Picture of a Polarized Congress
The deadlock between Republicans and Democrats is verified by a graphical mapping technique and analyzed by one of the method’s scholar-inventors.
By Keith Poole
Even the most casual of political observers have noticed that American politics has grown more divisive, charged, and dysfunctional in recent years. The political parties seem to have become ever more distant from one another, with few national political leaders staking out the middle ground. Commentators use the term “polarization” to describe this phenomenon. But can political polarization—defined, say, as the distance between Democrats and Republicans in Congress—actually be measured? The answer is yes, and our results illustrate the full extent to which polarization is now part of the American political zeitgeist.
much more & graphs
ftp://voteview.com/wf1/ViewpointPolarization.pdf
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