Book

Polarized : making sense of a divided America

Campbell, James E., 1952- author

Overview

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.\"-- Provided by publisher.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Subject: Polarization (Social sciences) United States. / Divided government United States. / Political culture United States. / Political participation United States. / Party affiliation United States. / Political parties United States. / Right and left (Political science) United States. / POLITICAL SCIENCE Political Process Political Parties. / POLITICAL SCIENCE Political Ideologies Democracy. / POLITICAL SCIENCE Public Policy General. / Divided government. / Party affiliation. / Polarization (Social sciences) / Political culture. / Political participation. / Political parties. / Politics and government. / Right and left (Political science) / United States Politics and government. / United States.
• ISBN: 9780691172163, 0691172161

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Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
JK1726.C359 2016	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE