BCAD director and faculty affiliate David Broockman’s research on the polarization and political accountability was featured in The New York Times

David Broockman was quoted in The New York Times:

As Trump rose to the presidency, one explanation that swept political science was the power of polarization, specifically a phenomenon known as affective polarization, but a keen group of scholars now suggests that this approach is inadequate.

It would be hard to describe the state of political competition in America more accurately than as “a poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralization” — the subtitle of an article, “Political Sectarianism in America,” published by 15 important scholars in Science magazine in November 2020, including Eli FinkelPeter DittoShanto IyengarLilliana MasonBrendan Nyhan and Linda Skitka.

David E. BroockmanJoshua L. Kalla and Sean J. Westwood, political scientists at Berkeley, Yale and Dartmouth, challenge the Science magazine argument. Instead, they make the case in their December 2020 paper, “Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not,” that partisan hostility may be destructive, but attempts to moderate it will not diminish party loyalty or tolerance for anti-democratic changes in election law or the decline in political accountability.

The full article is available here.

Original article

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