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Polarized Politics

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How is Polarized Politics Strangling Political Trust in our Nation? The increase of legislative polarization tracks the decline in political trust. Aggregate measures of polarization show lower trust in government from 1958 (the first year the trust question was included in the survey conducted by American National Election Study) to 2012 (the most recent survey). There is also a powerful relationship between polarization and economic inequality. Although inequality has a moderate impact by itself on political trust, its indirect link to the issue, through polarization, is much stronger. Partisan conflicts in Congress are the direct results of the expanding ideological gap. Moreover, in the past few elections, we have seen an increasingly …show more content…

The correlation between ideology and party voting for Congress has increased dramatically since 1968. At that time, democratic ballots for House candidates was cast by 60% of democrats and 40% of republicans cast. However, in 2012, these ratios had become 90% and 20% respectively. Some scholars also argue that the two parties are not only more distinctive in their coalitions, but also sorted in more ways than before. Besides ideology, each party has distinctive groups of members and supporters from different income, age, race, religiosity, and region groups. As a result, identifiers with each party now see the other party as threats to their own cultures. They see the policies of the opposition as illegitimate simply because those are based on different sets of ideals or proposed by someone who is so different from them. The increasing differentiation divides people even more on trust in the …show more content…

The nonsensically large number of procedural rules serves more as obstacle than as stimulus for such bills to become law. This, in turn, leads to the reality that only pills that are made up of neutral components can be passed since they require no compromise, and hence, minimal effort, as opposed to their highly charged counterparts which may be contested forever on different debate grounds existing in the process. Furthermore, no bills that come out of this process have the ability to adapt to the economic and social changes awaiting them. McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal (2006) also argue that rising inequality is the key factor underlying Congressional polarization, and in doing so, provide support for the argument that polarization reflects societal tensions. Indeed, there has been an almost perfect correlation between polarization and inequality since 1947 (r^2=.913), while the correlation between polarization and gridlock is weaker (r^2=.348). This leads to an equally powerful relationship between inequality and

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