Abstract
Political elites of the United States are deeply polarized. Polarization of the Democratic and Republican Parties is higher than at any time since the end of the Civil War. This essay describes how the modern polarization trend emerged and its implications for mass political behavior and public policy outcomes. We contend that contemporary political polarization must be understood in terms of both the ideological divergence of the parties and the expansion of the liberal–conservative dimension of conflict to a wider set of social and cultural conflicts in American society. We close with the speculation that the Republican Party has become the more fractured of the parties along the liberal–conservative dimension at both the elite and mass level.
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Notes
See, for instance, Chris Matthew’s column, “What Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill Could Teach Washington Today,” Washington Post, January 18, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/17/AR2011011703299.html, accessed on June 5, 2014.
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Of course, a similar ideological divide could appear in the Democratic Party between the left and center, most likely over economic issues like income inequality and financial regulation. However, at present there is no evidence from NOMINATE of such a divide among congressional Democrats.
Common Space scores allow for comparisons between the chambers as well as across time by using two sets of overlapping cohorts: legislators who have served in both the House and Senate to bridge across the chambers as well as legislators who have served in multiple Congresses to bridge across time. This allows us to include density plots for the parties in both the House and the Senate as well as compare the position of a former legislator like Senator Robert Dole (R-KS) with the positions of MCs in the 113th Congress.
If the most conservative group of congressional Republicans were breaking from other Republicans on new issue dimensions, we would expect that their fit to the existing spatial model would be poorer. However, the correlation between first-dimension DW-NOMINATE Common Space score and Geometric Mean Probability (a measure of fit of legislators’ observed choices to the spatial model) is r=0.20 among House Republicans and r=0.37 among Senate Republicans in the 112th Congress and r=0.05 among House Republicans and r=0.06 among Senate Republicans in the 113th Congress. Hence, there is at most a weak relationship between ideological extremity and spatial fit among Republican MCs in the last two Congresses, and to the extent a relationship does exist, it is positive (meaning more conservative legislators are a better fit to the model).
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, January 2013 Political Survey, available for download at: http://www.people-press.org/2013/01/13/january-2013-political-survey/, accessed on June 5, 2014.
See also Gary C. Jacobson, “The President, the Tea Party, and Voting Behavior in 2010: Insights from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.” Paper presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Seattle, WA.
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Hare, C., Poole, K. The Polarization of Contemporary American Politics. Polity 46, 411–429 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.10