1.This tendency persists. A colleague recently spotted in Nashville a bumper sticker with the message “Trump 2020: Make Liberals Cry Again.”
5.For less recent examples, see Judkis 2016; Bernstein 2016; Post Senning 2016; Miller and Nickalls 2016; Brophy Marcus 2016; Cummings 2017; Pulia 2017; and Obeidallah 2017.
1.Addams 1902: 9; Dewey 1927: 325.
2.It should be added that I see no reason to think that the injunction to put politics in its place is conservative in the political sense of that term, either. It is hoped that the view is consistent with political conservatism as well as progressive (in the United States, “liberal”) political platforms.
3.Compare R. Jay Wallace’s (2013: 210ff.) analysis of the “bourgeois predicament.”
4.Concede for the sake of argument that everything is politics. What, then, can we say about politics? What could we say politics is? Once one accepts that everything is politics, anything one says in order to clarify the meaning of the claim must itself be understood as politics, too. Suppose, though, that I am trying to find out what politics is, so that I might come to understand what one might mean by saying that everything is politics. It seems my conceptual and explanatory resources have run out. The assertion that everything is politics threatens to render itself unintelligible.
5.Schumpeter 2008: 269. See Przeworski 1999 and Posner 2003 for current versions of this view. A closely related, though not classically minimalist, view can be found in Achen and Bartels 2016.
6.Schumpeter 2008: 283.
7.Schumpeter 2008: 295.
8.Somin 2016 takes this view that smaller government is the best response to widespread public ignorance; Brennan 2016 defends a similar view, though his is not a view about the size of government, but the extent of popular political power.
1.See Bates 1993 for an account of the legal case and Macedo 2000 for a treatment of the philosophical issues it raises.
2.Lynch 2014: 6.
3.Rousseau 1988: 92.
4.Estlund 2000; Mulligan 2018.
5.Lopez-Guerra 2011; Landemore 2012; Guerrero 2014.
6.See Pateman 1970; Mansbridge 1983; and Barber 2004.
8.Goodin 2000: 92.
11.Pettit 2012: 225.
12.Gutmann and Thompson 2004: 80.
15.Ackerman and Fishkin 2004; Leib 2004.
1.On this, see Jennings and Stoker 2016.
2.See Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2009, and Schmitt and Freire 2012.
4.Pew 2016. See also Taylor 2016a and Taylor 2016b.
5.For skepticism, see Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2005. For other book-length treatments, see Levendusky 2009; Campbell 2016; and Mason 2018. For helpful overviews, see Hetherington 2009; Mason 2015; and Johnston, Manley, and Jones 2016.
6.See Lelkes 2016.
8.Thaler and Sunstein 2008; Thaler and Sunstein 2003.
9.This position is defended in Lanier 2018.
10.Thus Bishop (2009: 40), “The country may be more diverse than ever coast to coast. But look around: our streets are filled with people who live alike, think alike, and vote alike.”
11.Chen and Rodden 2013. See also Tam Cho, Gimpel, and Hui 2013.
12.Iyengar and Krupenkin 2018. See also Williamson 2008.
13.For one example, see Aristotle 1992: VIII.1.
14.Bogardus 1925. See also the first chapter of Mason 2018 for a discussion of the relevant sociological literature.
15.Cahn and Carbone 2010; Pew 2014a: 42–50; Taylor 2016b: 7–9.
16.Tapestry: http://www.esri.com/data/tapestry/zip-lookup. This site is free to use, but it is also a promotional vehicle for additional Esri products that provide even more detailed lifestyle data about regional populations.
17.https://teleport.org/about-us/
21.Skocpol 2013: 212–220.
24.Bonica, Chilton, and Sen 2015.
25.Carney, Jost, Gosling, and Potter 2008.
27.Pew 2014a: 48. Iyengar and Westwood 2015: 691–692.
28.Iyengar and Westwood 2015: 692. See also Huber and Malhotra 2017; and Klofstad, McDermott, and Hatemi 2012.
29.Huber and Malhotra 2017: 278–280.
30.Arfer and Jones 2019. Interestingly this study finds a positive correlation between conservative political affiliation and use of the Ashley Madison website. And Democrats were found to be the most infrequent users of the site.
31.Nicholson, Coe, Emory, and Song 2016.
32.Iyengar and Konitzer 2017: 24.
33.Bishop 2009: 255. Compare Iyengar (2016: 220), “Today, Republicans and Democrats differ not only in their politics, but also in terms of their ethnic, religious, and regional identities”; and Mason (2018: 13), “Democrats and Republicans have become different types of people.” See also Shi, Mast, Weber, Kellum, and Macy 2017.
34.Mason and Wronski 2018: 257.
35.Cf. Bennett 1998.
36.See Hetherington and Weiler 2018 for some current data.
37.For a sampling, see Wilson 2013; Wilson 2014; Weber 2013; and Maheshwari 2018.
38.McConnell, Margalit, Halhorta, and Levendusky 2017: 12–13. See also Gerber and Huber 2009.
39.Bishop 2009: 184.
40.See, for example, Sunstein 2017 and Mutz 2015.
41.See Peterson, Goel, and Iyengar 2017.
42.It is worth noting that currently MSNBC is using the slogan “This is Who We Are” in advertisements for its programming.
43.See, for example, the 2004 PIPA report on “The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters.” See also Kull, Ramsay, and Lewis 2013.
45.This has been a major theme of Sunstein’s work for more than two decades. For the most current treatment, see Sunstein 2017.
46.Sunstein 2017: 154–256.
48.Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012: 408.
53.As I type this sentence, I am reminded that #SecondCivilWar is currently trending on social media. The alt-right conspiracy monger Alex Jones promoted on his website the claim that Democrats were planning to declare war on their fellow citizens on July 4, 2018. This of course did not happen, and Jones was subjected to a mocking campaign on social media with its own hashtag (#SecondCivilWarLetters).
54.Coffey and Joseph 2013: 133; Iyengar and Westwood 2015: 691; and Margolis and Sances 2017.
55.Carney, Jost, Gosling, and Potter 2008: 835.
56.Shah, McLeod, Kim, Lee, Gotlieb, Ho, and Breivik 2007: 219.
57.Mason 2018: 44.
58.Coffey and Joseph 2013: 118.
59.Shah, McLeod, Kim, Lee, Gotlieb, Ho, and Breivik 2007.
60.See Stolle and Micheletti 2013 for a full treatment.
61.Coffey and Joseph 2013: 118.
62.Neither does the NRA online store.
3.For a sample of the genre, see Kruse and Zelizer 2019; Chua 2018; Schneider 2018; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Rosenfeld 2017; and Taylor 2016b.
4.The nomenclature here is tricky. What I’m calling belief polarization is generally known as group polarization. Though it is the more common term, I find “group polarization” misleading in the current context, mainly because what I have just described as political polarization concerns groups, and the contrasting phenomenon has to do with the beliefs of group members. Still, the terms are not entirely satisfactory. Note that the term belief polarization is used by some epistemologists to characterize cases where in the course of a disagreement, interlocutors become more dogmatic. For this use, see Kelly 2008. My use of the term differs from Kelly’s. To add an additional complication, in the course of my argument it will become clear that what I’m calling belief polarization isn’t strictly about beliefs. Alas, sorting out the terminological mess lies far beyond my present objectives.
5.Mason 2018: 60ff.
6.It is so common, in fact, that researchers in 1978 declared that “seldom in the history of social psychology has a nonobvious phenomenon been so firmly grounded in data from across a variety of cultures and dependent measures” (Lamm and Myers 1978: 146). Since that time, the documentation of belief polarization has only further accumulated. The appendix of Sunstein 2009 provides summaries of some of the most important experimental findings.
7.Sunstein 2009: 18–19. Baron, Hoppe, Kao, Brunsman, Linneweh, and Rogers 1996.
8.Moscovici and Zavalloni 1969.
9.Myers and Bishop 1970: 778–779.
11.Hastie, Schkade, and Sunstein 2007. My account here follows the summary in Sunstein 2009: 5–8.
12.In fact, the phenomenon known as “risky shift,” when a group’s post-discussion likeliness to engage in risky collective behavior exceeds any of its individual member’s pre-discussion willingness to endorse that level of risk for the group, is generally understood to be a special manifestation of belief polarization. See Isenberg 1986: 1141. See also the catalogue of “unfortunate events that have been blamed on group polarization” provided in Sia, Tan, and Wei 2002: 71–72. These include the Johnson administration’s decision to escalate the Vietnam War, the risk-taking at NASA that arguably led to the Challenger explosion, and certain failing trends in finance.
13.Schkade, Sunstein, and Kahneman 2000.
14.Johnson, Stemler, and Hunter 1977.
15.We cannot engage the issue here, but note that there is an ongoing dispute among philosophers concerning how degree of belief is best understood. One influential suggestion, proposed by Frank Ramsey (1990), is that degree of belief can be measured by the believer’s willingness to bet a substantial sum of money on the belief’s truth—a higher degree of belief is suggested by a willingness to bet a larger sum of money on the belief’s truth.
16.Burnstein and Vinokur 1977.
17.Sunstein 2017: 72.
18.Myers, Bruggink, Kersting, and Schlosser 1980. See also Zajonc 1968.
19.Sunstein 2009: 40–42.
20.Van Swol 2009: 194.
21.Vinokur and Burnstein 1978.
22.Lamm and Myers 1978: 185.
23.Abrams, Wetherell, Cochrane, Hogg, and Turner 1990.
25.Abrams, Wetherell, Cochrane, Hogg, and Turner 1990. Note also that individuals who have been belief polarized may also be prone to the “backfire effect”; when a belief they hold on the basis of their group identity is contradicted by someone perceived to be outside the relevant group, their confidence in the challenged belief intensifies—they come to hold the belief even more ardently. On this, see Nyhan and Reifler 2010 and Munro and Ditto 1997. But there is a debate regarding the robustness of this phenomenon; see Haglin 2017 and Wood and Porter 2019.
26.I follow the account in Baron, Hoppe, Kao, Brunsman, Linneweh, and Rogers 1996.
27.I set aside cases where a large number of instances of corroboration might itself constitute a kind of evidence.
28.Baron, Hoppe, Kao, Brunsman, Linneweh, and Rogers 1996: 558–559.
29.Sunstein 2009: 29.
30.Baron, Hoppe, Kao, Brunsman, Linneweh, and Rogers 1996: 559.
31.Baron, Hoppe, Kao, Brunsman, Linneweh, and Rogers 1996: 559.
32.Sunstein 2009: 24. See also Pariser 2011 and Vaidhyanathan 2018.
33.Del Vicario, Vivaldo, Bessi, Zollo, Scala, Caldarelli, and Quattrociocchi 2016; see also Garimella and Weber 2017.
34.I invoke Hume’s name with some trepidation. To be clear, my contention is not that this is a view that David Hume affirmed. Neither am I contending that it is a view that he would have embraced. In calling the view Humean, I mean only to highlight that the extremity-shift is initiated by a certain kind of affective change in the subject: the increase in our feeling of self-confidence leads to a shift to a more extreme belief content. I hold that this account fits nicely with Hume’s general conceptions of belief acquisition and belief change, but this demonstration cannot be attempted here.
35.Westfall, Van Boven, Chambers, and Judd 2015.
36.Iyengar and Krupenkin 2018.
38.Marks, Copland, Loh, Sunstein, and Sharot 2018.
39.MacIntyre 1984: 254.
40.Dewey 1939: 367–368.
1.For a summary statement along these lines, as well as citations to documenting literature, see Curato, Dryzek, Ercan, Hendricks, and Niemeyer 2017. Fishkin 2018 is an extended argument for this view.
2.Ackerman and Fishkin 2004; E. Leib 2004.
3.Christopher Karpowitz and Chad Raphael 2014; Grönlund, Bӓchtiger, and Setälä, eds. 2014.
4.Sunstein 2017: 226.
5.See, for example, Bail et al. 2018.
8.For example, see Neblo et al. 2010.
9.For example, Curato et al. (2017: 33) claims that “deliberation is the solution to [belief] polarization,” but then offers as evidence that “polarization is not found” in properly deliberative groups.
11.Sunstein 2017: 91.
12.Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2005; Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2008.