Is America too polarized?

Lane Kenworthy, The Good Society
September 2023

Polarization has two dimensions: movement away from the center toward the extremes and sorting into distinct groups. Americans haven’t moved away from the center in their opinions on policy questions or in their overall political orientations. But they’ve sorted themselves more cleanly into the country’s two political parties. The parties themselves, as judged by their elected representatives, have both sorted into distinct groups and moved away from the center.

How has this happened? What impact has it had?

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AMERICANS HAVEN’T MOVED AWAY FROM THE CENTER IN THEIR POLITICAL VIEWS

To many Americans it feels like we’re more polarized now than in the past. In national elections the country is split into reliably “red” Republican states and consistently “blue” Democratic states. There are more straight party-line votes in congress. And across the political spectrum the rhetoric seems more oppositional and confrontational.1

The most striking evidence of polarization, in the minds of many, is the red and blue map describing the results of recent presidential elections. Since 2000, the map has tended to look more or less like figure 1, which shows the 2016 results. It suggests a nation sharply divided between liberals and conservatives, with each side dominating broad swaths.

Figure 1. Red and blue America
Cartogram depicting 2016 presidential election vote results by state. Red: Republican candidate got the most votes in the state. Blue: Democratic candidate got the most votes. The states are sized in proportion to their population. Source: Mark Newman, “Maps of the 2016 US Presidential Election Results.”

But the image of a polarized nation conveyed by this picture is misleading in several respects.

First, a closer look at the electoral map reveals a more complicated picture. Figure 2 shows vote results from the same election, the 2016 presidential contest, amended in two ways: the results are shown by county instead of by state; and the colors indicate the winning candidate’s share of the votes, rather than simply which party’s candidate won, with shades of purple to convey relatively close outcomes. This map suggests a much less divided nation.

Figure 2. Purple America
Cartogram depicting 2016 presidential election vote results by county. Colors represent the share of presidential votes for the candidate getting the most votes in the county. The counties are sized in proportion to their population. Source: Mark Newman, “Maps of the 2016 US Presidential Election Results.”

Second, the occurrence of close elections with dependably Democratic and Republican states (or counties) doesn’t necessarily imply that political views have spread apart. Figure 3, from Morris Fiorina, illustrates why. The horizontal axis of each chart represents political views on a left-to-right scale, from liberal on the left to conservative on the right. The vertical axis indicates the share of voters who hold those views. In the top chart, most people are either liberal or conservative; relatively few are in the center. Because the liberal share is about the same as the conservative share, the election will be close.

In the lower chart we also get a close election. But voters aren’t polarized. Most are in the middle.

Figure 3. Two close election scenarios — one due to polarization, the other not
The horizontal axis of each chart represents political views on a left-to-right scale, from liberal on the left to conservative on the right. The vertical axis indicates the share of voters who hold those views. Source: Morris P. Fiorina with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, Pearson Longman, 2005, p. 8.

Which of these two scenarios is closer to the actual distribution of Americans’ views? The General Social Survey (GSS) regularly asks a representative sample of American adults to place themselves on “a seven-point scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged from extremely liberal to extremely conservative.” In the first year of the survey, 1974, the distribution of views looked like the lower chart in figure 3. The polarization hypothesis predicts a movement over time toward figure 3’s upper chart. But as figure 4 shows, that hasn’t happened. The distribution of political views in 2018, the last GSS year before the Covid pandemic, was very similar to the distribution in 1974, with most Americans in the middle. Our political orientations haven’t spread apart to any appreciable degree.2

Figure 4. Political views
Share of US adults. Seven response options: extremely liberal, liberal, slightly liberal, moderate, slightly conservative, conservative, extremely conservative. Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series polviews.

Figure 5 shows the same data in a different way. It collapses the seven political views categories from figure 4 into three — liberal (the three categories on the left side of figure 4), moderate (the one in the middle), and conservative (the three on the right) — and shows the share of Americans in each of these three groups since the mid-1970s. If political views were spreading apart, we would see an increase in the shares identifying as liberal and/or conservative and a decrease in the share identifying as moderate. What actually occurred is very little change for any of the three groups.

Figure 5. Political views
Share of US adults. Seven response options: extremely liberal, liberal, slightly liberal, moderate, slightly conservative, conservative, extremely conservative. The three liberal groups are combined here as “liberal.” The three conservative groups are combined here as “conservative.” Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series polviews.

Trends in Americans’ attitudes on particular policy questions point to the same conclusion. Figure 6 shows views about whether the government should reduce income differences between the rich and the poor. Interviewees are asked to score their view on a seven-point scale. The polarization hypothesis predicts a rise in the shares on the two ends of the scale, which are shown in the graph. That isn’t what has happened.

Figure 6. Views on whether government should reduce income differences between the rich and the poor
Share of US adults. Question: “Some people think that the government in Washington ought to reduce the income differences between the rich and the poor, perhaps by raising the taxes of wealthy families or by giving income assistance to the poor. Others think that the government should not concern itself with reducing this income difference between the rich and the poor. Here is a card with a scale from 1 to 7. Think of a score of 1 as meaning that the government ought to reduce the income differences between rich and poor, and a score of 7 meaning that the government should not concern itself with reducing income differences. What score between 1 and 7 comes closest to the way you feel?” Strongly agree: responses 1 and 2. Strongly disagree: responses 6 and 7. Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series eqwlth.

Figure 7 shows attitudes about abortion, one of the country’s most contentious policy issues. The General Social Survey asks respondents whether they think abortion should be legal under various circumstances. A strong “pro-choice” position is represented by those who say they agree that abortion should be legal regardless of the reason the woman wants it. A strong “pro-life” position is represented by those who say they believe abortion shouldn’t be legal even if the pregnancy resulted from rape. The polarization hypothesis predicts that the shares holding these two positions has increased sharply over time. They have increased, but not very much.

Figure 7. Views on abortion
Share of US adults. Question: “Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if ….” Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series abany, abrape.

Finally, figure 8 shows responses to a General Social Survey question about party identification. The polarization hypothesis predicts that the share identifying as Democratic and the share identifying as Republican have increased, while the share identifying as independent has declined. Instead, if anything it’s the share choosing independent that has risen.

Figure 8. Party identification
Share of US adults. Eight response options: strong Democrat, not strong Democrat, independent leaning Democrat, independent, independent leaning Republican, not strong Republican, strong Republican, other party. “Democrat” here is the three Democrat groups. “Independent” is the one independent group. “Republican” is the three Republican groups. Those choosing “other party,” usually just 1% or 2%, are excluded. Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series partyid.

The data suggest, in short, that Americans haven’t pulled away from the center in their opinions on key policy questions or in their overall political views. In this respect, we haven’t split into two distinct, opposing camps.

ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES IN THE TWO PARTIES HAVE SORTED AND MOVED AWAY FROM THE CENTER

Americans haven’t spread apart in their political views or their opinions on policy questions, but elected representatives in the Democratic and Republican parties have. And those representatives have sorted more cleanly into the two parties, so the parties have each become more ideologically cohesive.3

Until recently, both parties were loose collections of individuals with varying orientations and policy preferences. This was largely a legacy of the Civil War. In the south, many viewed the Civil War as a military invasion engineered by the Republican Party. For the better part of the following century, political competition in the south occurred entirely within the Democratic Party rather than between Democrats and Republicans. With the New Deal legislation in the 1930s, the Democrats became the party in favor of government intervention to enhance economic security and opportunity. Although this conflicted with the conservative orientation of many southern Democrats, they remained in the party until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 aligned the national Democratic Party with equal rights for African Americans. So in the middle part of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party was a heterogeneous conglomeration of northeastern liberals, conservative southerners, and moderates sprinkled throughout other parts of the country. The Republican Party was a little more cohesive, but it too ranged from west-coast and plains-state libertarians to east-coast moderates (“Rockefeller Republicans”).

While conservative southerners have been moving to the Republican Party in recent decades, liberals in the rest of the country have been switching to the Democrats.4 The ideological purification of the two parties is now complete: in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the leftmost Republican is to the right of the rightmost Democrat.5

As the parties have become more homogenous, their ideological center of gravity has shifted away from the middle and toward the ends of the political spectrum, and this too has contributed to polarization. In one respect this is surprising: in a two-party political system, each party has an incentive to position itself as close as possible to the other one on the issues, in order to maximize its vote share.6

But several characteristics of America’s electoral system foster party polarization. First, most candidates rely heavily on private contributions for campaign funding. Since 1980, the share of funding coming from individuals, including individuals from outside the district or state, has increased. And these contributors tend to be more extreme in their views than organizations and noncontributing citizens.7

Second, House and Senate legislators get elected as individual candidates in local or statewide races, rather than as members of a party in a nationwide election. To get elected, they must first win a primary election among voters within their party, and primary-election voters tend to be less centrist than voters in general elections. Adding to this, redistricting efforts have shaped House of Representatives districts in such as way as to make them “safe” for one of the parties, which means the candidate that emerges from the primary election is a virtual shoe-in to win the general election.

Third, incumbents tend to enjoy large election advantages due to name recognition and the ability to fundraise. This reduces their incentive to shift toward the center in anticipation of a competitive election battle.

Other possible contributors to party polarization include the relatively even balance of voter support for each of the two parties and shifts in the media in recent decades.8

Figure 9 shows trends in the best available indicator of party ideology. It is an index of votes by lawmakers on a wide array of issues related to the economy and government intervention. The chart shows the average vote score on this measure for Democratic and Republican members of the House and the Senate. Both parties have moved away from the center over the past half century, particularly since the late 1970s.

Figure 9. Voting by Republican and Democratic legislators in the House and the Senate
Average DW-nominate dimension 1 scores for Republican legislators and Democratic legislators in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Scores are based on votes cast. The scale runs from liberal (negative scores) to conservative (positive scores). Data source: Jeffrey B. Lewis, Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, Adam Boche, Aaron Rudkin, and Luke Sonnet, Voteview: Congressional Roll-Call Votes Database, voteview.com, series rep.mean.d1 and dem.mean.d1.

Figure 10 shows the positioning of Democratic and Republican members of congress relative to the citizenry as of the mid-2000s. By that time, the typical Democrat in congress was already to the left of much of the public, and the typical Republican in congress was to the right.

Figure 10. The parties are farther apart than the people
These data are for 2006. Source: Andrew Gelman, David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, and Jeronimo Cortina, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 125, using data from Joseph Bafumi and Michael Herron, “Preference Aggregation, Representation, and Elected American Political Institutions,” 2007.

The polarization of voting in congress along party lines owes not only to polarization in ideology among members of congress, but also to greater discipline imposed by the party leadership, which uses an array of rewards and punishments — allocation of committee positions, support in reelection campaigns, and more — to get backbenchers to vote the party line. The result is that members of each party tend to vote with their leadership on most issues.9

AMERICANS HAVE SORTED

Americans’ opinions on policy questions haven’t spread apart, but they have become more closely aligned with the views of their preferred party. Americans have sorted themselves more cleanly according to party affiliation. As a result, even though most Americans are still in or near the middle on most issues, the difference between those who identify as Democrats and those who identify as Republicans has increased.10 The Pew Research Center reports that as of 2014, 92% of Republicans were to the right of the median Democrat, and 94% of Democrats were to the left of the median Republican.11

Pew has calculated the average difference in opinion between self-identified Democrats and self-identified Republicans on 48 issues that it asks about in its surveys. Figure 11 shows the trend in this difference since the Pew surveys began in 1987. The difference has increased steadily since the mid-1990s.

Figure 11. Difference between Republicans and Democrats on 48 survey questions
Average percentage-point difference. Source: Pew Research Center, “Trends in American Values: 1987-2012,” 2012, p. 1.

An example is attitudes toward abortion. Figure 12 shows the share of Americans who hold a strong pro-choice position — they agree that abortion should be legal regardless of the reason why the woman wants it. Until the late 1980s, there was no difference between Republicans and Democrats in this share: about 35% of Democrats held this view, and so did about 35% of Republicans. But in the 1990s and 2000s a gap emerged, and by the late 2010s Democrats were about 30 percentage points more likely than Republicans to hold this position.

Figure 12. Pro-choice on abortion: Democrats and Republicans
Share of US adults. Question: “Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if the woman wants it for any reason.” “Democrat”: strong Democrat, Democrat, independent leaning Democrat. “Republican”: strong Republican, Republican, independent leaning Republican. Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series abany, partyid.

Another example is views on immigration. Since 1994, the Pew Research Center has asked Americans whether they agree that “immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.” Figure 13 shows that Republicans and Democrats were similar on this issue until the mid-2000s, when a sharp separation began.

Figure 13. Believe immigrants strengthen our country: Democrats and Republicans
Share of US adults. The vertical axis doesn’t begin at zero. Question: “Which comes closer to your view: Immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents or are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing, and health care.” “Democrat”: Democrat or lean Democrat. “Republican”: Republican or lean Republican. Data source: Pew Research Center.

A third example is opinions on whether there should be stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment, which Pew has asked about since 1990. As figure 14 indicates, in the early 1990s Americans identifying as Democrats and those identifying as Republicans weren’t too far apart on this issue. But the share of Republicans favoring stricter laws has dropped dramatically since then, producing an enormous gap.12

Figure 14. Favor stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment: Democrats and Republicans
Share of US adults. The vertical axis doesn’t begin at zero. Question: “Do you agree or disagree: There needs to be stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment.” “Democrat”: Democrat or lean Democrat. “Republican”: Republican or lean Republican. Data source: Pew Research Center.

Since the early 2000s, the Gallup organization has regularly asked Americans about their “views on social issues.” Figure 15 shows a widening of the gap between Democrats and Republicans, with Democrats becoming steadily more liberal while Republicans have stayed put.

Figure 15. Liberal on social issues: Democrats and Republicans
Share of US adults. Question: “Thinking about social issues, would you say your views on social issues are very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, or very conservative?” “Democrat”: strong Democrat, Democrat, independent leaning Democrat. “Republican”: strong Republican, Republican, independent leaning Republican. Data source: Jeffrey M. Jones, “On Social Ideology, the Left Catches Up to the Right,” 2015, using Gallup data.

Americans’ sorting into the two political parties has occurred not only with respect to their views on issues but also with respect to their “identity” — the aspect of people’s self-image that derives from the groups or categories they perceive themselves as belonging to. This is most evident for race. The country as a whole has been getting steadily less white, but as we see in figure 16, that is much more true among Democrats than among Republicans.

Figure 16. Nonwhite: Democrats and Republicans
Share of self-identified Democrats and Republicans who are nonwhite. “Democrat”: strong Democrat, Democrat, independent leaning Democrat. “Republican”: strong Republican, Republican, independent leaning Republican. Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series race, partyid.

The US also has been getting less religious in recent decades, but this trend is much more pronounced among Democrats than among Republicans, as we see in figure 17.

Figure 17. Not religious: Democrats and Republicans
Share of self-identified Democrats and Republicans who say they aren’t religious. Question: “What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?” “Democrat”: strong Democrat, Democrat, independent leaning Democrat. “Republican”: strong Republican, Republican, independent leaning Republican. Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series relig, partyid.

We also see a growing gender gap between the two parties. As figure 18 shows, Democrats increasingly are female, whereas Republicans remain more or less evenly split between men and women.

Figure 18. Female: Democrats and Republicans
Share of self-identified Democrats and Republicans who are female. “Democrat”: strong Democrat, Democrat, independent leaning Democrat. “Republican”: strong Republican, Republican, independent leaning Republican. Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series sex, partyid.

The share of Americans with a four-year college degree has risen steadily for more than half a century. But since the mid-1990s that’s no longer been the case among Republicans, as we see in figure 19. As a result, while it used to be that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to be college graduates, the reverse is now true.

Figure 19. Four-year college degree: Democrats and Republicans
Share of self-identified Democrats and Republicans who have a four-year college degree. “Democrat”: strong Democrat, Democrat, independent leaning Democrat. “Republican”: strong Republican, Republican, independent leaning Republican. Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series degree, partyid.

Given the increased sorting into political parties by issue preferences and by identities, we would expect to observe a growing partisan divide in Americans’ overall political orientations. Figure 20 shows the political views of those who identify as Republicans. They have become steadily more conservative since the early 1990s. Democrats, meanwhile, have gotten more liberal, as we see in figure 21.

Figure 20. Political views of Republicans
Share of US adults. Seven response options: extremely liberal, liberal, slightly liberal, moderate, slightly conservative, conservative, extremely conservative. The three conservative groups are combined here as “conservative.” The three liberal groups are combined here as “liberal.” Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series partyid, polviews.

Figure 21. Political views of Democrats
Share of US adults. Seven response options: extremely liberal, liberal, slightly liberal, moderate, slightly conservative, conservative, extremely conservative. The three liberal groups are combined here as “liberal.” The three conservative groups are combined here as “conservative.” Data source: General Social Survey, sda.berkeley.edu, series partyid, polviews.

If Americans’ views and identities now cohere better with those of their preferred party, we would expect to see less “split-ticket” voting — people voting for the presidential candidate of one party but the congressional candidate of the other. Figure 22 shows that this has indeed been the case in recent decades.

Figure 22. Ticket-splitting between presidential and House candidates
Share of congressional districts in which the presidential candidate getting the most votes and the House candidate getting the most votes are from different parties. The line is a loess curve. Data source: Brookings Institution, “Vital Statistics on Congress,” 2019, table 2-16.

IS POLARIZATION HARMFUL?

From the perspective of democracy, there is a benefit to having cohesive political parties with distinct policy orientations: it provides voters with clear information about how candidates will behave in office. But there are potential drawbacks, including policymaking gridlock and oppositional beliefs and behavior.

Gridlock in policymaking

In prior eras, legislating often succeeded by fashioning a coalition across party lines. While this was seldom an easy task, party unity and party polarization likely makes it more difficult. That my increase the likelihood of gridlock — difficulty in passing new laws or adjusting existing laws.

Gridlock isn’t an automatic result of party polarization. Parties are ideologically coherent and vote as a bloc in many other democratic nations without producing excessive gridlock.13 The problem is polarized parties in a political system with many “veto points.” Veto points enhance the ability of a determined minority to block policy changes favored by the majority. In the United States they include the separate executive and legislative bodies (in most rich democratic nations the executive, or prime minister, cannot veto laws passed by the legislature), the existence of two legislative bodies (most other countries have just one14), and the filibuster practice in the Senate, which requires 60 out of 100 votes to pass legislation rather than just 51.15 As long as the minority party controls one of the three lawmaking bodies — the House of Representatives, the Senate, or the presidency — it can veto virtually any proposed policy change. Indeed, because it can deploy the filibuster, the minority doesn’t actually need to control any of the three; it simply needs 41 seats in the Senate.16 Given this institutional setup, having two polarized parties of roughly equal popularity is a recipe for gridlock.17

Consistent with this worry, use of the filibuster has increased during the era of party polarization.18

Even so, there are grounds for optimism.19

First, a veto-point-heavy political system with polarized parties doesn’t preclude compromise. If the leadership of both parties is committed to negotiation and positive-sum agreements, the institutional hurdles can be surmounted.

That hasn’t been the case recently, but the fault arguably lies mainly with the Republican Party, which has adopted a stridently oppositional stance. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, longstanding congressional observers who have tended to be evenhanded in their assessment of the parties, put it this way in a 2012 book: “However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major political parties, the Republican party, has become an intransigent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges.”20

This approach began with Newt Gingrich. It has been accentuated by organizations within the Republican Party, such as the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, and by organizations outside the party, such as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity.21

Can the Republican Party’s leadership pull back toward the center and abandon the oppositional culture that has dominated the party’s approach of late? One conceivable trigger is a decisive loss in an otherwise winnable presidential election. This nearly happened in 2016, though Donald Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries and then in the general election has moved the party even further toward an oppositional stance.

A push toward Republican moderation could come from the growing importance of working-class whites as a constituency for the party. Some prominent voices on America’s right — David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David Frum, Charles Murray, Ramesh Ponnuru, Reihan Salam, among others — have noted that this group is struggling economically and could benefit from government help.22 That could encourage some Republicans to soften their opposition to taxes and government social programs.

Another way to hasten the demise of Republican extremism would be a well-funded organization dedicated to supporting moderate Republicans in primary campaigns against far-right challengers.23

A more pessimistic take suggests that the problem is no longer just the Republican Party’s oppositional culture. In this view, the sorting of Americans into distinct, cohesive political parties is based not only on issue preferences but also on identities. And those identities increasingly overlap. Republicans see themselves as white, religious, rural, and male, while Democrats view themselves as racially diverse, secular, urban, and gender-neutral. Evidence on group psychology suggests that in this type of scenario, group members come to care more about defeating the opposing team than about the substance of outcomes.24 That’s a recipe for even more gridlock.

A second potential route out of gridlock is a shift in the balance of Americans’ party preferences. Party polarization in a veto-point-heavy political system is less likely to produce gridlock if one party has the support of a significant majority of voters.25 At the moment, the United States is more or less a 50-50 nation; each party is preferred by about half of the electorate. That seems unlikely to persist over the long run. If and when public opinion shifts in favor of one of the parties, that party will likely have more opportunity to implement its preferred policy changes.

A third cause for optimism — perhaps the most important one — is that despite the strong incentives for legislative paralysis, there hasn’t actually been a slowdown in the federal government’s passage of major laws. The total number of laws passed has declined steadily, but congress has been combining more and more policy change into fewer and larger bills.26 Some have been passed along party lines, with the Senate sometimes sidestepping the filibuster via the reconciliation procedure. For others, passage has involved compromise across the two parties.27

A fourth consideration is that gridlock in the federal government may encourage state and local governments to become more active in implementing policy change. With 50 state governments and hundreds of city and county governments, in some of them one of the parties will have a sufficiently strong majority to be able to enact much of its preferred agenda.28

Oppositional beliefs and behavior, negative partisanship, and quality of life

Most of us don’t have sufficient time or interest to develop an informed opinion on every aspect of life. Consequently, we often look to our identity(ies) for queues. We see ourself as a member of a racial or ethnic or regional group, as part of a generation or cohort, as a follower of a particular religion or sports team or musical genre, and so on. We draw upon one or more of these identities in deciding what we believe and how we should behave.

As America’s two dominant political parties have become more coherent and cohesive in their policy positions and as Americans have sorted themselves more cleanly into the parties, party affiliation (“political partisanship”) has become an increasingly important identity for many Americans. And so our preferred political party increasingly determines what we believe and how we act.29

Here are just a few examples:

We saw earlier that since the early 1990s, Americans who identify as Democrat or Republican have increasingly differed in their views on issues such as abortion and immigration. This is partly because people with a particular view on an issue increasingly choose their party based on that view, but it’s also because people who identify with one or the other of the two parties increasingly choose their view on particular issues based on what their preferred party favors.

Americans increasingly choose where to live based on their political party preference. We’ve become more likely to move into and remain in areas where a large share of other residents hold likeminded political sentiments, with Democrats wanting to live near other Democrats and Republicans wanting to live near other Republicans.30

Party preference even affects what Americans choose to eat and drink.31

This might not be a bad thing in and of itself. The problem is that, as an oppositional sensibility spills over from politics into other aspects of life, it may have increased frustration, anger, and hostility among the two camps. And this is amplified by the tendency toward negative partisanship, whereby people increasingly focus not on what they like about their team but instead on what they dislike about the other team. “Republicans are uneducated racists who don’t believe in science!” “Democrats want to force everyone to move to the city and become a vegan!” “And they want to cancel Christmas!”

Figure 23 shows that since the early 2000s the share of self-identified Republicans who have a “very unfavorable” view of the Democratic Party has increased sharply — by about 40 percentage points — as has the share of self-identified Democrats who have a very unfavorable view of the Republican Party.

Figure 23. Very unfavorable view of the other party
The chart on the left shows the share of self-identified Republicans who say they have a very unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. The chart on the right shows the share of self-identified Democrats who say they have a very unfavorable view of the Republican Party. Excludes those who “lean” Republican or Democratic. Question: “Would you say your overall opinion of the _____ Party is very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, or very unfavorable?” Source: Pew Research Center, “As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System,” 2022.

As political partisanship becomes more all-encompassing, oppositional, and negative, so does our lived experience. It used to be that if a coworker or neighbor or family member was a Republican and I was a Democrat, we could simply avoid talking about politics. But if more and more of life aligns with our political party preferences, there is less room for common ground — and less ability, perhaps, to just get along.

It’s too early to know how large an effect this is, and whether it will continue.

SUMMARY

Americans haven’t spread apart in their views on policy questions, but they’ve sorted themselves more cleanly into our two political parties. The parties have sorted into distinct groups and moved away from the center.

Given America’s political institutions, this has made gridlock more likely. Yet there are some reasons for optimism: the possibility of the Republican Party shifting away from its oppositional approach, the likelihood that the country will move away from its current 50-50 split, the federal government’s continued ability to pass major legislation, and the ability of subnational governments to act even when the federal government doesn’t.

More problematic may be the way in which political polarization has been spilling over into other realms of life as party preference has become an increasingly important identity for Americans.

  1. David Brooks, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible,” The Atlantic, 2001; Pew Research Center, “Evenly Divided and Increasingly Polarized,” 2003; Earl Black and Merle Black, Divided America, Simon and Schuster, 2007; Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, Houghton Mifflin, 2008; Alan I. Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center, Yale University Press, 2010; Danny Hayes, “The ‘Words Hurt’ Model of Polarization,” Washington Post: Wonkblog, 2013; Pew Research Center, “Political Polarization in the American Public,” 2014; James E. Campbell, Polarized: Making Sense of Divided America, Princeton University Press, 2016. ↩︎
  2. See also Paul DiMaggio, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson, “Have Americans’ Social Attitudes Become More Polarized?,” American Journal of Sociology, 1996; Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All, Viking, 1998; John H. Evans, “Have Americans’ Attitudes Become More Polarized? An Update,” Social Science Quarterly, 2003; Michael Barber and Nolan McCarty, “Causes and Consequences of Polarization,” in Negotiating Agreement in Politics, edited by Jane Mansbridge and Cathie Jo Martin, American Political Science Association, 2013. ↩︎
  3. Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America, MIT Press, 2006; Barber and McCarty, “Causes and Consequences of Polarization”; Christopher Hare and Keith T. Poole, “The Polarization of Contemporary American Politics,” Polity, 2014. ↩︎
  4. Delia Baldassarri and Andrew Gelman, “Partisans without Constraint: Political Polarization and Trends in American Public Opinion,” American Journal of Sociology, 2008; Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2008. ↩︎
  5. Keith T. Poole and Christopher Hare, “An Update on Political Polarization (through 2011),” Voteview, 2012. ↩︎
  6. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, Harper, 1957. ↩︎
  7. Barber and McCarty, “Causes and Consequences of Polarization,” pp. 31-32; Richard H. Pildes, “Small-Donor-Based Campaign-Finance Reform and Political Polarization,” Yale Law Journal Forum, 2019. ↩︎
  8. Barber and McCarty, “Causes and Consequences of Polarization”. ↩︎
  9. Keith Poole, “Party Unity Scores.” ↩︎
  10. Morris P. Fiorina with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, Pearson Longman, 2005; Alan I. Abramowitz and Kyle L. Saunders, “Is Polarization a Myth?,” Journal of Politics, 2008; Matthew Levendusky, The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans, University of Chicago Press, 2009; Baldassarri and Gelman, “Partisans without Constraint: Political Polarization and Trends in American Public Opinion”; Pew Research Center, “Trends in American Values: 1987-2012,” 2012; Barber and McCarty, “Causes and Consequences of Polarization”; Pew Research Center, “Political Polarization in the American Public.” ↩︎
  11. Pew Research Center, “Political Polarization in the American Public,” pp. 6, 10. ↩︎
  12. For additional examples, see Pew Research Center, “Political Polarization in the American Public,” p. 28. ↩︎
  13. David W. Brady, “Sure, Congress Is Polarized. But Other Legislatures Are More So,” in Political Polarization in American Politics, edited by Daniel J. Hopkins and John Sides, Bloomsbury. ↩︎
  14. Actually, in many democratic countries there are two bodies of parliament — a lower house and an upper house — but only one has the ability to pass laws. ↩︎
  15. Evelyne Huber, Charles Ragin, and John D. Stephens, “Social Democracy, Christian Democracy, Constitutional Structure and the Welfare State,” American Journal of Sociology, 1993; George Tsebelis, “Decision Making in Political Systems,” British Journal of Political Science, 1995; Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy, Princeton University Press, 1998; Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, “Comparative Perspectives on Inequality and the Quality of Democracy in the United States,” Perspectives on Politics, 2011. Lobbying, too, plays a role in minimizing policy change; see Frank Baumgartner, Jeffrey M. Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David C. Kimball, and Beth L. Leech, Lobbying and Policy Change, University of Chicago Press, 2009. There is the additional possibility of veto by the judicial branch. ↩︎
  16. The majority in the Senate can circumvent the filibuster via a procedure known as “reconciliation,” but this can be used only for a narrow range of bills. ↩︎
  17. Barber and McCarty, “Causes and Consequences of Polarization”. ↩︎
  18. Lane Kenworthy, “Democracy,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  19. For a pessimistic view, see Matthew Yglesias, “American Democracy Is Doomed,” Vox, 2015. ↩︎
  20. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, Basic Books, 2012, p. xiv. See also Ornstein and Mann, “The Republicans Waged a Three-Decade War on Government. They Got Trump,” Vox, 2016. ↩︎
  21. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Oxford University Press, 2012. ↩︎
  22. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, Grand New Party, Doubleday, 2008; David Frum, “The Vanishing Republican Voter,” New York Times, 2008; David Brooks, “The Party of Work,” New York Times, 2012; Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Crown Forum, 2012; Ramesh Ponnuru, “Reaganism after Reagan,” New York Times, 2013. ↩︎
  23. Michael Tomasky, “Moderate Republicans, Unite!,” New York Times, 2016. ↩︎
  24. Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, University of Chicago Press, 2018. ↩︎
  25. Morris P. Fiorina, “Gridlock Is Bad. The Alternative Is Worse,” in Political Polarization in American Politics, edited by Daniel J. Hopkins and John Sides, Bloomsbury; Gary Jacobsen, “Political Polarization and Gridlock,” presented at the Yankelovich Center Retreat, University of California-San Diego, 2016. ↩︎
  26. Kenworthy, “Democracy.” ↩︎
  27. David R. Mayhew, Partisan Balance: Why Political Parties Don’t Kill the U.S. Constitutional System, Princeton University Press, 2011; James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee, “Non-Party Government: Bipartisan Lawmaking and Party Power in Congress,” Perspectives on Politics, 2019. ↩︎
  28. Thad Kousser, “Gridlock and the States,” presented at the Yankelovich Center Retreat, University of California-San Diego, 2016. ↩︎
  29. Bernard Berelson, Paul Lazarsfeld, and William McPhee, Voting, University of Chicago Press, 1954; Campbell et al, The American Voter; Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists, Princeton University Press, 2016; Amanda Taub, “Why Americans Vote ‘Against Their Interest’: Partisanship,” New York Times, 2017; Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, University of Chicago Press, 2018; John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America, Princeton University Press, 2018; Joshua J. Dyck and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz, The Power of Partisanship, Oxford University Press, 2023. ↩︎
  30. Bishop, The Big Sort; Wendy Tam Cho, James G. Gimpel, and Iris S. Hui, “Voter Migration and the Geographic Sorting of the American Electorate,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2013; Craig Gilbert, “Dividing Lines: Democratic, Republican Voters Worlds Apart in Divided Wisconsin,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2014; Jesse Sussell and James A. Thomson, “Are Changing Constituencies Driving Rising Polarization in the U.S. House of Representatives,” Rand, 2014. Some research questions this conclusion: Samuel J. Abrams and Morris P. Fiorina, “‘The Big Sort’ That Wasn’t: A Skeptical Reexamination,” PS: Politics and Political Science, 2012; Clayton Nall and Jonathan Mummolo, “Why Partisans Don’t Sort: How Neighborhood Quality Concerns Limit Americans’ Pursuit of Like-Minded Neighbors,” 2013. ↩︎
  31. Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz, The Power of Partisanship. ↩︎