prowag

Clearly appealing to the non-bowl-watching supermajority of the American people, C-SPAN aired this New Year’s Eve morning the panel on partisan polarization from the 2013 State of the Parties Conference at the  Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. As usual, John Green assembled a great meeting.

Click here to watch the panel; I bat lead-off with my co-authored paper with Mike Ensley and Ted Carmines about why Americans can’t get beyond the left-right divide. The panel also includes two very interesting papers giving evidence for the idea that dislike for the other party is a driver of partisan polarization in the electorate.  The first, from David Kimball, Bryce Summary, and Eric Vorst provided evidence that partisans are systematically likely to find that the other side makes them feel angry and afraid. Alan Abramowitz showed evidence of increasing negative affect for the other party as well; his analysis of the American National Election Study data showed that people’s placement of the distance between their own ideological position and the position of their party has not changed much but that the distance between their position and the other party has grown dramatically.