Polarization

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nolan McCarty
Keyword(s):  
American Politics ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
System P ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Legislative Districts

The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump invoked a time for reflection about the state of American politics and its deep ideological, cultural, racial, regional, and economic divisions. But one aspect that the contemporary discussions often miss is that these fissures have been opening over several decades and are deeply rooted in the structure of American politics and society. Nolan McCarty's Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know® is an accessible introduction to polarization in America. McCarty takes readers through what scholars know and don't know about the origins, development, and implications of our rising political conflicts, delving into social, economic, and geographic determinants of polarization in the United States. While the current political climate makes it clear that extreme views are becoming more popular, McCarty also argues that, contrary to popular belief, the 2016 election was a natural outgrowth of 40 years of polarized politics, instead of a significant break with the past. He explains the factors that have created this state of affairs, including gerrymandered legislative districts, partisan primary nomination systems, and our private campaign finance system. He also considers the potential of major reforms such as instating proportional representation or single-transferable voting to remedy extreme polarization. A concise overview of a complex and crucial topic in US politics, this book is for anyone wanting to understand how to repair the cracks in our system.

scholarly journals Reflections on the Challenges of Writing a (Pre-)History of the “Polarized” Present

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-408
Author(s):  
Thomas Zimmer
Keyword(s):  
American Politics ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Severe Problem ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

Polarization is everywhere. It is, according to the Pew Research Center, “a defining feature of American politics today.” Elected officials, journalists, and political pundits seem to agree that it is a severe problem in urgent need of fixing, maybe even the root of all evil that plagues the United States, from dysfunction in Congress to the decay of social and cultural norms. Many historians, too, have embraced the concept of polarization for its explanatory power: It has emerged as the closest thing to a master narrative for recent American history. In this interpretation, the “liberal consensus” that had dominated mid-twentieth-century American politics and intellectual life—the widely shared acceptance of New Deal philosophy and broad agreement on the desirable contours of society and the pursuit of certain kinds of public good—gave way after the 1960s to an age of heightened tension, dividing Americans into two camps that since then have regarded each other with deepening distrust. Yet too few historians have reflected on the limits and potential pitfalls of using polarization as a governing historical paradigm. It is high time, therefore, to pause to consider the larger implications of approaching the past through the prism of polarization.

Almost “Nothing New Under the Sun”: American politics and the election of Donald Trump

Leadership ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
George R Goethals
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Vote ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Electoral Vote ◽  
The Social ◽  
Large Factor ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
Implicit And Explicit

Donald Trump’s surprising 2016 election as President of the United States was unusual both in the set of states he won and in clearly winning the electoral vote while decisively losing the popular vote. His victory is somewhat less surprising given recent Republican domination of American politics, a context which provides Trump both leadership opportunities and constraints. A large factor in Trump’s rise is the leader–follower dynamics of crowds, seen throughout time, which enabled him to win an uncritical and devoted following. An important part of that dynamic was Trump’s validation of the social identity of the white working class in the United States, especially in comparison to Hillary Clinton’s both implicit and explicit denigration of that base of Trump support. Trump’s identity story for his base is unusually exclusive, highlighted by ingroup vs. outgroup hostility. His appeal is compared to inclusive identity stories successfully related by other US presidents, which suggest how future leaders might effectively touch “the better angels of our nature.”

Reading the (identity politics) market: Articulating the forest past the trees post-Trump

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-422
Author(s):  
James J Brittain
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Profit Maximization ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Real Potential ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Economic Trends ◽  
President Elect ◽  
The Right

Prior to becoming the President-elect, Donald Trump long engaged in the practice of exploiting economic trends that displayed a potential for increased rates of profit maximization. Like those engaged in speculative investment, he looked for exploitable opportunities where a modest outlay could be directed toward a precise stream of the market with the sole intent of receiving an exacerbated rate of return compared to the allotment initially invested. Over the past decade, the United States has witnessed a unique political climate of a disorganized, yet growing, movement of frustrated citizens inarticulately moving to the Right. It could be argued that Trump saw a prospective market ripe for exploitation herein, which showed a very real potential for significant returns. Without a centralized focus or guide, these under-formed sociopolitical blocs traversing the country were thus read as a vulnerable venture. It was amidst this climate that a capitalist with a speculative eye looked at a prospective rising market that could provide one chance investor an impressive yield: the US Presidency. By adopting a unique performativity, Trump invested in 2015.

From Combahee resistance to the Confederate: Black feminist temporalities and white supremacy

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 518-535
Author(s):  
Tanya Ann Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
White Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
Combahee River Collective

In the weeks preceding the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, VA on 12 August 2017, HBO responded to criticism of Game of Thrones’ whiteness by announcing a new series from its producers called Confederate that imagined an alternative history in which the Confederacy became its own nation and slavery still existed. A few weeks later, Representative Maxine Waters’ refusal to listen to white male practices of diversion and condescension under the guise of flattery made national news when she interrupted Treasury Secretary Mnuchin's stalling to “reclaim my time.” In this paper, I examine these events as representative of the prevalent contention in the United States that the post-2016 election era is an era of crisis, but look outside the ruling temporality of crisis as it is framed through white supremacy. Reinterpreting this crisis through the lens of black feminist insurgencies against white supremacy demonstrates how the ruling temporalities of mainstream feminism are implicated in the election of 2016 and the events following. In returning to the year 1977 and aligning two feminist moments from that year, the Combahee River Collective Statement and the National Women’s Conference, I argue for a recalibration of feminist temporalities that will allow us, as Lisa Lowe argues, to recuperate the future in the tense of the past conditional, to see “what could have been” as that which may yet be.

Ibsen, Theatre, and the Ideology of Modernism

2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toril Moi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Generation ◽  
The World ◽  
State Of Affairs

Over the past generation, literary critics and theatre scholars in the United States have not been overly interested in Ibsen, widely considered a fuddy-duddy old realist who never truly became modern. The fact that his plays are still performed all over the world has had little effect on scholarly opinion. This is a deplorable state of affairs, for Ibsen is a major writer of modernity on a par with Baudelaire, and Flaubert. He is also unique among nineteenth-century writers for his clear-eyed and profound analysis of the relationships between women and men in modernity.

Politics: American and Non-American

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (03) ◽  
pp. 545-548
Author(s):  
Suzanne Berger
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
American Politics ◽  
American Political Science Review ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
Foreign Governments

Tocqueville, considering how Americans compare their nation with others, observed that general ideas about politics testify to the weakness of human intelligence. “The Deity does not regard the human race collectively.… Such is, however, not the case with man. … Having superficially considered a certain number of objects, and remarked their resemblance, he assigns to them a common name, sets them apart, and proceeds onwards.”As it is for human beings, so, too, for political scientists. And of the generalizations which have helped Americans and American political scientists organize the confusing mass of differences and similarities between this country and others, none has been more important and enduring than the notion of the uniqueness of the American political community. This conception is reflected in the split within the discipline between those who study the U.S. political system and those who study comparative politics, a field understood to encompass various foreign countries. The rubric that in theAmerican Political Science Reviewuntil the 1950s used to read “Foreign Governments and Politics” has been replaced by a subsection of the book reviews that is entitled “Comparative Politics.” But today as in the past, it is rare to find teaching or research in political science that truly integrates the analysis of American politics within a comparative framework.Why this should remain the case is difficult to understand, for over the past half-century there have been many shifts in the discipline and in the world that challenged the premises of research based on American exceptionalism. Already in the interwar period, significant work in political science was moving beyond configurative case studies of individual countries. C. J. Friedrich's importantConstitutional Government and Democracy(1937), indeed, included the United States in its examination of how well certain general political theories explained the experiences of major political systems. Whatever reservations one might have had about the methodologies of comparative research on which Friedrich relied, the broad influence of his work promised a new integration of American politics into an expanded field of comparative politics.

Political (Mis)behavior: Attention and Lacunae in the Study of Latino Politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Jones-Correa ◽  
Hajer Al-Faham ◽  
David Cortez
Keyword(s):  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Latino Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
2016 Election

The field of Latino politics has developed rapidly over the past decade, but some areas within the field have received more attention than others, with some topics remaining relatively overlooked. This article begins by reviewing three primary strands of the recent literature on Latino civic engagement, identity politics, and institutions. It then pivots off the 2016 election to highlight three additional lines of inquiry that are either understudied or where the findings in the literature remain conflicted: the effects of threat on Latino mobilization, the entry of new Latino voters into American politics, and Latino conservatism. Assessing the field, the article concludes by arguing for greater attention to understudied questions and against facile assumptions about Latinos in American politics.

scholarly journals Ratioing the President: An exploration of public engagement with Obama and Trump on Twitter

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. e0248880
Author(s):  
Joshua R. Minot ◽  
Michael V. Arnold ◽  
Thayer Alshaabi ◽  
Christopher M. Danforth ◽  
Peter Sheridan Dodds
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
The Past ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
Use Of Social Media

The past decade has witnessed a marked increase in the use of social media by politicians, most notably exemplified by the 45th President of the United States (POTUS), Donald Trump. On Twitter, POTUS messages consistently attract high levels of engagement as measured by likes, retweets, and replies. Here, we quantify the balance of these activities, also known as “ratios”, and study their dynamics as a proxy for collective political engagement in response to presidential communications. We find that raw activity counts increase during the period leading up to the 2016 election, accompanied by a regime change in the ratio of retweets-to-replies connected to the transition between campaigning and governing. For the Trump account, we find words related to fake news and the Mueller inquiry are more common in tweets with a high number of replies relative to retweets. Finally, we find that Barack Obama consistently received a higher retweet-to-reply ratio than Donald Trump. These results suggest Trump’s Twitter posts are more often controversial and subject to enduring engagement as a given news cycle unfolds.

The symbolic uses of platforms: The politics of platform governance in the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-230
Author(s):  
Philip M. Napoli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Congressional Hearings ◽  
The Past ◽  
Platform Governance ◽  
Policy Interventions ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
Actual Policy ◽  
Past Half

Unlike many other countries around the world, the United States has taken relatively little substantive action in the realm of platform governance, despite the United States being directly impacted by occurrences such as Russian interference in the 2016 election, domestic disinformation related to the 2020 election, the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal and the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation that has accompanied the Coronavirus pandemic. Yet the past four years have involved numerous Congressional hearings on various aspects of platform governance and a multitude of bills have been introduced addressing a similarly wide range of platform governance issues. With so many indicators of potential government action over the past half-decade, but so few actual policy interventions, platform governance appears to be a prime example of a policy-making context in which symbolic actions are taking precedence over substantive actions. This article illustrates this dynamic through an analysis of recent platform governance developments in the United States.

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