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"Toward a Theory of Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies: Comparative Evidence and Possible Remedies" Forthcoming in a Special Issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, guest editors Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, January 2019.
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This article compares the dynamics in eleven case studies analyzed in this special issue to draw conclusions about antecedents of severe political and societal polarization, characteristics and mechanisms of such polarization in action, and consequences for democracy. We find that neither any specific underlying cleavages nor any particular institutional make-up explains the emergence of pernicious polarization. Instead it arises when polarizing political entrepreneurs exploit existing grievances with Us vs Them discourse to mobilize voters, and opposing political elites reciprocate the polarizing tactics. We further generate hypotheses toward a theory of pernicious polarization and its consequences for democracy, explaining various outcomes in terms of the political construction of the polarization around 'formative rifts', the relative capacity of opposing political blocs to mobilize voters versus relying on institutional mechanisms such as courts and military to constrain the executive, and the strategic and ideological aims of the polarizing actors. We conclude with reflections on how to combat pernicious polarization.
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Significance
Support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election was widely attributed to citizens who were “left behind” economically. These claims were based on the strong cross-sectional relationship between Trump support and lacking a college education. Using a representative panel from 2012 to 2016, I find that change in financial wellbeing had little impact on candidate preference. Instead, changing preferences were related to changes in the party’s positions on issues related to American global dominance and the rise of a majority–minority America: issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status. Results highlight the importance of looking beyond theories emphasizing changes in issue salience to better understand the meaning of election outcomes when public preferences and candidates’ positions are changing.
Polarization does not necessarily pit left against right, rich against poor, secular against religious, or ethnicity against ethnicity. Rather than polarizing along deep social or ideological cleavages, today’s democracies often polarize over the perceived abuse of power by popularly elected chief executives. We argue that such conflicts are built into the definition and design of democracy, which requires both vertical accountability (i.e., inclusivity) and horizontal accountability (i.e., constraints) and divides sovereignty into separate institutions. We illustrate our institutional theory of polarization through a comparative analysis of polarizing crises in five Asian democracies since 2000. What mattered most for these crises’ severity and eventual resolution was not the depth of social cleavages, but how the leading elite opponents of polarizing figures managed their removal from office.
This article describes and discusses the new generation of methodological responses to measuring democracy and related issues generated by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). V-Dem is distinct in several regards in addition to its unique level of disaggregation, by the combination of: historical data extending back to 1900 and for a large selection among them to 1789 for many countries in the world; use of multiple, independent coders for each evaluative question; inter-coder reliability tests incorporated into a custom designed Bayesian item-response theory measurement model; provision of confidence bounds for all point estimates associated with expert-coded questions as well as for all indices; multiple indices reflecting varying theories of democracy; fully transparent aggregation procedures; and that all data are made freely available, including original coder-level judgments (exclusive of any personal identifying information).
Over the past decades, the ability of liberal democracies around the world to translate popular views into public policy has declined. This is a result of two major developments: Legislatures have become less reflective of popular opinion because of the growing role of money in politics. At the same time, they have also become less powerful because of the growing importance of bureaucratic agencies, central banks, judicial review, free trade, and international institutions. But there are no easy solutions, since some of these institutions are needed to meet high expectations on government performance. The “technocratic dilemma” thus poses a real threat to liberal democracy’s ability to meet the public’s twin demands of responsiveness and performance. © 2018 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press.
This article argues that a common pattern and set of dynamics characterizes severe political and societal polarization in different contexts around the world, with pernicious consequences for democracy. Moving beyond the conventional conceptualization of polarization as ideological distance between political parties and candidates, we offer a conceptualization of polarization highlighting its inherently relational nature and its instrumental political use. Polarization is a process whereby the normal multiplicity of differences in a society increasingly align along a single dimension and people increasingly perceive and describe politics and society in terms of “Us” versus “Them.” The politics and discourse of opposition and the social–psychological intergroup conflict dynamics produced by this alignment are a main source of the risks polarization generates for democracy, although we recognize that it can also produce opportunities for democracy. We argue that contemporary examples of polarization follow a frequent pattern whereby polarization is activated when major groups in society mobilize politically to achieve fundamental changes in structures, institutions, and power relations. Hence, newly constructed cleavages are appearing that underlie polarization and are not easily measured with the conventional Left–Right ideological scale. We identify three possible negative outcomes for democracy—“gridlock and careening,” “democratic erosion or collapse under new elites and dominant groups,” and “democratic erosion or collapse with old elites and dominant groups,” and one possible positive outcome—“reformed democracy.” Drawing on literature in psychology and political science, the article posits a set of causal mechanisms linking polarization to harm to democracy and illustrates the common patterns and pernicious consequences for democracy in four country cases: varying warning signs of democratic erosion in Hungary and the United States, and growing authoritarianism in Turkey and Venezuela.
As political and societal polarization deepens, democracies are under stress around the world. This article examines the complex relationship and causal direction between democracy and polarization and posits three theoretical possibilities: (1) polarization contributes to democratic backsliding and decay, (2) polarization results from democratic crisis, and (3) polarization contributes to democratic deepening. We argue “politics” is central to polarization and identify as a key feature of the process of polarization the manner in which it simplifies the normal complexity of politics and social relations. Polarization does so by aligning otherwise unrelated divisions, emasculating cross-cutting cleavages, and dividing society and politics into two separate, opposing, and unyielding blocks. As such, it often has pernicious consequences for democracy, emerging as an intended or unintended consequence of political interest–based and purposeful political mobilization. Polarization over the very concept of democracy may also be the product of democratic crisis. Finally, in certain circumstances, polarization may strengthen democratic institutions and citizen choice. The article then introduces the articles in this issue that address these three theoretical and empirical possibilities.