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How Polarization Begets Polarization: Ideological Extremism in the US Congress

Online ISBN:
9780197745267
Print ISBN:
9780197745229
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

How Polarization Begets Polarization: Ideological Extremism in the US Congress

Samuel Merrill III,
Samuel Merrill III
Professor Emeritus, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Wilkes University
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Bernard Grofman,
Bernard Grofman
Distinguished Research Professor, University of California Irvine
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Thomas L. Brunell
Thomas L. Brunell
Professor of Political Science, University of Texas at Dallas
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Published online:
18 January 2024
Published in print:
29 November 2023
Online ISBN:
9780197745267
Print ISBN:
9780197745229
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Extreme polarization in American politics—and especially in the US Congress—is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book connects polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-intensifying feedback loop. The loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on their Congressional members and district candidates, and maintained by the voters in each Congressional district who must choose between the alternatives offered. These alternatives are today just as extreme in competitive districts as in lopsided ones. Tight national party discipline produces party delegations in Congress that are each ideologically narrowly distributed but are widely separated from one another. As district constituencies become more polarized, with each side egged on by activists, parties are further motivated to move past a threshold and appeal to their respective bases rather than to voters in the political center. Parties with clearly differentiated platforms—once thought to be a desirable goal—have indeed become a reality, but these parties are now feuding camps. What resolution might there be? Could a new reform effort eventually emerge from the current altercation, just as the Progressive Era slowly emerged from the Gilded Age? Could an asymmetry develop in the partisan constraints, which would lead to ascendancy of the center? Or might a new and overriding issue generate a cross-cutting dimension that could open the door to a new politics? Only the future will tell.

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