Political Polarization and Issues: A New Perspective
This chapter discusses how policy issue substance matters for studying political preferences. Fully exploring how policy issue substance matters for studying political polarization in Congress, the chapter begins by introducing a new large data set that comprises the estimated induced preferences of members of the House of Representatives and U.S. senators by policy issue area over a very long time horizon: 1877 to 2010. It also explores the literature on elite polarization in Congress by policy issue area and studies polarization across a 124-year period (1877 to 2010) by the policy issue areas defined as “tier 1.” The chapter shows that issue content is extremely important for understanding political polarization and that many of the empirical facts about polarization depend on not disaggregating policy by issue areas.