Political polarization
[1][2][3][5][6][7] However, some political scientists assert that contemporary polarization depends less on policy differences on a left and right scale but increasingly on other divisions such as religious against secular, nationalist against globalist, traditional against modern, or rural against urban.
[9] Polarization itself is typically understood as "a prominent division or conflict that forms between major groups in a society or political system and that is marked by the clustering and radicalisation of views and beliefs at two distant and antagonistic poles."
[2] Polarized political parties are internally cohesive, unified, programmatic, and ideologically distinct; they are typically found in a parliamentary system of democratic governance.
Ideological polarization refers to the extent to which the electorate has divergent beliefs on ideological issues (e.g., abortion or affirmative action) or beliefs that are consistently conservative or liberal across a range of issues (e.g., having a conservative position on both abortion and affirmative action even if those positions are not "extreme").
[24] Political scientists who study mass polarization generally rely on data from opinion polls and election surveys.
), and they try to relate those trends to respondents' party identification and other potentially polarizing factors (like geographic location or income bracket).
This can lead to increased hostility and a lack of willingness to compromise or work together with people who hold different political views.
[42] With regards to multiparty systems, Giovanni Sartori (1966, 1976) claims the splitting of ideologies in the public constituency causes further divides within the political parties of the countries.
Some, such as Washington Post opinion writer Robert Kaiser, argued this allowed wealthy people, corporations, unions, and other groups to push the parties' policy platforms toward ideological extremes, resulting in a state of greater polarization.
La Raja and David L. Wiltse, note that this does not necessarily hold true for mass donors to political campaigns.
These scholars argue a single donor who is polarized and contributes large sums to a campaign does not seem to usually drive a politician toward political extremes.
[54] Fernbach, Rogers, Fox and Sloman (2013) argue that it is a result of people having an exaggerated faith in their understanding of complex issues.
[58] Morris P. Fiorina (2006, 2008) posits the hypothesis that polarization is a phenomenon which does not hold for the public, and instead is formulated by commentators to draw further division in government.
Dutch Afrikaners, white English, and native Africans split based on racial divisions, causing polarization along ethnic lines.
He was shocked to found that the largest polarization index over time was occurred among oldest cohort, which was less likely to use social media (Boxell et al., 2017).
Political scientists argue that this has particularly affected the voting public in the last three decades, as previously less partisan viewers are given more polarized news media choices.
The mass media's current, fragmented, high-choice environment has induced a movement of the audience from more even-toned political programming to more antagonistic and one-sided broadcasts and articles.
[82] Solomon Messing and Sean J. Westwood state that individuals do not necessarily become polarized through media because they choose their own exposure, which tends to already align with their views.
[85] Specifically, polarization over government spending was reduced when people were provided with a "Taxpayer Receipt," but not when they were also asked how they wanted the money to be spent.
This suggests that subtle factors like the mood and tone of partisan news sources may have a large effect on how the same information is interpreted.
[87] Experiments and surveys from Sweden also give limited support to the idea of increased ideological or affective polarization due to media use.
[29] However, this study does not find evidence that the number of political parties and district magnitude that captures the proportionality of electoral systems would influence the extent of affective polarization.
[90] When politicians repeatedly favor partisan media outlets, they reinforce their supporters' existing biases, which can further fuel political polarization within the public.
Rather, pernicious polarization operates on a single political cleavage, which can be partisan identity, religious vs secular, globalist vs nationalist, urban vs rural, etc.
[101] On the other hand, Slater & Arugay (2019) have argued that it's not the depth of a single social cleavage, but the political elite's process for removing a leader which best explains whether or not polarization truly becomes pernicious.
[103] It is agreed, however, that pernicious polarization reinforces and entrenches itself, dragging the country into a downward spiral of anger and division for which there are no easy remedies.
[103][99] Pernicious polarization makes compromise, consensus, interaction, and tolerance increasingly costly and tenuous for individuals and political actors on both sides of the divide.
[104] Pernicious polarization routinely weakens respect for democratic norms, corrodes basic legislative processes, undermines the nonpartisan nature of the judiciary and fuels public disaffection with political parties.
In these situations, the loser typically questions the legitimacy of the institutions allowing the winner to create a hegemony, which causes citizens to grow cynical towards politics.
[106] Political polarization can help transform or disrupt the status quo, sometimes addressing injustices or imbalances in a popular vs. oligarchic struggle.
