Polarized America, second edition

Polarized America, second edition PDF

Author: Nolan McCarty

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-02-26

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0262528622

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Updated analysis of how the increasing polarization of American politics has been accompanied and accelerated by greater income inequality. The idea of America as politically polarized—that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states—has become a cliché. What commentators miss, however, is that increasing polarization has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and economic changes—most notably, a parallel rise in income inequality. In this second edition of Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal use the latest data to examine the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces. They find that inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality. Paul Krugman called the first edition of Polarized America “Important.... Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what's happening to America.” The second edition has been thoroughly brought up to date. All statistical analyses, tables, and figures have been updated with data that run through 2012 or 2014, and the text has been revised to reflect the latest evidence. The chapter on campaign finance has been completely rewritten (with Adam Bonica as coauthor); the analysis shows that with so much “soft” money coming from very wealthy ideological extremists, there is even greater campaign contribution inequality than income inequality.

Polarized America, second edition

Polarized America, second edition PDF

Author: Nolan McCarty

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-02-26

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0262528622

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Updated analysis of how the increasing polarization of American politics has been accompanied and accelerated by greater income inequality. The idea of America as politically polarized—that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states—has become a cliché. What commentators miss, however, is that increasing polarization has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and economic changes—most notably, a parallel rise in income inequality. In this second edition of Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal use the latest data to examine the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces. They find that inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality. Paul Krugman called the first edition of Polarized America “Important.... Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what's happening to America.” The second edition has been thoroughly brought up to date. All statistical analyses, tables, and figures have been updated with data that run through 2012 or 2014, and the text has been revised to reflect the latest evidence. The chapter on campaign finance has been completely rewritten (with Adam Bonica as coauthor); the analysis shows that with so much “soft” money coming from very wealthy ideological extremists, there is even greater campaign contribution inequality than income inequality.

Why We're Polarized

Why We're Polarized PDF

Author: Ezra Klein

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2020-01-28

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1476700397

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022 One of Bill Gates’s “5 books to read this summer,” this New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller shows us that America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this “superbly researched” (The Washington Post) and timely book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us—and how we are polarizing it—with disastrous results. “The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.” “A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis” (The New York Times Book Review), Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together. Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis. “Well worth reading” (New York magazine), this is an “eye-opening” (O, The Oprah Magazine) book that will change how you look at politics—and perhaps at yourself.

Culture War?

Culture War? PDF

Author: Morris P. Fiorina

Publisher: Longman Publishing Group

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Part of the Great Questions in Politics series, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America combines polling data with a compelling narrative to debunk commonly-believed myths about American politics--particularly the claim that Americans are deeply divided in their fundamental political views. This second edition of Culture War? features a new chapter that demonstrates how the elections of 2004 reinforce the book's original argument that Americans are no more divided now than they were in the past. In addition, the text has been updated throughout to reflect data from the 2004 elections. Authored by one of the most respected political scientists in America, this brief, trade-like text looks at controversial and hot topic issues (such as homosexuality, abortion, etc.) and argues that most Americans are not polarized in relation to them.

The Second Civil War

The Second Civil War PDF

Author: Ronald Brownstein

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2008-09-30

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 9780143114321

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In recent years American politics has seemingly become much more partisan, more zero-sum, more vicious, and less able to confront the real problems our nation faces. What has happened? In The Second Civil War, respected political commentator Ronald Brownstein diagnoses the electoral, demographic, and institutional forces that have wreaked such change over the American political landscape, pulling politics into the margins and leaving precious little common ground for compromise. The Second Civil War is not a book for Democrats or Republicans but for all Americans who are disturbed by our current political dysfunction and hungry for ways to understand it—and move beyond it.

Polarized

Polarized PDF

Author: James E. Campbell

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-03-27

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0691180865

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An eye-opening look at how and why America has become so politically polarized Many continue to believe that the United States is a nation of political moderates. In fact, it is a nation divided. It has been so for some time and has grown more so. This book provides a new and historically grounded perspective on the polarization of America, systematically documenting how and why it happened. Polarized presents commonsense benchmarks to measure polarization, draws data from a wide range of historical sources, and carefully assesses the quality of the evidence. Through an innovative and insightful use of circumstantial evidence, it provides a much-needed reality check to claims about polarization. This rigorous yet engaging and accessible book examines how polarization displaced pluralism and how this affected American democracy and civil society. Polarized challenges the widely held belief that polarization is the product of party and media elites, revealing instead how the American public in the 1960s set in motion the increase of polarization. American politics became highly polarized from the bottom up, not the top down, and this began much earlier than often thought. The Democrats and the Republicans are now ideologically distant from each other and about equally distant from the political center. Polarized also explains why the parties are polarized at all, despite their battle for the decisive median voter. No subject is more central to understanding American politics than political polarization, and no other book offers a more in-depth and comprehensive analysis of the subject than this one.

Polarized

Polarized PDF

Author: James E. Campbell

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-03-27

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0691180865

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An eye-opening look at how and why America has become so politically polarized Many continue to believe that the United States is a nation of political moderates. In fact, it is a nation divided. It has been so for some time and has grown more so. This book provides a new and historically grounded perspective on the polarization of America, systematically documenting how and why it happened. Polarized presents commonsense benchmarks to measure polarization, draws data from a wide range of historical sources, and carefully assesses the quality of the evidence. Through an innovative and insightful use of circumstantial evidence, it provides a much-needed reality check to claims about polarization. This rigorous yet engaging and accessible book examines how polarization displaced pluralism and how this affected American democracy and civil society. Polarized challenges the widely held belief that polarization is the product of party and media elites, revealing instead how the American public in the 1960s set in motion the increase of polarization. American politics became highly polarized from the bottom up, not the top down, and this began much earlier than often thought. The Democrats and the Republicans are now ideologically distant from each other and about equally distant from the political center. Polarized also explains why the parties are polarized at all, despite their battle for the decisive median voter. No subject is more central to understanding American politics than political polarization, and no other book offers a more in-depth and comprehensive analysis of the subject than this one.

Polarized America

Polarized America PDF

Author: Nolan McCarty

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2008-01-25

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0262303272

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The idea of America as politically polarized—that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states—has become a cliché. What commentators miss, however, is that increasing polarization in recent decades has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and economic changes—most notably, a parallel rise in income inequality. In Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal examine the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces, characterizing it as a dance of give and take and back and forth causality. Using NOMINATE (a quantitative procedure that, like interest group ratings, scores politicians on the basis of their roll call voting records) to measure polarization in Congress and public opinion, census data and Federal Election Commission finance records to measure polarization among the public, the authors find that polarization and income inequality fell in tandem from 1913 to 1957 and rose together dramatically from 1977 on; they trace a parallel rise in immigration beginning in the 1970s. They show that Republicans have moved right, away from redistributive policies that would reduce income inequality. Immigration, meanwhile, has facilitated the move to the right: non-citizens, a larger share of the population and disproportionately poor, cannot vote; thus there is less political pressure from the bottom for redistribution than there is from the top against it. In "the choreography of American politics" inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality.

Polarization

Polarization PDF

Author: Nolan McCarty

Publisher: What Everyone Needs to Know (H

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0190867787

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"The weeks following the election and inauguration of Donald J. Trump have been a time for reflection about the state of American politics and its deep ideological, cultural, racial, regional, and economic divisions. But one aspect that the contemporary discussions often miss is that these fissures have been opening over several decades and are deeply rooted in the structure of American politics and society. Long before the historically divisive presidential election of 2016, the polarization of American politics has been an important concern of scholars, journalists, and elected officials. Unfortunately, there have been few, if any, attempts to synthesize these debates in ways that are accessible to the educated general public. Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know