article last week at Reason on a related subjectThe Other Divide: Polarization and Disengagement in American Politics, by Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, Cambridge University Press, 250 pages, $28.99
With The Other Divide, political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan have made a significant contribution to the polarization debate. Wait! What debate? Everyone knows that Americans are more polarized now than at any time since the Civil War. There is no debate. The science is settled.
Well, actually not—or at least not in political science, whatever the average political journalist might erroneously believe.
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Consequently, we have partisan polarization within an electorate that has not changed much. The middle still exists, but it is not welcome in either party. Debates continue over such matters as whether the sorting is top-down or bottom-up (the latter is a minority view, but one held by some serious scholars); how much the broader electorate has sorted compared to political elites (not nearly as much, many believe, but again some serious scholars disagree); and the size of the middle (there is considerable disagreement about this). There is more agreement about the composition of "the middle": It is heterogeneous, comprising not just moderates but cross-pressured libertarians and populists, the alienated, and the apoliticals.
Some psychologically inclined scholars argued that the ideological differences between ordinary Democrats and Republicans did not seem sufficiently great to produce the level of acrimony that characterizes contemporary politics. They suggested that researchers were looking for partisan polarization in the wrong place; it was not cognitive but affective. In other words, partisans hated each other not so much because they disagreed about Afghanistan, taxation, or gay rights but because they increasingly belonged to different identity groups associated with the parties.
Affective polarization is a major growth industry in political science, and various debates continue here as well. Social identity theory posits that positive feelings about the in-group are stronger than negative feelings about the out-group, but empirical studies find just the opposite. How many partisans really hate members of the other party, as opposed to just making a show for the sake of cheerleading? ("The Yankees suck!") Do partisans really loathe members of the other party, or just the caricatures they form from viewing the extreme cases selected by the media?
