TY - BOOK AU - Campbell,James E. TI - Polarized: making sense of a divided America SN - 9780691172163 AV - JK1726 .C359 2016 U1 - 320.97309/051 23 PY - 2016///] CY - Princeton PB - Princeton University Press KW - Democratic Party KW - USA KW - gnd KW - Republican Party KW - Umschulungswerkstätten für Siedler und Auswanderer KW - Bitterfeld KW - Polarization (Social sciences) KW - United States KW - Divided government KW - Political culture KW - Political participation KW - Party affiliation KW - Political parties KW - Right and left (Political science) KW - POLITICAL SCIENCE KW - Political Process KW - Political Parties KW - bisacsh KW - Political Ideologies KW - Democracy KW - Public Policy KW - General KW - fast KW - Politics and government KW - Gesellschaft KW - Polarisierung KW - Spaltung KW - gtt N1 - Includes bibliographical references and index; Preparing the Foundation. Knowns and unknowns -- History and theories -- The Polarized Electorate. Ideology and polarization -- Issues and polarization -- Circumstantial evidence -- The Polarized Parties. Why are the parties more polarized? -- One-sided party polarization? -- Why are the parties polarized at all? -- Polarization and democracy -- Appendices: Five ideological series ; Regression analyses of ideological orientations N2 - 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 UR - http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i10846.pdf UR - http://worldcat.org/oclc/951413738 ER -