Suchergebnisse

National audience ; In recent years, the ties that Members of Parliament (MPs) create by cosponsoring legislation together have attracted interest from scholars adopting a network approach to lawmaking. This paper expands the empirical base of these studies by introducing an original dataset of 150 bill cosponsorship networks that cover 27 parliamentary chambers from 19 European countries, plus Israel. We then use the data to model the amount of partisan divisiveness found in the networks while controlling for the number of parliamentary factions, thereby providing an empirical test of Giovanni Sartori's classical distinction between the fragmentation of a party system and the degree of polarization between its components. In line with Sartori's observations, the results show that inter-party ideological distance predicts some of the partisanship expressed by MPs through their propensity to cosponsor bills within and across party lines, regardless of the number of MPs and parties involved.

So Cosma Shalizi and I have an article (messy pre-print) coming out Real Soon in Communications of the ACM on democracy, polarization and social media. And Nate Matias, who I'm friends with, has forceful objections. I've promised him a response – which is below – but am doing it as a blogpost, since I think […]

Organized and written with the collaboration of Marie Gulbransen. ; Town and city life in America.--The westward movement and the growth of transportation.--The mechanical conquest of America.--America's march toward democracy.--Americanizing our foreign-born.--Resources, industries and cities.--Industries and trade which bind nations together.--Explorers and settlers westward bound.--Problems of American industry and business.--Problems of American government. ; Mode of access: Internet.

This review article analyzes three major recent books (written by Robert Wuthnow, Arlie R. Hochschild, and James and Deborah Fallows, respectively) concerning ongoing political, economic and social change in United States' rural communities to probe differing frames and claims among them. We contend these works together point to vital social and political forces that must receive increased attention if the communities they treat are to address the challenges confronting them successfully. Thereafter, we briefly and illustratively underscore the significance of these authors' arguments using our own ongoing work in two small communities confronting catastrophic economic decline and social fissuring in Central Appalachia. Overall, we argue that an analytical approach that combines elements of Wuthnow's sensitivity to demographic and scalar polarization and divides, coupled with Hochschild's emphasis on opportunities to instill and call on empathetic imagination in development efforts, could assist these rural communities' residents to understand more fully the dynamics at play within them and to craft strategies aimed at addressing those challenges. In particular, we contend that the Fallowses' call for pragmatic interventions and partnership building must be accompanied by long-term efforts to overcome the fear engendered by the view that rural community life constitutes a consumerist zero-sum game, and the accompanying widespread belief in those jurisdictions that scapegoating and explicit or implicit racialized hierarchies represent reasonable responses to such anxieties.

Affective polarization refers to people having favorable attitudes toward their preferred political parties, or inparties, along with their supporters, and negative attitudes toward other parties, or outparties, and their supporters. Originally an American concept, there is now growing interest in studying (AP) in European countries characterized by multiparty systems. So far, researchers have primarily focused on like-dislike ratings when measuring affect, which has relegated another important aspect to the background, namely attitudes toward ordinary supporters of parties. Open questions also remain relating to how political ingroups and outgroups should be conceptualized in situations with large numbers of relevant political parties. We examine these puzzles using data from an online panel in Finland. First, we measure partisan social distance, or feelings toward interacting with supporters of different parties, in addition to commonly used like-dislike ratings of parties. We find that social distance differs from party like-dislike ratings in that respondents are less likely to report animosity toward outparty supporters. Second, we measure multiple party identification based on party support and closeness, and find that people commonly have not one, but many potential inparties. Finally, we build two individual-level AP measures and apply them using both like-dislike ratings and social distance scales. One of the measures is based on identifying a single inparty, while the other takes the possibility of multiple inparties into account. We find that choosing which type of attitude to measure is more consequential for the outcome than how partisanship is operationalized. Our results and discussion clarify relationships between AP and related constructs, and highlight the necessity to consider the political and social context when measuring AP and interpreting results.

The growing influence of social media in an era of media fragmentation has amplified concerns of political polarization. Yet relatively few studies have analyzed polarization in user networks over time. This study therefore examines change in network polarization on Twitter during a highly contested general election. Using Twitter's REST API, user networks of 3000 randomly selected followers of well-known partisan and entertainment-oriented accounts were recorded 17 times in the 7 months leading up to the 2016 general election. Results suggest that partisan users form highly partisan networks on Twitter, while moderate, or less engaged, users continue to mostly avoid politics.

Recent commentary points to clear increases in ideological polarization between the major American political parties. We review the theoretical & empirical literature on party polarization & partisan change. We begin by comparing the current period both to earlier political eras & to theories of partisan change. We argue that in the current period the parties have grown increasingly divided on all the major policy dimensions in American politics -- a process that we term conflict extension. We discuss various perspectives on increases in polarization between the parties in government, the parties in the electorate, & the parties' activists, & we consider the causal links between polarization at each of these levels. We consider whether American society itself, & not just the parties & their identifiers, has become increasingly polarized. Finally, we discuss the consequences of growing party polarization for American political life. Figures, References. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractBackgroundCable news makes it possible for consumers to avoid information that challenges their predispositions, and the Internet makes it even easier. Cable news consumption is related to attitude extremity, but the extant literature is absent empirical examination of how the two may work together.ObjectivesThis study aims to contribute to our understanding of the relationship between media consumption and policy attitude extremity. In particular,, it asks how digital media consumption may combine with cable or traditional mass media to drive higher levels of polarization and attitude extremity.MethodsWe use American National Election Studies and data reduction methods to model and measure the gathering of political information to compare the relationship between different forms of media consumption and policy attitude extremity.ResultsOur results indicate that, independently, the consumption of both "partisan" cable news and "non‐partisan" political digital information have the same positive relationship to attitude extremity across four major issue domains (economy, federal spending, social issues, and foreign affairs) and that when combined into a single index, the relationship is stronger than their independent relationships. Finally, the results suggest that the combined effect is strongest among those who consume more liberal cable news.ConclusionOur high choice media environment contributes to the polarized climate in the United States today.