![]() ![]() ![]() As the constituencies are polarized across certain issue areas, politicians are quick to capitalize on these ideological divisions to gain congressional seats. Ideological disagreements could be materialist/post-materialist as Inglehart theoriezed alternatively disagreements could be based on geographically preferential policies (Inglehart 1980 Hopkins 2018). To put it simply, people disagree on how political issues should be resolved and, in a stable bipartisan democracy like the United States, they vote for one or the other party. Ideological disagreement is the most direct cause of short-run electoral polarization. ![]() Section 1: Ideological Disagreement: Where Polarization Starts Together, by expanding the range of polarizing issue areas, this vicious cycle of electoral polarization continues to transform centrist, non-opinionated voters into engaged and polarized participants of the centrifugal American democracy. Section 1 will identify how ideological disagreement among the general public has created electoral polarization in the short run, dividing people into partisan camps Section 2 will attribute the growing inter-party animus to reinforced and inherited ideological disagreement, arguing that the animus itself is strong enough to create electoral polarization, which is now disconnected from policy divisions Section 3 will investigate various concepts of sorting, which have created ideologically homogeneous parties and opened up ideological disagreements in new issue areas within a relatively centrist public. As the general public is polarized at different degrees by different political issues, these existing issues would generate fierce partisan hostility and, in the long run, create newly controversial issues for an enlarged “engaged public” to polarize on via bipartisan sorting. In three sections, the essay argues that electoral polarization in the United States is created and reinforced by three interacting phenomena: ideological disagreement, inter-party animus, and the alignment of ideology with partisanship, i.e. Electoral polarization, therefore, is the cumulative result of the ever enlarging size of the “engaged public” across a wide range of issue areas.Īcademic evidence has shown that neither inter-party animus nor ideological disagreement alone can sufficiently explain electoral polarization. Throughout recent history, it is evident that some issues, such as gay rights and the Black Lives Matter movement, have been gaining public attention and transforming themselves from “fringe issues” in Fiorina’s account to issues resting at the center of polarization in Abromowitz’s account. Neither theory, however, addresses in depth the dynamic nature of the “engaged public.” In fact, I consider that the engaged public could be large, contra Fiorina, on certain political issues and it could be small, contra Abramowitz, on some other issues. Fiorina, believing that the polarized politicians do not represent the centrist, policy-voting mass public, attributed polarization to a small quantity of “engaged public,” whose extreme ideologies drive the two parties away from each other (Fiorina & Abram 2008) Abramowitz, on the other hand, claimed that most Americans are politically engaged and have been drifting away from the political center, causing politicians to polarize (Abramowitz & Saunders 2008). In 2008, scholars had a debate on what, if anything, constituted the main cause of electoral polarization. Obtaining bipartisan consensus in Congress is becoming increasingly difficult, and the general public, exhibiting stronger interests in voting, is also being polarized across the party lines. It is hardly an understatement that American politics is becoming more polarized than it has ever been. ![]() Q: Is electoral polarisation a matter of inter-party animus rather than ideological disagreement? (2017) ![]()
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