necessary pre-condition for the rise in partisan polarization after 1964. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2008
41. Party Polarization in Congress: A Social Networking Approach.
- Author
-
Waugh, Andrew Scott
- Subjects
- *
UNITED States legislators , *COMMUNITY organization , *MODULARITY (Psychology) , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *ALGORITHMS - Abstract
In this paper, I construct networks between Members of Congress using roll-call data and identify the community structure of these networks using the concept of modularity. Modularity maximization provides two key measures. First, the maximum modularity value provides a conceptually clear measure of Congressional polarization, derived from the data without making assumptions about legislator utilities, as NOMINATE based measures do. Second, the community detection algorithm used to maximize modularity yields a unique community structure for each Congress that may be quantitatively compared to alternate community structures using the modularity concept. Analysis of maximum modularities over the history of the United States Congress reveals high levels of partisan polarization to be the historical norm, with the period from the 75th to 95th Congresses being the notable exception. Comparison of the modularity measure to NOMINATE based measures of polarization reveal interesting substantive differences, especially during periods of declining party importance and partisan fractionalization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2008
42. The Impact of Partisan Polarization on the Congressional Appropriations Process.
- Author
-
Hanson, Peter
- Subjects
- *
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *PARTISANSHIP ,UNITED States appropriations & expenditures - Abstract
This paper investigates how partisan polarization is changing the behavior and legislative output of members of Congress. One way to understand the consequences of polarization in Congress is by studying changes in the process of passing appropriations bills over time. While the political parties are drifting farther apart and the floor is becoming more contentious, the need to pass spending bills is an annually recurring event. Each year, the 13 (now fewer) bills funding the operation of the federal government must be written, debated, and passed. If not, the government will shut down. The regularity of these bills and the procedures by which they are passed make them a perfect vehicle for studying member behavior over time and how changes in preferences affect the legislative process.I present evidence from a dataset outlining 30 years of legislative history for each of the 13 appropriations bills. I find that the major consequence of the polarization of the two political parties is that it has created a more contentious floor environment in which it has grown increasingly difficult to pass spending bills. Partisan disputes now prevent many spending bills from receiving a floor vote, particularly in the Senate. Since it is not an option to shut down the government, Congress has resorted to new measures to ensure passage of the bills. First, it has routinely packaged the bills together as omnibus appropriation bills in order to broaden their base of support. Second, it has increased the number of earmarks it gives to members in order to provide an additional incentive to vote for the bills. Omnibus bills are not necessarily more tilted toward the majority party preference than spending bills in the past, since the final product must be negotiated with the president. However, during periods of unified government, omnibus bills do provide an opportunity for "partisan steamrolls" in which the majority party can enact its preferences into law. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2007
43. Issue Evolution & Public Opinion on Immigration.
- Author
-
Monogan III, James E.
- Subjects
- *
IMMIGRANTS , *COST , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,UNITED States emigration & immigration - Abstract
This paper considers whether immigration is an issue that evolves, beginning in the 1990s. It is argued that whenever the immigrant population can be associated with high costs, then policy entrepreneurs will start the evolution process by dwelling on the cost symbol. This idea is tested by comparing partisan polarization for the entire United States, for the seven states that incurred a net deficit in spending on immigrants, and for California alone. As hypothesized, polarization increases the most in California, though not in a way that suggests issue evolution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2007
44. Directional Representation in the United States Congress.
- Author
-
Macdonald, Stuart Elaine, Rabinowitz, George, Engstrom, Erik, and Pyeatt, Nicholas
- Subjects
- *
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *UNITED States political parties , *REPRESENTATIVE government , *ELECTIONS - Abstract
There is no abstract for this paper ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2007
45. A "Conflict-Theory" of Policy Productivity in Congress: Party Polarization, Member Incivility and Landmark Legislation, 1873-2004.
- Author
-
Dodd, Lawrence C. and Schraufnagel, Scot
- Subjects
- *
SOCIAL conflict , *CONFLICT theory , *MEDIATION , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *POLITICAL parties - Abstract
Congress by its very nature is a deliberative institution created to mediate societal conflicts and address the policy concerns posed by such conflicts (Madison, Federalist # 10; Dahl, 1967; Cooper, 1970). The challenge for Congress is to embrace these responsibilities without becoming so overwhelmed with internal institutional conflict that its policy processes break down or so regularized and insulated in its policy processes that it fails to see and confront pressing social concerns. Thus a central congressional dilemma: Because conflict is inherent to Congress and threatening to its operation, it is tempted to avoid institutional meltdown by embracing highly constrained and regularized policy procedures. Yet an embrace of excessive constraints can isolate the Congress, inhibit conflict mediation, and allow policy problems to fester. How then does Congress generate the landmark laws that address its central mediational and policy-making tasks (Mayhew, 1991; Binder 2003)? The thesis of this paper is that the capacity of Congress to enact landmark legislation depends significantly on the character and regulation of conflict within the institution. Substantial and sustained landmark productivity requires a Congress that fosters real policy contestation (Dahl, 1967, 1971) characterized by serious conflict and even occasional incivilities, so that difficult policy problems can be brought to its attention (Jones and Baugartner, 2005; Schattsneider, 1960). Such contestation limits the isolation of Congress and connects it with social reality. But Congress then must maintain internal conflict within moderated parameters that avoid institutional meltdown and enable deliberative policy-making to proceed (Cooper, 1970, Part IV; Maass, 1983; Bessette, 1994). In this formulation, too much institutional conflict can inhibit landmark productivity -- but so can too little conflict (Simmel, 1955/1908). Too much conflict, we argue, will occur in polarized Congresses when high party polarization interacts with high inter-party incivility. Too little conflict is witnessed in depolarized Congresses (those below the historic mean level of party polarization) when low party polarization interacts with excessive intra-party civility. Both settings inhibit landmark productivity. In contrast, moderate levels of interactive conflict between party polarization and member incivility foster landmark productivity in both depolarized and polarized Congresses. Institutional conflict thus has countervailing effects, increasing gridlock in polarized Congresses and decreasing it in depolarized ones. To explore the explanatory value of our 'conflict theory' of landmark productivity we examine the statistical relationship between institutional conflict and landmark legislation by Congress from 1891 to 1994. This period begins with the first Congress to occur after the initial passage of the Reed Rules in the House of Representatives and ends with the 103rd Congress, which is the last Congress for which we have complete data. In our analysis: a.We use DW-Nominate scores developed by Poole and Rosenthal (1997) to measure party polarization. b.We determine the rise and fall of incivility within Congress according to the percentage of articles published by the New Your Times and the Washington Post on the Congress between 1891 and 1994 that discuss incidents of congressional incivility... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2007
46. Geographic Polarization in Social Attitudes.
- Author
-
Evans, John H. and Nunn, Lisa M.
- Subjects
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,SOCIAL attitudes ,POLITICAL science ,SOCIAL groups ,SOCIAL influence ,SOCIAL surveys - Abstract
While there has been a long-running debate about polarization in values or attitudes between people defined by socio-demographic characteristics, recent presidential elections have lead many in the public sphere to assume that there is increased polarization in values based on geography. In this paper we operationalize various claims of geographic polarization in values made in public discourse and from existing sociological literatures. Using the cumulative General Social Survey and diss-aggregating the respondents by various geographic units, we conclude that there has been an increase in geographic polarization in values. However, it is not the polarization that either the existing sociological literature would predict (city vs. suburbs), nor the received political wisdom ("red states" vs. "blue states.") Rather, there is a growing divide in values between locales in the U.S. that are more diverse and those that are less diverse. Of the various ways of conceptualizing diversity, the religiously diverse locales and the less religious diverse locales are polarizing on the greatest number of social attitudes and converging in the least. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2006
47. False Starts in U.S. Foreign Aid Policy: Domestic Polarization and Global Alienation.
- Author
-
Hook, Steven W.
- Subjects
- *
FOREIGN aid (American) , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *SOCIAL alienation , *INSTITUTIONAL theory (Sociology) - Abstract
The article presents the conference paper "False Starts in U.S. Foreign Aid Policy: Domestic Polarization and Global Alienation" shown during the "Annual meeting of the International Studies Association" in Honolulu, Hawaii. It deals with the domestic challenge over U.S. foreign aid by assessing the institutional landscape in which foreign-aid programs operate. It reviews central assumptions of institutional theory and determine characteristics that are used to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Millennium Challenge Corp. (MCC).
- Published
- 2005
48. How Legislative Staffers Perceive Party-Line Voting in the House of Representatives.
- Author
-
Cook, Zachary
- Subjects
- *
PARTISANSHIP , *POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *POLITICAL participation , *POLITICAL parties - Abstract
Over the past two decades, partisanship in the U.S. Congress has grown in media coverage and as a source of academic dispute. Partisanship can take the form of partisan homogenization, where the two parties are more coherent internally in their preferences, or partisan polarization, where the ideological distance between the two parties has grown. The most prominent evidence for this rise-in-partisanship phenomena includes roll call voting, first-dimension DW-NOMINATE scores, presidential support scores and adjusted ADA scores. My paper evaluates some of the most prominent theories of partisanship by comparing them to the personal impressions of a survey of staffers in the U.S. House of Representatives. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2005
49. Gay and Lesbian Rights as a "Mini" Issue Evolution.
- Author
-
Craw, Michael
- Subjects
- *
POLARIZATION (Social sciences) , *POLITICAL elites , *CULTURAL policy , *GAY rights , *UNITED States political parties ,UNITED States politics & government - Abstract
The article argues that mass polarization may begin with population groups that consider cultural policy issues such as abortion and gay and lesbian rights more salient than others, resulting in a mini issue evolution in which members of the political elites in the U.S. polarize on the issue and group members increasingly identify with one party or the other. The paper also aims to determine if the two U.S. political parties are experiencing an issue evolution with respect to cultural policy issues.
- Published
- 2005
50. Social Inequalities in Health Insurance Coverage and Health: Lessening Selection Bias with Fixed Effects Regression.
- Author
-
Quesnel-Vallée, Amélie
- Subjects
EQUALITY ,SOCIAL classes ,POLARIZATION (Social sciences) ,REGRESSION analysis ,MEDICAL care ,SOCIAL status ,HEALTH insurance - Abstract
This paper will determine the extent to which health insurance has an impact on health, net of that of more conventional measures of socioeconomic status (SES), namely education and income, using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. As previous research indicates, a satisfactory answer to this question requires estimates of the effects of health insurance on health that are less affected by selection biases. This will be achieved by framing this question within the counterfactual account of causality and using fixed effects models with sibling clusters to corroborate -- or refute -- the results of a conventional OLS regression. Fixed effects models postulate that, by using one sibling virtually as a "control" for another one, it is possible to estimate the effects of current factors net of common family background and genetic predispositions (Guo and Van Wey 1999). Results show that, despite the inclusion of control variables antedating the measure of health insurance coverage, public insurance has in the conventional regression a strong negative association with health. However, as hypothesized, this negative relationship declines in magnitude and becomes non significant in the fixed effects regression with sibling clusters. Conversely, the effects of years uninsured, which were non significant in the OLS regression, increase in magnitude and become highly significant in the fixed effects regression. Private insurance had no significant effect on health beyond that of adult SES in either model. These results suggest that being uninsured has a strong negative impact on health, while public and private insurance may have no impact beyond that of adult SES. However, this relationship can only be observed with methods that specifically address the selection bias in health insurance allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2003
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
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