Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content onĪdvanced Democracies, Electoral System Reform inĪdvanced Democracies, Public Opinion and Public Policy inĪdvertising and Election Campaigns in the United StatesĪfrica, Women’s Political Representation inĪsian American Mobilization and Political IdentitiesĪustralia and New Zealand, Comparative Politics ofīiopolitics and State Regulation of Human Lifeīrexit, British Politics, and European IntegrationĬampaign Finance in the Era of Super-PACSĬaribbean, Elections and Democracy in theĬhannels of Electoral Representation in Advanced Industria.Ĭivil-Military Relations in Latin AmericaĬomparative Industrial Relations in EuropeĬomparative Political Economy of Resource ExtractionĬomparative Politics of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bis.Ĭomparative Politics of Chile and UruguayĬomparative Politics of the Middle East and North AfricaĬonservative Litigation Strategies and Groups in US Judici.Ĭrisis of European Integration in Historical Perspective. Nothing in the results of the 2012 election suggests that polarization will decrease in the near future. They argue that the parties and the voters supporting them have not only ideologically polarized, but also racially polarized. The authors show the consequences on party polarization as a result of the 2012 elections. “The Effect of the 2012 Elections on Party Polarization.” In The American Elections of 2012. He also analyzes the consequences of this polarization, though he argues that political scientists can do much more work on this dimension. The author documents the growing divide between the parties and describes the literature that developed around this divide. Edited by Eric Schickler and Frances Lee, 527–549. “Party Polarization.” In The Oxford Handbook of the American Congress. Hetherington shows that the overall ideological mood of the American electorate has not appreciably changed, though the electorate has ideologically sorted itself. There is more dispute about polarization in the mass electorate. Most scholars agree that polarization at the elite level not only exists, but is growing. “Review Article: Putting Polarization in Perspective.” British Journal of Political Science 39 (2009): 413–448. Theriault and Moeller 2013 shows how the 2012 elections affected polarization in both arenas. While Schaffner 2011 focuses almost exclusively on institutional polarization, Hetherington 2009 adds polarization within the electorate to the author’s analysis. These review articles describe this vibrant literature. It took political scientists a long time to get interested in questions of party polarization, but once they became interested, a broad and deep literature developed. Nothing about the politics that the parties practice today suggests that the partisan polarization is going to slow down in the near future. In the 112th Congress (2011–2012), the divergence between the parties had more than doubled in the House to 1.07 and increased by more than 70 percent to 0.85 in the Senate. The infusion of Tea Party members in the 112th Congress and the losses suffered by the Blue Dog Democrats in 2010 only exacerbated the divide between the parties. Because the total scale is 2 points, this gap represents about 25 percent of the entire scale. According to Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal’s DW-NOMINATE, a statistic that summarizes voting in the House and Senate, the average Democrat was about 0.50 away from the average Republican in both the House and Senate. The congresses after the 1964 election and into the 1970s were some of the least polarized in modern history. Indeed, the causes and consequences of partisan polarization have become a cottage industry among congressional scholars. In the last few years, political scientists have described and analyzed this trend in a fairly comprehensive way. The trend of polarization between the political parties in Congress is, perhaps, the most pronounced development in Congress since World War II.