Academic literature on the topic 'Political polarization'

Using data from the American National Election Studies from 1968 to 2016, I explore the historical relationship between voter income, other demographic factors, and political polarization. I find that while having a higher income and a better education generally correlates with increased Republican political preference, though the relationship between higher income and increased Republican preference does not hold in lower income groups. Race is by far the most significant indicator of political preference, with whites and blacks on opposite ends of the political spectrum, and Hispanics as well as other races somewhere in between the two. In addition, I analyze the data from 20th century elections separately from 21st century elections and discover key differences in how each factor influences political preference.

On July 1, 1971, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified which prohibited states from denying citizens who had attained the age of eighteen the right to vote. Having passed 96-0 in the Senate and 401-19 in the House of Representatives, the amendment was widely considered a bipartisan effort with minimal resistance from within the two major political parties. This paper seeks to determine how this largely politically unifying amendment process became so politicized since its passage, including an analysis and comparison of factions who fought against initial passage with those who seek to suppress the youth vote. A historical analysis will look deeper into how those battles were won with the ultimate passage of the amendment. Using a mixed methodology approach including a quantitative analysis of polling data and a qualitative analysis of partisan methods to influence youth voter turnout, the paper shows a trend towards increased politicization that has peaked in today's political landscape. Three specific elections serve as case studies and a lens through which to analyze changes in the law, changes in campaign strategies, changes in rhetoric, and changes in salient issues. Youth engagement is particularly valuable to political leaders and to the nation. In American politics, youth voter turnout has become less of a normative good--in many cases it has been deeply politicized. There is a strong association between specific methods taken by political parties and interest groups and their efforts to mobilize or disincentive youth voter turnout.<br>Master of Arts<br>A Constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of the House of Representatives and two-thirds of the Senate to propose it and then must be ratified by three-fourths of the states. This process is difficult to accomplish and one that requires bipartisanship in Congress and must have broad support throughout the nation. Outside of the original Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, only seventeen amendments have been ratified since the inception of the Constitution. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment is an important milestone in the history of the United States as it ultimately lowered the voting age to 18 throughout the country. The amendment passed 96-0 in the Senate and 401-19 in the House of Representatives and was passed by the necessary number of states in less than four months. It marked the quickest ratification timeline of any amendment in the history of the United States. The amendment was a largely bipartisan effort with minimal resistance from within the two major political parties. This paper seeks to determine how this largely politically unifying amendment process has become so politicized since its passage. The paper shows a trend towards increased politicization that has peaked in today's political landscape. Three specific elections serve as case studies and a lens through which to analyze changes in attitudes about young voters. As a high school teacher who values the importance of youth engagement and voting, I provide some strategies that I believe will help overcome the level of polarization and voter suppression laws that have recently been enacted. Both of the two major political parties have an incentive to engage young voters and encourage them to show up for their side.

21st century political science has seen a growing field of research focused around the idea of political polarization. While authors like Fiorina and Abramowitz have been debating the existence of such polarization, the literature has come to understand that perhaps the root of the issue lies in differing definitions. The never-ending quest for clarity has produced a variety of measures of polarization and, subsequently, theories on why 21st century Americans may be experiencing such polarization. Unsurprisingly, as political science questions what may be causing various trends in 21st century voter behaviors and attitudes, the Internet is often mentioned. With the Internet being a clearly powerful tool for political mobilization, whether or not it is divisive among the public could have politically consequential implications. Because of its interactive nature, it is difficult to evaluate a person's social media use. This study uses a unique survey to evaluate a respondent's general social media and internet use, as well as measures of political polarization. Using this information, along with analysis of the 2016 ANES, I am able to make associations of various levels of social media activity and political polarization. Using means comparison and multivariate regression, I am able to evaluate social media use controlling for effects of age and other confounding variables and how it relates to measures of political polarization. The survey results ultimately provide some evidence for the claim that increasing social media use is associated with higher levels of political polarization. Additionally, in an OLS regression model testing the effects of different sources of political news, increases in internet use are highly correlated with an increase in political polarization.<br>Master of Arts<br>Since the 2016 US Presidential election, there have been increasing concerns over how divided the country is getting. Part of the reason why people feel so polarized is likely being exaggerated by social media and breaking news headlines. While Americans may be closer on the issues than they care to believe, the perception of a divided country may be just as consequential. It is difficult to say to what degree our country is truly polarized, if at all. What we can be sure of is that political activists are able to be heard much louder given the platform of the internet. What motivates people to spend hours of their day scrolling through platforms like Facebook is an individual preference, but it is clear that these companies can directly profit from click-bait news headlines. In order to explore the degree to which different groups are polarized in America, I used an online survey asking respondents about their internet use and political leanings. Using this information, I am able to see what associations might exist between things such as amount of time spent on social media per day and how committed one is to their ideology. These measures themselves are widely debated in political science, so the study also aims to examine in what ways different measures of polarization may be used effectively. The results of the study do find some evidence that increased social media use is correlated with an increase in political polarization. However, other measures of political activity on the internet are seen to be highly correlated with an increase in political polarization.

Is the American electorate ideologically polarized as its representatives are polarized in Congress? How ordinary citizens have responded to growing elite polarization? The goal of this dissertation project is to answer these two questions. I conceptualize polarization here as having multi-dimensional characteristics and distinguish between polarization as a state and polarization as a process. Based on the conceptualization of polarization, I argue here that most existing literature has not only focused on polarization as a presence, but the empirical strategies adopted by previous research are more appropriate for assessing the existence rather than gradual polarization as a process. I assume that the degree of ideological polarization among the mass public would not be dramatic, thus scholars are more likely to be divided regarding the existence of popular polarization due to the less apparent changes in public opinion distribution. Therefore, I propose here using relative distribution method to evaluate a level of opinion polarization developed in the other field of social science. Using the alternative method, we can assess how a comparison cohort of a recent period is more or less polarized compared to a reference cohort of a previous period. I first apply the relative distribution method to congressional roll-call data (DW-NOMINATE) to demonstrate the distributional comparison analysis on quantile bases. Then I analyze the cumulative American National Election Study (ANES) 1948-2008 survey to assess the relative degree of mass ideological polarization. As I analyze ideological preference of individuals, I construct the two ideological measures based on a factor analysis, rather than using a combined single indicator. In addition to the analysis of mass opinion polarization as a whole, this dissertation also examines some political consequences of ideological polarization both at elite and mass levels focusing on mass political awareness and engagement. In particular, I also test if heterogeneous effects of polarized political environment exist on citizens conditional on their existing levels of political resources such as political knowledge or formal education. Just as many detailed characteristics of distribution might be untapped by summary measures (e.g., mean), behavior of extremists might not be explained properly by the conventional regression analysis based on conditional mean effect. While the ordinary regression analysis focuses on the representative characteristics of a majority in the sample, in polarization analysis we are more often interested in the behavior of extremists placed far from the mean. So I adopt a qunatile regression to account for potentially differential responses of the mass public to polarized politics depending on their positions in the distribution of a dependent variable. Empirical evidence suggests that polarizing political environment has brought about many significant changes in mass political attitudes and behavior. I demonstrate that the distributional center of measures of political ideology have progressively declined in later periods, though the opinion distribution of the later periods do not dramatically exhibit a text-book style polarized distribution (e.g., bimodal distribution). In addition, I find that the majority of mass public has responded to the changing political environment by becoming politically more aware. Therefore, the overall findings of this project indicate that the electoral link between the elite and the masses became either transformed or is transforming rather than being broken as the mass public assimilate the polarized politics.

This study examines the relationship between Islam and political culture in Pakistan in the four decades following its naissance. It assesses the validity of the argument that a polarity has emerged in the Pakistani political culture, consisting of Islamism and Islamic modernism. In the case of Pakistan, Islamism refers to the use of the primary sources of Islam law, the Qur'an, hadith, and sunnah, in crafting both policy and political institutions. Islamic modernism refers to the systematized use of these primary sources as well as other (external) sources, adjusted for contemporary circumstances. These ideologies, as defined here, are gleaned from the discourse of a Pakistani ideologues, Sayyid Abu'l A 'la Mawdudi and Fazlur Rahman. It examines the thought of Mawdudi and Rahman as the discursive backdrop to the polarity of political culture. It then provides analysis of three regimes which exacerbate this polarity. They include the Islamic modernist regime of Ayub Khan, from 1958 to 1969, the quasi-Islamist regime of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, from 1971 to 1977, and finally the Islamist regime of General Zia ul-Haq, from 1977 to 1988.

Democracy is defined by the element of competition. Elite party competition has become one of the most discussed contemporary developments in the United States. Elected representatives from the main parties have become internally homogeneous, deepening the divide of ideologies between one another. This thesis seeks to establish the relationship between mass partisan polarization and the level of trust in political institutions across the United States. What happens when the public trusts the Elites more than Congress? Elite polarization has divided the masses so deeply in the U.S by electing representatives from the two major parties whom carry ideologies so distinct from another that the public begin change their ways of forming opinions. This thesis acknowledges that there is high elite and mass political polarization in the U.S., which is attributed to the heterogeneity in ideologies across the three main political parties (Democrats, Republicans and Independents) and intra-party homogeneity. The elite partisan theoretical framework expounds the relationship such that the public tends to hold a low level of trust towards the U.S. congress because majority of voters’ partisan motivated decision making is influenced by political endorsements. The implication is that the public is more likely to hold a considerable level of trust towards their political parties as opposed to the U.S. congress.