Through the course of this research paper we will evaluate the political polarization within the United States to answer a few critical questions: 1) are we currently at a heightened level of political polarization within the country? and 2) if there is political polarization, what are the driving factors? Answering these two critical questions will allow us a better understanding of our democratic system, and what it has naturally grown to become.
What is political polarization? Political polarization is simply a measured overlap between the two parties. A high level of political polarization means that Republicans agree with the Republican platform and that Democrats agree with the Democratic platform. These platforms obviously change overtime, and lines on policy may overlap between the two political parties, which is how we end up with a compromise or bipartisan resolve. But as of recent it seems that both the Democratic and Republican platforms have sharpened their views and policy plans, which in return leaves us with increased levels of polarization. Political polarization is a natural and regular occurring phenomenon that happens across the world. Even though mainstream media would make you believe that we have never had polarization until the 2016 election.
Since the run up to the 2016 US presidential elections, journalist have frequently spoke of cultural wars between the the political liberals and conservatives. The whole political climate today seems to be increasingly more turbulent, as we turn on the news it seems like all we see is our elected officials arguing on two opposite sides of the divide, with absolutely no chance of compromise or bipartisan resolve. This has effected both the house and senate from carrying out their appointed jobs, of serving the American people through legislation. This has been the year of Donald Trump in the executive office. The year Republican primary voters overwhelmingly supported and applauded nonconventional policy proposals to “build the wall” and ban Muslims from entering the country. It has also been on of the first years in which the Democrats openly endorsed self proclaimed socialists, like Democratic senator Bernie Sanders (VA). The year in which many Democrats favor higher top tax rates, and $15 minimum wages.
We look at the news and social media live streams , and all we see is protest from both sides of the spectrum, even at times turning violent .The problem with party polarization is that the American political system typically requires bipartisan coalitions in order to get big things done, but during periods of intense political polarization, it is almost impossible for those coalitions to form. Is this societal divide just a part of our democracy, or will it be the year in which leads us to an extreme polarized society, in which we believe those who don’t adhere to our political beliefs are attempting to destroy the country, and everything it stands for.
This brings up our first question: are we truly at a heightened level of political polarization within the country? Or, have we seen this before. Our country has seen many great political divides within its history; in the 19050’s and 60’s civil rights had split the country in half. In 1980, we elected an actor as president, which was considered extremely controversial by the opposite side of the political divide. On top of all of this, commentators and the general public were biting their nails at the prospect of him bringing us to to a nuclear holocaust with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In the 1860’s, the two opposing political factions even went to war with each other, during the Civil War. By looking at the data, I like many others believe that the currant state of political polarization within American politics, is overwhelmingly overstated. The constant fear mongering of the news and social media has made us believe that we are currently going through a political phenomenon, bringing our country on the brink of another Civil War. But in reality, political polarization is just the way in which democracy functions. A healthy democracy, needs different ideologies on each side of the divide to represent the voters.
Pew Research Center published a survey in 2014, titled: “Political Polarization in the American Public,” they attempted to draw an overly broad circle around the current political discourse and polarization within the country. As shown in Table #1, they attempted to shown political polarization within the party its self, but not within the actual American public.
Table #1 (PEW Research)
The title: “Political Polarization in the American Public,” is an inaccurate characterization of the findings. In common parlance polarization connotes a movement away from the center toward both extremes. Which has not happened in the United States. If one thinks about polarization in partisan terms, one would expect to see an increase in the proportions of Democrats and Republicans and a decrease in the proportion of independent voters.
But the American National Election Studies report that the distribution of American partisanship has been constant since the reelection of Ronald Reagan in 1984. Gallup had the proportion of independents at an all-time high in 2013.If one thinks about polarization in ideological terms, one would expect to see a decline in moderates and an increase in liberals and conservatives. But, the General Social Survey reports that the distribution of ideology in the United State has been stable since the early 1970s. With occasional small exceptions, “moderate” remains the modal category today just as it was in the days of Jimmy Carter.
If we think about polarization in terms of positions on specific policy issues, we would expect to see a decline in the center and a lumping up of people on the extreme left or right. We do not have long time series of attitudes toward particular policy issues since they rise and fall on the national agenda, but on most issues, attitudes continue to cluster in the middle rather than lump up on the extremes (liberals/conservative). In closing, we can argue about the size of the political center in the United States since the answer depends on various ways of measuring it, but whichever measure we choose, the conclusion is the same: the country as a whole is no more polarized than it was a generation ago, but there is polarization with in the parties themselves. Each party’s platform has sharpened to adjust to these changes. That’s part of the reason in which we see President Trump openly discuss immigration policy more frequent or, why we see democrats openly speak about switching to the Single Payer health insurance system. In the past these topics my have been considered somewhat of a political taboo, have only just became the norm. For candidate to target certain groups, or for the advocating of policies that may be regarded as contrary to capitalism.
Weather academics or the common citizen believe that political polarization is at an all time high, one thing for sure is that we talk about it more now then ever before. The media it’s self has emerged to be much like the picture that it has created of society; polarized. Modern day media outlets have also been divided by political lines, with Fox New and Breitbart News on the conservative/Republican side of the aisle, and CNN News and MNBC News (to just name a few) on the liberal/Democratic side of the aisle. Since freedom of press is legally protected within our country, many of these news outlets have learned that it is more beneficial in regard to views, by slightly tilting towards one of the parties. This is because every news event has a political side to it. If they’re is a mass shooting within the country, we automatically start talking about gun policy and the 2nd Amendment and turn to the media to see what our elected representatives are doing about it.
Relatedly, many political commentators diagnose a sharp and increasing partisan divide that splits the U.S. electorate. For example, the Economist writes that “the 50-50 nation appears to be made up of two big, separate voting blocks, with only a small number of swing voters in the middle”, and that “America is more bitterly divided than it has been for a generation”. In contrast, Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope (2004) argue that even though partisans may be more partisan, there is a large center of voters who are largely ambivalent or indifferent and that “there is little evidence that Americans’ ideological or policy positions are more polarized today then they were two or three decades ago, although their choices often seem to be.”. To accurately measure polarization within the current political process, we mustn’t worry about the voters who identify with one of the parties on the political divide, but instead those centrists in the middle of both political parties. If more of the centrists joined ether side, then we know theirs a problem. But, this is not the case at the current time.
Since they first formed at the end of the eighteenth century, the major American parties have basically always been polarized over some set of policy issues. The most famous and tragic example is, of course, slavery. But battles over issues like the relative power of the national and state governments (embodied in the early debates about a national bank), the Gold Standard, the New Deal, and civil rights resulted in deep divisions between the nation’s political parties. Party polarization is not new. In fact, a primary function of political parties is to o organize political conflict, providing some clear policy separation between the parties virtually inevitable. Each party need the other to fulfill our democratic criteria.
To the extent that political polarization is really rising, what is the cause? An early, influential example of this argument is the book Republic.com by Cass Sunstein (2001). Sunstein argues that the Internet is creating “echo chambers,” where partisans will hear their own opinions, biases and prejudices endlessly reinforced. He writes: “Our communications market is rapidly moving” toward a situation where “people restrict themselves to their own points of view—liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; Neo-Nazis, Neo-Nazis” (Sunstein, pg. 5-6). This increases polarization and limits the “unplanned, unanticipated encounters [that are] central to democracy itself” (Sunstein.pg. 9).
The media in all of it’s forms (televised news outlets, social media outlets, internet blogs,..etc) have all played a significantly noted role in the polarization of American politics. Back in the 1980’s (and before), the media was a mostly neutral source of information. Today it has gone through quite the evolution, drawing their opinions around party lines. Networks like Fox News almost never call out the republican party, or it’s supporters. Same goes for liberal MSNBC, who is predominantly used as a microphone for the democratic party, and other liberals. This whole fiasco of the media networks taking sides in the 2016 election became so obvious, that politicians from both sides of the political divide called them out as “fake news”, at phrase that is regularly used by president Trump.
Markus Prior, the writer of “Media and Political Polarization” put together three different surveys from Nielsen, PEW, and KN asking television news network viewers how long they they watch their favorite news channel, and if they every overlap into different channels, and if so, roughly how long (Table #2). Each survey has slightly different results regarding scale. But, in general he found that “audience overlap, the share of viewers of one channel who also watch another, provides some insight into selective exposure. Minimal overlap between audiences for conservative and liberal channels would correspond to strong selective exposure.” (Prior, pg.113). Though there are general errors in which he ran into with consolidating these survey’s (sampling, measurement, coverage and non-response), he managed to draw a linear relationship between people who watch a lot of daily news, and their far right/left political affiliations (Table #2). This further proves that the media is an outlining cause of political polarization within American politics and society.
Table #2 (Prior, pg.113)
Another predominant driving factor of political polarization within the United States in the rise of populism. Populism within it’s essence, is the public/citizen’s participation in the government, or mobilization of citizens to change the current political structuring. This includes participation in free and fair elections, democratic institution, etc… Populism is a fundamental part of the American democratic process and identity. Voters protected under the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights practice populism by voting and mobilizing for their representative to “shake up” the current political structure. This form of voter mobilization also effects public institutions, since these representatives can ether appoint a new head of the institutions, or vote to adjust federally provided funding. Far right populism is one of the main reasons that President Donald J. Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Many Republican affiliated citizens felt alienated by their current political representatives, and felt that Trump who promised to revolutionize the political land scape (drain the swamp, tough on immigration et…), was more aliened with their own political beliefs. His supporters grew, and mobilized around him to win the election.
Populism seems great for the political process at first glance, but nevertheless it is a huge contributor to political polarization within our political system. Populism and political polarization have an entrenched relationship across history, and the around the world. Depending on the level of populism, and the type of call of action/mobilize for government change, you could be looking at groups of people going to the poles at election day (Trump 2016), or you could be looking at a political meltdown, violent protests (also Trump 2016), and even Civil War.
When a group of citizens mobilizes around a candidate /movement to enact change within the government, they tend to attract like minded people from the same side of the political aisle. The issue with this is that, populism usually attracts groups of people that feel alienated by the government. Within or democratic process, the alienated group has every right to mobilize and enact change, as long as it is within the bases of the law. But this rarely happens due to pushback from the elites, and from the government itself. As the alienated group grows in size and power, depending on how institutionalized the said countries is, they will ether have a voice within the government, or they may resort to violence. Through out the Arab Spring, we saw groups of alienated people, resort to violence because their governments failed to hear them out and negotiate them a fair say within the government. This is a very relevant example of widespread populism, on an international scale. For populist movements to be considered successful
Many can argue the political atmosphere within the United States has recently become more polarized, within the Trump Era of politics. This is largely due to how president Trump got to power, he road on a populist wave. During Trump’s whole presidential campaign, he appeled to those within the Republican platform who felt that their current representative were not truly representing their beliefs. He ran his campaign by playing off of the identity politics of many low income Americans living in rural areas who felt that politicians have only taken advantage of the. Since Trump and his staff knew that there were such hard feelings against politicians within the country, he ran his campaign and message predominately off of the fact that he has never been a politician but a “self” made businesses man.
Trumps campaign may have slight driven the rise of polarization within the country because he appealed to parts of the Republican party that did not have such a loud voice at the time. This group of alienated far-right conservatives are now louder then before, and since they are on the far-right side of the political aisle, they are and will be met with opposition on the far left side of the political aisle. This type of scenario forces moderates on both sides of the political spectrum to have to side with those who fall within their party’s umbrella. Thus, the political party will eventually have to sharpen their policy format to meet the beliefs of its’ supporters. This type of scenario causes political polarization with in both parties, but still hasn’t really effected independents (centrists).
In conclusion, political polarization can be a very real and relevant thing. In this day of age, the media and populism can both be strong driving factors. The relevance of polarization in modern day America can also highly depend on you define it. Many academics and institutions seem to define is as being a phenomenon across the whole political spectrum (including centrists joining the right/left) The media and less credible sources seem to define it in whatever way supports their political message, even if they are only talking about internal polarization (only inside party lines), they seem to paint the whole country as being polarized. We must bear in mind, that internal movement within party lines is a very normal occurrence with in a democratic system. The only thing that seems to always stay the same within our current political system, is voters party identification itself. There is long family histories of Republican and Democratic voters across the country, even if the individual doesn’t necessarily agree with the whole parties platform.
Originally published 15.10.2019