![]() ![]() But this information can still tell us a lot about our current state of affairs. Some political scientists have pointed out that - viewed within the context of data from the last two centuries - today’s levels of polarization are not such an alarming anomaly compared to those occurring during the time of slavery and similar points along the historical continuum. “In the 1960s, for instance, you had intervals where about 50 percent of the legislators in the two parties overlapped.” “This was certainly not always true,” Lo said. This measure shows how many Republicans lie to the right of the most right-leaning Democrat and how many Democrats lie to the left of the most left-leaning Republicans. This means 85 percent of votes can be differentiated first and foremost on the basis of party affiliation.Īnother way to think about polarization is to look at something called the overlap interval. We typically think of legislators in Congress as lying on the left-right political spectrum, and according to traditional interpretation of the NOMINATE scores, Lo said, the left-right dimension alone accounts for about 85 percent of variance in all roll call voting. “Political polarization has become one of the hottest research topics in political science today,” he said, “in large part because - both in the popular media and research - there is a lot of evidence suggesting that significant partisan impact occurs as a result of it.” Left or right? Political polarization has become one of the hottest research topics in political science today. Now there is a demand to bring these analytical techniques to new environments. His work helps generate Nominal Three-step Estimation (NOMINATE) scores - a multidimensional scaling method that political scientists Keith Poole of the University of Georgia and Howard Rosenthal of Princeton University developed to measure legislators’ liberal-conservative positions based on their roll call voting records.Īccording to Lo, ever-increasing levels of this kind of big data are available to researchers now that computation has become so much cheaper in recent years. He measures levels of polarization between Democrats and Republicans over time through statistical analysis of congressional voting patterns. ![]() James Lo, assistant professor of political science at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, researches political preferences by analyzing voting records, survey data and cross-party affiliations. Political polarization - one factor leading to this gridlock - has become very pronounced.įollowing a period of a much more balanced Congress during the middle of the 20th century, ideological distance between the parties began to grow during the 1970s to the extent that Congress is now more polarized than at any time since the late 1870s Reconstruction Era. Stymied by issues like gun control, immigration and health care, they have been ineffective in brokering compromise, hampering the political process. House and Senate have gained an almost infamous reputation for their ability to create partisan impasse.
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