Party Polarization Research Articles

Social Work, Politics, and Social Policy Education: Applying a Multidimensional Framework of Power

ABSTRACTThe call to promote social justice sets the social work profession in a political context. In an effort to enhance social workers’ preparedness to engage in political advocacy, this article calls on educators to integrate a broad theoretical understanding of power into social policy curricula. We suggest the use of a multidimensional conceptualization of power that emphasizes mechanisms of decision making, agenda control, and attitude formation. We then apply these mechanisms to demonstrate how two prominent features of contemporary politics—party polarization and racially biased attitudes—affect the ability of social workers to influence policy. Finally, we suggest content that social work educators can integrate to prepare future social workers to engage in strategic and effective social justice advocacy.

Voting for Radical Right Parties in Europe: The Role of Cultural Change and Party Polarization (Part 2)

The article is devoted to the problem of rapid growth in recent decades of electoral support for radical right-wing parties in Western, Central and Eastern Europe. It presents the results of empirical testing of the theory of silent counterrevolution and two-dimensional party polarization. Data from the European Social Survey (ESS 2006-14) and content analysis of electoral party manifestos (CMP/MARPOR), and statistics on migrants, electoral institutions and liberal culture for 56 parliamentary elections in 24 European countries were analyzed using two-level logistics modeling. The results show that anti-immigration attitudes and distrust of parliament are the most important distinguishing features of supporters of nationalists and populists. In accordance with the silent counter-revolution theory, the voting mobilization of nationalist supporters in parliamentary elections, according to the facts revealed, depends on the spread of liberal culture in society. The analysis also revealed that the conditions for their mobilization are favorable when party positions in the economic dimension converge and cultural polarization increase at the same time, although this conclusion needs further verification.

Party Effects in State Legislative Committees

Legislative scholars have theorized about the role of committees and whether they are, or are not, tools of the majority party. We look to the states to gain more empirical leverage on this question, using a regression discontinuity approach and novel data from all state committees between 1996 and 2014. We estimate that majority‐party status produces an 8.5 percentage point bonus in committee seats and a substantial ideological shift in the direction of the majority party. Additionally, we leverage a surprisingly frequent, but as if random occurrence in state legislatures—tied chambers—to identify majority‐party effects, finding similar support for partisan committees. We also examine whether the extent of committee partisanship is conditional on party polarization or legislative professionalism, but we find that it is not. Our results demonstrate that parties create nonrepresentative committees across legislatures to pursue their outlying policy preferences.

Nash equilibrium and party polarization in an electoral model with mixed motivations

We study the existence problem of Nash equilibrium as well as the patterns of equilibrium policy outcomes in an electoral competition model with mixed motivations. Each party maximizes a sum of party members’ expected utility and office rent. The inclusion of office rent renders the payoff of each party discontinuous. This makes it difficult to apply usually fixed point arguments to prove the existence of Nash equilibria. By using a recently developed concept, multiple restrictional security (MR‐security) we provide conditions under which a pure‐strategy Nash equilibrium exists within fairly general settings, and further the analysis by presenting conditions under which various patterns of policy choices, including polarization, arise in equilibrium.

Electoral Politics, Party Polarization, and Arms Control: New START in Historical Perspective

Electoral Politics, Party Polarization, and Arms Control: New START in Historical Perspective

The Indian Parliament: How Party Polarization, the Rise of the Media, and Single-Party Dominance Led to the Decline of the Lok Sabha

The Indian Parliament: How Party Polarization, the Rise of the Media, and Single-Party Dominance Led to the Decline of the Lok Sabha

Voting for Radical Right Parties in Europe: the Role of Cultural Change and Party Polarization

The article is devoted to the problem of rapid growth in recent decades of electoral support for radical right-wing parties in Western, Central and Eastern Europe. The first part of the article discusses the general theoretical foundation of approaches to this problem in the scientific literature - social changes caused by modernization and globalization, and the main varieties of these approaches. One of them assumes that there is an increase in public "demand" for populist and nationalist ideology, while the other indicates the emergence of favorable political opportunities due to electoral institutions of proportional multi-party systems and strategies of party competition, leading to a change in the polarization of the party system in the economic and socio-cultural dimensions. A brief review of empirical studies is given, and the ambiguity of the results is noted.

Prospects for Third Party Electoral Success in a Polarized Era

The trend of increasing major party polarization in the United States has raised concerns about the quality of representation and governance. One potential corrective is third parties, as they can hold the major parties accountable and instigate positive change. We, however, highlight limits to their influence. Two factors dampened the electoral support for third party candidates in the 2016 U.S. presidential election despite favorable conditions. First, the cost of third party voting is higher in the current polarized era, since casting a vote for a third party can lead to their less-favored major party candidate winning. Voters today have especially negative feelings toward their less-favored major party. Second, Trump co-opted voters distrustful of the government, which is a group that tends to support third parties. Our analysis of American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 1992 and 2016 shows support for both factors.

Party Polarization, Ideological Sorting and the Emergence of the US Partisan Gender Gap

This article argues that the modern American partisan gender gap – the tendency of men to identify more as Republicans and less as Democrats than women – emerged largely because of mass-level ideological party sorting. As the two major US political parties ideologically polarized at the elite level, the public gradually perceived this polarization and better sorted themselves into the parties that matched their policy preferences. Stable pre-existing policy differences between men and women caused this sorting to generate the modern US partisan gender gap. Because education is positively associated with awareness of elite party polarization, the partisan gender gap developed earlier and is consistently larger among those with college degrees. The study finds support for this argument from decades of American National Election Studies data and a new large dataset of decades of pooled individual-level Gallup survey responses.

Who Drives the Agenda: Media or Parties? A Seven-Country Comparison in the Run-Up to the 2014 European Parliament Elections

In this paper, we examine who drives attention to the European Union (EU) in member nations—the media or the parties—and how cross-national variations in these media-party interactions can be explained by focusing on issue salience in campaign communications, party polarization, and media system characteristics. To answer these questions, we rely on a quantitative content analysis of newspaper articles and party press releases in seven countries (Austria, France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom) during the twelve weeks prior to the 2014 European Parliament (EP) election. Our results from a daily-level vector autoregression (VAR) analysis show that parties are the main driver. However, our findings also indicate that single approaches in comparative research, namely, issue salience, party polarization, and media characteristics, cannot fully explain cross-national variations, which stem from combinations of different determinants, such as low (high) EU issue salience interacting with high (low) party polarization.

RETROSPECTIVE VOTING AND PARTY POLARIZATION

AbstractWe provide a new and favorable perspective on voter naiveté and party polarization. We contrast sophisticated (Nash) versus retrospective voting in a model where two parties commit to policies. Retrospective voters do not understand the mapping between states and outcomes induced by a policy; instead, they simply vote for the party that delivers the highest observed performance, as determined in equilibrium. We show that parties have an incentive to polarize under retrospective, compared to Nash, voting. Moreover, this polarization often results in higher welfare due to a better match between policies and fundamentals.

The Home as a Political Fortress: Family Agreement in an Era of Polarization

The manifestations of party polarization in America are well known: legislative gridlock, harsh elite rhetoric, and at the level of the electorate, increasing hostility across the partisan divide. We investigate the ramifications of polarization for processes of family socialization. Using the classic 1965 Youth-Parent Political Socialization Panel data as a baseline, we employ original national surveys of spouses and offspring conducted in 2015 supplemented by the 2014 and 2016 TargetSmart national voter files to demonstrate that political correspondence between married couples and parent-offspring agreement have both increased substantially in the polarized era. We further demonstrate that the principal reason for increased spousal correspondence is mate selection based on politics. Spousal agreement, in turn, creates an “echo chamber” that facilitates intergenerational continuity. Overall, our results suggest a vicious cycle by which socialization exacerbates party polarization.

Customary Law of Larwul Ngabal in the Implementation of Regional Autonomy in North Moluccas

The Kei Islands of Southeast Moluccas, like other parts of Indonesia, have a customary order and cultural diversity. The values of local wisdom existing in the Kei community, which is contained in the customary law of Larwul Ngabal, is a very important cultural social capital in the social integration of its society. The type of study was an empirical research with sociological-anthropological juridical approach. The results show that the existence of customary law of Larwul Ngabal supports the implementation of regional autonomy with full authority and reinforcement in local regulations based on local wisdom in Kei Island. The dominant factors that caused the values of customary law of Larwul Ngabal have not provided legal strength in the implementation of local government is because it is determined by the recruitment factor of the leader who lacks capacity and competence. Added to the polarization of political parties and the values of local wisdom on financial strength in determining leadership. Therefore, to realize good local governance in Kei Islands, the values of customary law of Larwul Ngabal in various Local Regulations and local government policies must be accommodated, keeping in mind the custom, governmental and religious factors that are the foundation of Kei community life.

Core community structure recovery and phase transition detection in temporally evolving networks

Community detection in time series networks represents a timely and significant research topic due to its applications in a broad range of scientific fields, including biology, social sciences and engineering. In this work, we introduce methodology to address this problem, based on a decomposition of the network adjacency matrices into low-rank components that capture the community structure and sparse & dense noise perturbation components. It is further assumed that the low-rank structure exhibits sharp changes (phase transitions) at certain epochs that our methodology successfully detects and identifies. The latter is achieved by averaging the low-rank component over time windows, which in turn enables us to precisely select the correct rank and monitor its evolution over time and thus identify the phase transition epochs. The methodology is illustrated on both synthetic networks generated by various network formation models, as well as the Kuramoto model of coupled oscillators and on real data reflecting the US Senate’s voting record from 1979–2014. In the latter application, we identify that party polarization exhibited a sharp change and increased after 1993, a finding broadly concordant with the political science literature on the subject.

Party Polarization in America: The War Over Two Social Contracts. By B. Dan Wood and Soren Jordan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 388p. $120.00 cloth.

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Response to Sam Rosenfeld's review of Party Polarization in America: The War Over Two Social Contracts

Response to Sam Rosenfeld's review of Party Polarization in America: The War Over Two Social Contracts

Response to Sam Rosenfeld’s review of Party Polarization in America: The War Over Two Social Contracts

Response to Sam Rosenfeld’s review of <i>Party Polarization in America: The War Over Two Social Contracts</i>

Party Polarisation in the United States

Party Polarisation in the United States

Following Fenno: Learning from Senate Candidates in the Age of Social Media and Party Polarization

AbstractStudents of American politics are indebted to Richard Fenno’s path-breaking work,Home Style, published four decades ago. But, given the book’s widespread acclaim, few have taken Fenno’s prescription to go back home with members of Congress to heart. In this essay, I echo Fenno’s call for scholars to become participant-observers of the political process while offering the modern “soaker and poker” a guide to the pitfalls and opportunities of pursuing such a research project. I respond to Fenno’s methodological treatise, written as the appendix toHome Style, focusing in particular on gaining access and how to remain publicly engaged while observing a competitive Senate campaign. I discuss how changes in American political culture create additional wrinkles for participant observation that must be considered, especially if scholars chose to remain engaged in public outreach. I conclude by addressing the need to consider carefully the ethics of engaging the political world we study, particularly in the light of the Stanford-Dartmouth experiment scandal rocking Montana in the weeks preceding the state’s 2014 judicial elections. We may not all do participant observation, but we should follow Fenno when considering the implications of interfering in the political world as we study it.

Perceived party polarization, news attentiveness, and political participation: a mediated moderation model

ABSTRACTPerception of party polarization has a positive impact on political participation. While past research suggests that such impact depends upon people’s information use, empirical evidence is lacking. We used a mediated moderation model to test the multiplicative effect between polarization perception and media use on political participation. The data for analysis came from a survey of 625 representative Hong Kong residents in 2015. Findings show that the impact of perceived party polarization on political participation is contingent upon one’s news attentiveness, and that internal political efficacy serves as a mediator that partially explains the interaction effect. Narrowed gaps in political knowledge, efficacy, and participation were observed between light and heavy news users as perceived party polarization rises. The implications of the findings with respect to political participation, role of news media use, and the formation of efficacy beliefs in the context of party polarization are discussed.