Purchase
The Dance Of Ideology And Unequal Riches
The MIT Press
April 2008
On Sale: March 31, 2008
256 pages
ISBN: 0262633612
EAN: 9780262633611
Paperback
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
The idea of America as politically polarized--that there is
an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue
states--has become a cliché. What commentators miss,
however, is that increasing polarization in recent decades
has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and
economic changes--most notably, a parallel rise in income
inequality. In Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith
Poole, and Howard Rosenthal examine the relationships of
polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other
forces, characterizing it as a dance of give and take and
back and forth causality.Using NOMINATE (a quantitative
procedure that, like interest group ratings, scores
politicians on the basis of their roll call voting records)
to measure polarization in Congress and public opinion,
census data and Federal Election Commission finance records
to measure polarization among the public, the authors find
that polarization and income inequality fell in tandem from
1913 to 1957 and rose together dramatically from 1977 on;
they trace a parallel rise in immigration beginning in the
1970s. They show that Republicans have moved right, away
from redistributive policies that would reduce income
inequality. Immigration, meanwhile, has facilitated the move
to the right: non-citizens, a larger share of the population
and disproportionately poor, cannot vote; thus there is less
political pressure from the bottom for redistribution than
there is from the top against it. In "the choreography of
American politics" inequality feeds directly into political
polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that
further increase inequality.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy