PO SC 4420 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Party System, Job Performance, Social Inequality
25 Sep 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Hopkins and Sides
Chapter 1- What we know and do not know about our polarized politics
• Based on both qualitative and quantitative evidence, the roots of our current
polarization go back almost 40 years to the mid-1970s.
• The timing is much more consistent with explanations based on large historical trends
such as the post-Civil Rights realignment of southern politics and increased levels of
economic and social inequality.
• The evidence points to a major partisan asymmetry in polarization.
i) the movement of the Republican Party to the right accounts for most of the
divergence between the two parties.
• Any movement to the left by the Democrats can be accounted for by a decline in
white representatives from the South and an increase in African-American and Latino
representation.
• The increase in party polarization has also reduced the dimensionality of political
conflict.
i) Many issues that were once distinct from the party conflict dimension have
been absorbed into it.
• there is a consensus that voters are much better sorted within the party system.
Conservative voters are much more likely to identify as Republicans and liberals as
Democrats than two generations ago.
• Voters are primarily changing their issue positions to match the partisanship rather
than switching to the party that reflects their stances on issues.**
• Features of our electoral system such as political gerrymandering and partisan
primaries are not likely to be important causes of polarization.
• Polarization in Congress derives from both sincere ideological differences about
policy means and ends and strategic behavior to exploit those differences to win
elections.
i) The combination of high ideological stakes and intense competition for party
control of the national government has all but eliminated the incentives for
significant bipartisan cooperation on important national problems.
Chapter 10- The two key factors behind our polarized politics
• The political parties in Congress are deeply polarized1 as are also voters.
• Evaluation of presidential job performance is increasingly driven by party
identification.
• The percentage of voters choosing to identify with a party is increasing, and those
who identify with a party are consistently voting for the candidates of their party.
• Two factors have produced our polarized politics.**
i) First, changing social conditions and government actions have combined to
prompt fundamental disagreements about what and how much government
should do.
ii) Second, a long-term realignment brought this debate into sharp focus.
▪ In short, today’s polarization is the product of today’s issues and yesterday’s
political realignment.
• Liberals have become steadily more supportive of programs to help people.
