Polarization, Partisanship, and Health in the United States

Hyperpartisanship and polarization are defining features of contemporary American politics.According to an influential political science measure, Democrats and Republicans in Congress are now further apart ideologically, largely as a result of the GOP's rightward turn, than at any point in the past 150 years (McCarty 2019).Congressional Democrats and Republicans increasingly vote with large majorities of their own party against large majorities from the other party (Lee 2015; McCarty 2019).There are recurrent partisan battles over the federal budget and debt limit, while Democrats and Republicans frequently try to block each other's judicial nominees (Whittington 2018).In the Senate, the filibuster has become much more commonplace as a mechanism for the minority party to stop the majority from passing laws, while rates of legislative gridlock in Congress have risen (Binder 2014).The refusal of President Donald Trump and many Republican lawmakers to accept the results of the 2020 elections, and the efforts by Trump and his allies to stage a coup that would keep him in office, underscore the extent to which American democracy is itself increasingly in peril in a polarized era.This era of extraordinary polarization and partisanship 1 is hardly confined to Washington.Across the country, similar patterns of growing 1. Polarization is often understood as occurring when political parties move further apart on their policy preferences and ideological orientations, although polarization can occur on other dimensions (such as social identity), and partisan conflict between Democrats and Republicans can increase for nonideological reasons (such as a desire to hurt the other party politically).See