Causes of Ideological Polarization in the US
The concept of political polarization. Electorate coverage of polarization. The political consequences of populism. The influence of the president on the polarization of the population. The link between political polarization and social problems.
| Рубрика | Политология |
| Вид | статья |
| Язык | английский |
| Дата добавления | 10.08.2020 |
| Размер файла | 407,3 K |
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Although the trends of mutual negative perception between the party groups have long been observed, in our opinion, the current interparty animosity has been caused by the populist influence. This statement is bolstered by the fact that under Trump Republicans became more hostile to Democrats, than vice versa. This is so, because the influence of the Trump movement obviously has stronger effect on the supporters than on the opposition.
In specific, in one of the last sections of Chapter 3 we showed that currently Republicans assess their Democrat counterparts significantly colder than Democrats assess Republicans. The conservative partisans are significantly more likely to attribute negative qualities to the other party. They are less prone to sharing nonpolitical goals with Democrats and tend to reject opposite ideas as viable. Most importantly, the clear majority of Republicans does not want to reach compromise with the other party and advocates for pushing forward the conservative policies no matter what. In the meantime, the majority of Democrats seeks common ground and compromise with Republicans. These tendencies are persistent, despite the fact that voters from both groups are equally polarized and admit the lack of mutual understanding and dialogue. The fact that party distancing turned into hostility under the Trump's administration and did not manifest itself in this form before him, allow us to conclude that the Trump phenomenon became the main driver behind the public political animosity. Consequently, our results show one more way in which populism can undermine democracy.
Conclusion
The main goal of this thesis was to analyze the process of popular political polarization in the US. In specific, the initial hypothesis suggested the idea that the populist movement boosted the existing process of differentiation and qualitatively changed its character.
In the first chapter, we created the theoretical framework for our analysis and set the clear boundaries of the examined phenomena. We also picked the criteria, necessary for assessing the practical implications of the discussed concepts.
In the second chapter, we discussed the process of political polarization before the rise of the Trump phenomenon. We confirmed that both the process of party sorting and the divergence of political attitudes started long before Trump and reached intense levels by 2016 elections. We also found out that the President can enhance party affiliation and political participation in general by mobilizing voters during the election seasons. We continued by claiming that Barack Obama managed to mobilize large groups of voters, based on the racial identities. The trend is valid for both his supporters and opponents. Subsequently, we came to a conclusion that popular polarization before Trump primarily manifested itself as the race-based party sorting without significant left-right distancing, as opposed to the elite polarization, which was marked by significant divergence. Finally, we found out that among the US electorate liberal democracy became a less popular form of governance, while the popularity of authoritarian alternatives has been on the rise. As a result, all these factors combined created a demand for the populist movement that was satisfied by Donald Trump.
In the third chapter, we discussed the essence of the Trump phenomenon and its implications on the political polarization. We established that the essence of Trumpism completely falls into the frames of the populist ideology. After that, we examined the statistical data on public opinion and proved that Trump's presidency qualitatively changed the process of political polarization. In specific, we proved that voters became more politically engaged and ideologically consistent, which significantly increased the process of party sorting. Although this process existed under Obama as well, it was mainly related to the “identity voting” and “racial partisanship”, unlike the sorting under Trump that was closely related to the full-fledged ideological sorting. On top of that, we observed the significant rise in party animosity. In other words, the hostility, mutual distrust and negative assessment between the large partisan groups became the predominant tendencies in political polarization, which gives way to pernicious polarization and “us vs. them” psychology, when politics turn into the zero sum game. Although this trend was observed for both parties, the Republican voters became significantly more hostile to the other party, which suggests that there is a connection between this behavior and the populist influence of Donald Trump's movement. In our view, it proves that the ideological sorting and the popular animosity is the result of the populist influence.
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