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Of course, people might feel morally compelled to polarize, even to this pernicious degree. Under these conditions, constructive debates are impossible and mutually acceptable policies elusive. Highly polarized citizens often refuse to engage with each other, reactively dismissing out of hand both potential flaws in their own views and potential merits of their other opponents’.
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Īt its worst, polarization is pernicious, posing a challenge to the democratic process. Ideally, this kind of engagement and pluralism ultimately produce effective, stable government: It helps societies identify policies that are both optimal for solving their biggest problems, and unlikely to be overturned when a new party takes power since they are mutually agreed-upon. Polarization also entails pluralistic policy alternatives this is crucial for democracies, which rely on citizens being able to consider multiple policies and have thorough, constructive debates between them. It encourages civic engagement: Polarized citizens more often vote, protest, and join political movements, all of which are necessary for functioning democracy and help disrupt undesirable status quos. At its best, polarization can be benign, and produce more effective, stable democracies. Political scientists continue to debate the costs and benefits of polarization. ĭoes polarization help or hurt democracies? These trends have led scholars to speculate that politics is a unique intergroup domain wherein people’s hate for opponents exceeds their affinity for co-partisans. For example, 80% of Americans today feel unfavorable towards their partisan foes, and the portion feeling very unfavorable has nearly tripled since 1994. Since the 1990s, Americans’ liking for their own party and dislike for opponents have both increased. More than ever, Americans endorse their party’s stance across all issues. In the last half century, members of both parties have reported increasingly extreme ideological views, a trend more pronounced among Republicans than Democrats, especially in the last decade. Polarization recently reached an all-time high in the US. With very high polarization, large, separate clusters of the population endorse ideologically consistent stances across all issues, and love their own party while loathing the other(s). With little-to-no polarization, most people support a mixture of liberal and conservative stances across issues, and they can support one party without disliking others. Political polarization occurs when subsets of a population adopt increasingly dissimilar attitudes toward parties and party members (i.e., affective polarization ), as well as ideologies and policies (ideological polarization ). What does the future hold? We argue that, at its current level, polarization threatens the stability of American democracy, then offer two alternative predictions for its trajectory. As polarization has risen, so have Americans’ worries: 90% believe their country is divided over politics and 60% feel pessimistic about their country overcoming these divisions to solve its biggest problems. Many Americans find the latter increasingly difficult, as news stories document the negative effects of rising political polarization in recent decades. Now recall the last time you heard a news story about political foes respectfully listening to each other. Recall the last time you heard a news story about political foes disrespecting and ignoring each other.
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This review comes from a themed issue on Emotion, motivation, personality and social sciences *political ideologies*Įdited by John T Jost, Eran Halperin and Kristin Laurinįor a complete overview see the Issue and the EditorialĢ352-1546/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd.
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Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2020, 34:179–184