America’s political scientists are worried about “lethal partisanship”

THE TAGLINE for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) held in Seattle last weekend read “Promoting Pluralism.” Under the sunny geometric windows of the city’s convention centre, and through the poorly lit rectangles of Zoom rooms, scholars met to discuss, among other things, the various threats to American democracy, and whether the country’s polarised political parties could peacefully coexist. Like experts on the use of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, the spectre of some disastrous future hung over the discussions and was made only slightly less alarming by the technical language used to describe it.

Scholars of American politics are particularly dismayed by rising levels of “affective polarisation,” the political science term for the hostility one person feels towards members of the other party relative to the feelings they have towards members of their own party. Levels of affective polarisation have risen more than two-fold since the 1970s when the American National Election Studies, a quadrennial academic survey started at the University of Michigan, began asking citizens to rate how they felt about members of either major party. In 1978, according to the survey, the difference between Americans’ ratings of members of their own and ratings of members of the other party on a 100-point “feeling thermometer” scale was 27 points. The gap had widened to 56 by 2020.

Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins University calls this phenomenon “identity-based” polarisation. In her 2018 book “Uncivil Agreement” Ms Mason crunched a mass of survey data to reveal how ideological, religious and racial identities have become “sorted” into overlapping mega-identities captured almost entirely by the words “Democrat” and “Republican.” One result, she concludes, is that isolated and warring tribes have become “relatively unresponsive to changing information or real national problems.”