Samuel J. Abrams

“The Big Sort” That Wasn't: A Skeptical Reexamination

In 2008 journalist Bill Bishop achieved the kind of notice that authors dream about. His book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart , was mentioned regularly during the presidential campaign; most notably, former president Bill Clinton urged audiences to read the book. Bishops thesis is that Americans increasingly are choosing to live in neighborhoods populated with people just like themselves. In turn, these residential choices have produced a significant increase in geographic political polarization. Bishop does not contend that people consciously decide to live with fellow Democrats or Republicans; rather political segregation is a byproduct of the correlations between political views and the various demographic and life-style indicators people consider when making residential decisions. Whatever the cause, Bishop contends that the resulting geographic polarization is a troubling and dangerous development.

The 2000 US Presidential Election: Can Retrospective Voting Be Saved?

According to a portrait of elections widely held in academic political science, election outcomes depend on the ‘fundamentals’, especially peace and prosperity. Al Gores election showing in 2000 runs counter to the preceding interpretation of elections. Objective conditions pointed to a comfortable victory, if not a landslide, but Gores narrow popular vote margin fell well below the expectations held by many political scientists. This article attempts to account for Gores under-performance via detailed analyses of National Election Studies surveys. We find that Gores often criticized personality was not a cause of his under-performance. Rather, the major cause was his failure to receive a historically normal amount of credit for the performance of the Clinton administration. Secondary contributors were the drag of Clintons personal affairs and Gores decision to run to the left of where Clinton had positioned the Democratic party. Quite possibly these three factors are logically related: failure to get normal credit reflected Gores peculiar campaign, which in turn reflected fear of association with Clintons behaviour.

Informal Social Networks and Rational Voting

Classical rational choice explanations of voting participation are widely thought to have failed. This article argues that the currently dominant Group Mobilization and Ethical Agency approaches have serious shortcomings in explaining individually rational turnout. It develops an informal social network (ISN) model in which people rationally vote if their informal networks of family and friends attach enough importance to voting, because voting leads to social approval and vice versa. Using results from the social psychology literature, research on social groups in sociology and their own survey data, the authors argue that the ISN model can explain individually rational non-altruistic turnout. If group variables that affect whether voting is used as a marker of individual standing in groups are included, the likelihood of turnout rises dramatically.

American Gridlock: Party Sorting: The Foundations of Polarized Politics

• A political cleavage illustrates polarization when the extremes grow at the expense of the middle. • Whether one looks at partisan, ideological, or issue cleavages, the American electorate shows no evidence of polarization; the middle has not shrunk. • The American electorate has sorted – the parties are more internally homogeneous and more distinct from each other. • Party sorting increases inter-party conflict and makes cross-party compromise more difficult. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the national media adopted a narrative promoted by a coterie of scholars, pundits, and politicos. According to the narrative, Americans were combatants in a culture war between red and blue states. Our country had become a 50/50 nation with no neutrals to mediate between the opposing sides. The United States of America had deteriorated into the Divided States of America. This narrative nicely met the mediaes concept of newsworthiness – division, polarization, battles, war! But to political scientists familiar with public opinion data, the narrative was puzzling. If one thinks about polarization in partisan terms, the American public did not look much different than it had in the 1970s. As shown in Figure 1, the proportion of Democrats was a little smaller than in the 1970s and the proportion of Republicans a little larger. After 1984, there is almost no change. Rather than the middle – in this case, nonpartisans – having disappeared, it is slightly larger today than in the 1970s. Similarly, if one thinks about polarization in ideological terms, the American public looked about the same as it did in the 1970s. The proportion of self-identified liberals – always the least popular label (Free and Cantril 1967; Ellis and Stimson 2012) – trails the proportion of conservatives, which with a few small exceptions, trails the modal category – moderates. Again, the middle has not disappeared. If one thinks about polarization in terms of specific policy issues, the picture is less definitive because we do not have lengthy time series of data such as those previously described. But most data shows the American public clustering in the center, as on the seven-point scales included in the American National Election Studies (ANES) graphed in Figure 3.

Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches

Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. By Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 240p.

Culture War?: The Myth of a Polarized America

35.00. Hyperbole was rampant in the aftermath of the 2000 elections. Pundits, politicos, and journalists asserted that the United States was in the midst of a culture war. The country appeared to be polarized to many, and this polarization reached a crescendo in 2000, with the now “classic” red/blue map of the continental United States serving as the iconic image of this divide and with blabocrats and politicians alike all pronouncing the end of centrism. Notably absent in all this discussion, though, was actual empirical evidence, a sense of historical perspective, and a meaningful explanation for this apparent polarization beyond sophomoric cries of cultural wars and diverging beliefs about morality. While political science as a discipline had considerable expertise to bear on this “cultural divide,” the discipline had remained fairly quiet on this polarization.