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Failures of government policies often provoke opposite reactions from citizens; some call for a reversal of the policy while others favor its continuation in stronger form. We offer an explanation of such polarization, based on a natural bimodality of preferences in political and economic contexts, and consistent with Bayesian rationality.

Recently, researchers and reporters have made a wide range of claims about the distribution, nature, and societal impact of political polarization. Here I offer reasons to believe that even when they are correct and prima facie merely descriptive, many of these claims have the highly negative side effect of increasing political polarization. This is because of the interplay of two factors that have so far been neglected in the work on political polarization, namely that (1) people tend to conform to descriptive norms (i.e., norms capturing [perceptions of] what others commonly do, think, or feel), and that (2) claims about political polarization often convey such norms. Many of these claims thus incline people to behave, cognize, and be affectively disposed in ways that contribute to social division. But there is a silver lining. People's tendency to conform to descriptive norms also provides the basis for developing new, experimentally testable strategies for counteracting political polarization. I outline three.

Recently, researchers and reporters have made a wide range of claims about the distribution, nature, and societal impact of political polarization. Here I offer reasons to believe that even when they are correct and prima facie merely descriptive, many of these claims have the highly negative side effect of increasing political polarization. This is because of the interplay of two factors that have so far been neglected in the work on political polarization, namely that (1) people tend to conform to descriptive norms (i.e., norms capturing [perceptions of] what others commonly do, think, or feel), and that (2) claims about political polarization often convey such norms. Many of these claims thus incline people to behave, cognize, and be affectively disposed in ways that contribute to social division. But there is a silver lining. People's tendency to conform to descriptive norms also provides the basis for developing new, experimentally testable strategies for counteracting political polarization. I outline three. ; peerReviewed ; publishedVersion

Failures of government policies often provoke opposite reactions from citizens; some call for a reversal of the policy, whereas others favor its continuation in stronger form. We offer an explanation of such polarization, based on a natural bimodality of preferences in political and economic contexts and consistent with Bayesian rationality.

We study political polarization in a parliamentary setting dominated by strong parties. In addition to examining polarization along the left-right dimension, we consider political divergence between legislators belonging to the same political bloc. Are politicians' background characteristics unimportant when parties have powerful tools to discipline their rank-and-file? We investigate this question using legislative speech from the Norwegian Parliament and recently developed techniques for measuring group differences in high-dimensional choices. Across the background characteristics we consider — gender, age, urbanicity, and class background — we document substantial differences in speech, even when comparing legislators from the same party bloc and policy committee. Our results illuminate how individual legislators shape policymaking in party-centered environments.

This thesis analyzes whether polarization is occurring in congressional committees, both the House of Representatives and the Senate standing committees, from 1970-2010. Sean Theirault's (2006) research of polarization on the floor of Congress is the foundation for identifying similar results in the standing committees. In addition, committees will be separated into three different types: regional, national, and power. These types are based on previous categorizing strategies by Glenn Parker and Suzanne Parker (1979), Keith Krebhiel (1990), Garry Young and Valerie Heitshusen (2003), and Gary Cox and Matthew McCubbins (2007). The separation of committees is to find if some committees polarize more than others over time. DW-Nominate scores will be utilized to find the median of each political party in these committees. In addition, David Jones's (2001) theory of political gridlock presents the basis for analysis at the committee level to find if polarization is affecting the number of bills being reported out of each committee. THOMAS, an online branch of the Library of Congress, is the database that provides the bills reporting in and out of the committees. The result has provided evidence the congressional committees are becoming polarized throughout the time period in this analysis, especially in the House of Representatives. In addition, the higher the level of polarization in the committee, the lower the percentage of bills being reported back out of the committees. Polarization is occurring in the congressional committees and might be playing a bigger factor on politics within the committees than on the floors of Congress.

Social networks can be a very successful tool to engage users to discuss relevant topics for society. However, there are also some dangers that are associated with them, such as the emergence of polarization in online discussions. Recently, there has been a growing interest to try to understand this phenomenon, as some consider that this can be harmful concerning the building of a healthy society in which citizens get used to polite discussions and even listening to opinions that may be different from theirs. In this work, we face the problem of defining a precise measure that can quantify in a meaningful way the level of polarization present in an online discussion. We focus on the Reddit social network, given that its primary focus is to foster discussions, in contrast to other social networks that have some other uses. Our measure is based on two different characteristics of an online discussion: the existence of a balanced bipartition of the users of the discussion, where one partition contains mainly users in agreement (regarding the topic of the discussion) and the other users in disagreement, and the degree of negativity of the sentiment of the interactions between these two groups of users. We discuss how different characteristics of the discussions affect the value of our polarization measure, and we finally perform an empirical evaluation over different sets of Reddit discussions about diverse classes of topics. Our results seem to indicate that our measure can capture differences in the polarization level of different discussions, which can be further understood when analyzing the values of the different factors used to define the measure. ; This research was funded by Spanish Project PID2019-111544GB-C22 (MINECO/FEDER), by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under Grant Agreements 723596, 768824, 764025 and 814945, and by 2017 SGR 1537.

Population changes are leading Texas to becoming a majority-minority state, especially with the increase of Hispanics. Texas has become a GOP stronghold, and the GOP is increasingly cohesive, and conservative, winning all statewide offices in both 1998 and 2002, plus control of the legislature in 2002. Religious fundamentalism is clearly evident in the GOP, but many distance themselves from the Christian right. Ideological differences between the parties have increased, largely because Democrats are more liberal. GOP activists are upbeat, while Democrats appear dispirited, although less so than in 1991.

Using panel data from the US states, we document a robust negative relationship between state-level government corruption and ideological polarization. This finding is sustained when state polarization is instrumented using lagged state neighbor ideology. We argue that polarization increases the expected costs of engaging in corruption, especially deterring marginal low-level corruption. Consistent with this thesis federal prosecutorial effort falls and case quality increases with polarization. Tangible anti-corruption measures including the stringency of state ethics' laws and independent commissions for redistricting are also associated with increased state polarization.

This dissertation explores how partisan polarization among the political elites (the President and key Members of Congress) impacts national security decision-making. The research examines the relationship over time beginning at the start of the Cold War through 2014. In doing so, the research tests several hypotheses to determine the nature of the relationship and what the implications might be for future U.S. national security policy-making. There are three different approaches used in the research centered on the same theory of partisan polarization. The first approach examines changes in the level of polarization and defense budgets each year. The second explores the impact of partisan polarization on the outcome of key roll-call votes on national security legislation. Lastly, the third approach studies the changes in polarization relative to the Presidents' decision to use force. Poole and Rosenthal (1984) argue that political polarization has increased among the political elite since the 1960s and the Republicans and Democrats continue to move further apart ideologically (Gray et al. 2015). I argue that the combined effect of polarization and a growing ideological divide between the two major political parties puts our collective national security at risk. Using analytical regression time series models and a qualitative analysis, the findings suggests that rising partisan polarization presents a clear and present threat to our national security. ; 2019-05-01 ; Ph.D. ; Sciences, Pol, Scty and Intl Afrs, Schl of ; Doctoral ; This record was generated from author submitted information.

We adapt an axiomatically derived measure of polarization due to Esteban and Ray (1994) to measure polarization of political preferences. Previous work used different measures such as variance, kurtosis, Cronbach's alpha, median distance to median and the mean distance between groups. Yet, none of these measures are theoretically connected to a notion of polarization. Although the initiation of the current one is in the lieu of income inequality measurement, it is conceptually suitable for preferential polarization as well. This paper offers a methodology for that purpose. The second contribution of the paper is that we use the Aldrich-McKelvey Scaling to correct for differential-item functioning in estimating ideal points of the individuals. We use the American National Election Survey Data for years between 1984-2008 to implement the theory offered in the paper. Our findings suggest that there is not a statistically significant increasing trend in polarization in this time period in many issue dimensions but there is an upward trend in the latent ideology dimension which is significant during the 1990s.

We adapt an axiomatically derived measure of polarization due to Esteban and Ray (1994) to measure polarization of political preferences. Previous work used different measures such as variance, kurtosis, Cronbach's alpha, median distance to median and the mean distance between groups. Yet, none of these measures are theoretically connected to a notion of polarization. Although the initiation of the current one is in the lieu of income inequality measurement, it is conceptually suitable for preferential polarization as well. This paper offers a methodology for that purpose. The second contribution of the paper is that we use the Aldrich-McKelvey Scaling to correct for differential-item functioning in estimating ideal points of the individuals. We use the American National Election Survey Data for years between 1984-2008 to implement the theory offered in the paper. Our findings suggest that there is not a statistically significant increasing trend in polarization in this time period in many issue dimensions but there is an upward trend in the latent ideology dimension which is significant during the 1990s.

A recent upsurge of empirical studies on the causes of conflict attempts to connect various features of the distribution of the relevant characteristic (typically ethnicity or religion) to conflict. The distributional indices differ (polarization, fractionalization or Lorenz-domination) and so do the various specifications of "conflict" (onset, incidence or intensity). Overall, the results are far from clear, and combined with the mixture of alternative indices and notions of "conflict" it is not surprising that the reader may come away thoroughly perplexed. The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework that permits us to distinguish between the occurrence of conflict and its severity and that clarifies the role of polarization and fractionalization in each of these cases. Our analysis brings together strands from three of our previous contributions: on polarization (Esteban and Ray, 1994, and Duclos, Esteban and Ray, 2004), on conflict and distribution (Esteban and Ray, 1999) and on the viability of political systems (Esteban and Ray, 2001). ; Esteban gratefully acknowledges support from the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, the Polarization and Conflict project CIT-2-CT-2004-506084 funded by the European Commission-DG Research Sixth Framework Programme, Barcelona Economics (XREA) and the CICYT grant no. SEC2003-01961.

Standard spatial models of political competition give rise to equilibria in which the competing political parties or candidates converge to a common position. In this paper I show how political polarization can be generated in models that focus on the nexus between pre-election interest group lobbying and electoral competition.

This article accounts for two puzzling paradoxes. The first paradox is the simultaneous absence and presence of attitude polarization, the fact that global attitude polarization is relatively rare, even though pundits describe it as common. The second paradox is the simultaneous presence and absence of social polarization, the fact that while individuals experienced attitude homogeneity in their interpersonal networks, their networks are characterized by attitude heterogeneity. These paradoxes give rise to numerous scholarly arguments. By deploying a formal model of interpersonal influence over attitudes in a context where individuals hold simultaneous positions on multiple issues we show why these arguments are not mutually exclusive and how they meaningfully refer to the same social setting. It follows that the results from this model provide a single parsimonious account for both paradoxes. The framework we develop may be generalized to a wider array of problems, including classic problems in collective action.