Political Polarization

Recent scholarly work demonstrates divisions among scholars on the causes and consequences of political polarization (Abramowitz, 2017; Levendusky and Malhotra 2016; Kernell 2016; Brunell, Grofman, and Merrill 2016). However, the polarization literature highlights an ongoing debate as to whether the mass public is polarized as political elites are (Abramowitz and Saunders 2008; Fiorina, Abrams and Pope 2004). The reality is that the mass public, taken as a whole, is not polarized contrary to perceptions (Ahler 2014). For it is the constraints American political system the promote polarization which is largely a function of elections, party competition, and candidate choices (Heatherington 2001; Fiorina, 2008). in the Yet, when segmenting

However, other scholars have a narrower definition of polarization, partisan polarization. Partisan polarization is the ideological homogeneity of political parties (greater clustering around the party mean) and growing distinction between the ideological positions of the Democratic and Republican Party (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006; Theriault 2008). This definition is primarily the definition used in recent scholarly work (Levendusky and Malhortra 2016; Baker 2016). Lee (2015), evaluating polarization affect governance, demonstrates that political polarization does not have to include polarization of parties and that the spatial definition often used is simply a division of two groups. Yet, polarization occurs not only on ideology or partisanship, but is can also be related to social and cultural preferences (Hetherington 2001). One aspect to consider is that social and culture polarization may not be occurring as much as political parties make it out to be, for perceptions of social and cultural polarization might occur as party parties put social-culture issues in their platforms (Claaseen

This scale lies on a single, left-right dimension that has a bimodal distribution, whereby the center of the dimension is moderates and to the left and right lay the extreme ideological poles (Fiorina and Abrams 2008). Polarization, therefore, is determined by the spread (distance from the mean) and overlap of Democrat and Republican ideological positions (Fiorina 2008). However, Carnes and D’Amico (2015), argues that while this conceptualizes is most commonly used, it is too simplistic because it inadequately captures populist and libertarian ideologies. They go on as argue for evaluating values and principles, which aggregate into the overall conceptualization of ideology, which is the primary focus of political