How Polarization Begets Polarization: Ideological Extremism in the US Congress

Extreme polarization in American politics--and especially in the U.S. Congress--is perhaps the most confounding political phenomenon of our time. This book binds together polarization in Congress and polarization in the electorate within an ever-expanding feedback loop. This loop is powered by the discipline exerted by the respective political parties on their Congressional members and district candidates and endorsed by the voters in each Congressional district who must choose between the alternatives offered. These alternatives are just as extreme in competitive as in lop-sided districts. Tight national party discipline produces party delegations in Congress that are widely separated from one another but each ideologically narrowly distributed. As district constituencies become more polarized and are egged on by activists, parties are further motivated to move past a threshold and appeal to their respective bases rather than to voters in the ideological center. America has indeed acquired parties with clear platforms--once thought to be a desirable goal--but these parties are now feuding camps. What resolution might there be? Just as the progressive movement slowly replaced the Gilded Age, might a new reform effort replace the current squabble? Or could an asymmetry develop in the partisan constraints that would lead to ascendancy of the center, or might a new and over-riding issue generate a cross-cutting dimension, opening the door to a new politics? Only the future will tell.

Politics & Social Sciences

Merrill III, Samuel

Grofman, Bernard

Brunell, Thomas L

Anthropology

Oxford University Press

The authors explain how parties and candidates position themselves on the Left-Right ideological dimension and other issue dimensions. Their unified theoretical approach to voter behavior and party strategies takes into account voter preferences, voter's partisan attachments, expected turnout, and the location of the political status quo. The approach, tested through extensive cross-national analysis, includes studies of the plurality-based two-party contests in the U.S. and multiple-party competition in France, Britain, and Norway.

A Unified Theory of Party Competition: A Cross-National Analysis Integrating Spatial and Behavioral Factors

Adams, James F.

Politics & Government

Cambridge University Press

Professors Merrill and Grofman develop a unified model that incorporates voter motivations and assesses its empirical predictions--for both voter choice and candidate strategy--in the United States, Norway, and France. The analyses show that a combination of proximity, direction, discounting, and party ID are compatible with the mildly but not extremely divergent policies that are characteristic of many two-party and multiparty electorates. All of these motivations are necessary to understand the linkage between candidate issue positions and voter preferences.

A Unified Theory of Voting: Directional and Proximity Spatial Models

Legal Theory & Systems

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Books by Merrill III, Samuel