In the United States, political polarization has reached a fever pitch. Battle lines are drawn on every issue, bipartisan compromise is rare, and even our shared understanding of the facts is eroding. According to the Pew Research Center, over a quarter of Democrats and a third of Republicans now say that the opposition’s policies “threaten the nation’s well-being”.[1] While some disagreement is normal, even essential, for democracy, our current level of polarization poses a significant threat to not just our national unity, but also the stability and efficacy of our government. In this essay, I’ll show that high polarization is inherently damaging to democratic government, that our current polarization is contributed to by our institutional arrangements, and that therefore by reforming those arrangements we can reduce polarization and strengthen our democracy.
Polarization is dangerous because once polarization has reached a high enough level, it produces one of three undesirable outcomes, all of which are occurring in different institutions within the United States today.
First, if the institutional arrangements in the democracy are such that compromise is necessary to accomplish any agenda, then once compromise becomes an unacceptable outcome, governance spirals into gridlock and the government becomes incapable of action. This is undoubtedly the story of the current U.S. Congress, where its bicameral structure and the Senate’s filibuster makes it difficult for a simple majority to rule on their own.[2] As a result, Congress has failed to even keep the government running multiple times throughout the past two decades,[3] and congressional job approval sits at an abysmal 21%.[4] When facing major crises, such as climate change and a global pandemic, a paralyzed government can be deadly.
Alternatively, if the institutional arrangement is such that changing policy is easy and the parties exchange power frequently, the significant gulf between the agendas of those parties will result in high policy instability. This results in a chaotic, unstable government where citizens and businesses don’t know what to expect, and it perfectly describes the U.S. executive branch.[5]
Finally, where one of the polarized sides occupies a firm, stable majority, the minority can be shut out of any say in government entirely. While democracy necessitates that the minority be eventually overruled, in a climate of extreme polarization, these voters are often overruled across the board, on every issue, resulting in their effective disenfranchisement. In this situation, their resentment and distrust of the government is, although unfortunate and potentially dangerous, understandable. This situation, of course, is that which countless U.S. States find themselves in.
All of these possible outcomes then have domino effects into the rest of civic life, which present yet greater threats to democratic institutions, and allow the problem to continue to snowball. Majority domination can lead to the factional politics the Framers so rightfully feared,[6] and incense the minority to anti-democratic measures for a chance at getting a say. Policy instability puts everything on the line in every election, further heightening political tensions. Gridlock in the legislature also invites the rise of populist strongmen, willing to topple institutions and subvert democracy to get their way.
These arrangements are all clearly undesirable, which begs the question of what is causing polarization to rise. Many thinkers attribute our polarized climate to social media and the internet.[7] However, these arguments fall flat when considering them on the international stage: social media is a global phenomenon, not in any way unique to the United States. Yet, extreme political polarization is not a universal trend. In a recent working paper, researchers analyzing nine liberal democracies found that in five of them, polarization had decreased over the past four decades, and none polarized quite as quickly as the United States has.[8] Data from the Pew Research Center backs up this finding, indicating that the U.S. remains significantly more polarized than peer nations.[9] All this is not to say that outside societal factors have nothing to do with polarization, just that they do not seem to be sufficient to cause it on their own, and that something unique seems to be going on in the United States.
What, then, is causing our predicament? It could simply be the result of our particular cultural zeitgeist. Our divisions could be the results of deep-seated, considered disagreements between citizens. But this does not seem to be the case. After all, if increasing polarization was coming from the bottom up, we would expect to see the polarization of citizens equal or exceed the polarization of their representatives, who are pushed into ideological extremes by the movement of the electorate. Instead, over the past 30 years, we’ve seen our representatives become far more polarized than the voters themselves.[10] For example, while most voters favor middle-of-the-road positions on abortion issues, the stated platform of the Republican and Democratic parties are that it should be legal in almost none or almost all cases, respectively.[11] This pattern repeats across most issues, creating a disconnect between the massive divides in Washington and the smaller divides among the actual American people[12]. In effect, we aren’t polarizing them, they’re polarizing us. Some institutional arrangement is putting a finger on the scales.
This discrepancy, I believe, is in large part the indirect result of increasing margins of victory in American elections on the state and district level. As pointed out by Alan Abramowitz in “Beyond Confrontation and Gridlock” and Gary Jacobson in “Eroding the Electoral Foundations of Partisan Polarization,” this increasing margin of victory is caused by two major trends.[13] First, urbanization. Over the last half-century, Americans, particularly liberal Americans, have rapidly moved out of rural areas and into cities. As a result, conservative areas became more conservative, and liberal areas became more liberal. In addition, the rise of computer-assisted political gerrymandering has allowed politicians to gerrymander far more egregiously than ever before, often choosing to create safe districts sure to re-elect members of the same party each cycle. As a combined result of gerrymandering and urbanization, the number of congressional districts won by a margin of more than 20 percentage points increased from 26 in 1976 to 286 in 2012. Furthermore, the number of districts won by a margin of less than 5 percentage points dropped from 232 to a measly 47.[14]
In a competitive district, there is a much larger incentive for a candidate to represent all citizens, to reach across the aisle, and adopt moderate positions. In many cases, they must do so to win. In a non-competitive district, however, a candidate can often depend solely on their party label to achieve victory. As a result, who is elected may be determined not by the general election, but by the party primary. It is well understood that primaries have a much lower turnout than the general election, and those who do turn up tend to be far more ideologically extreme, favoring more radical candidates.[15] This is not the only way in which non-competitive districts sow the seeds for polarization, however. Non-competitive districts can also enable special interest groups to fund more radical primary challengers to incumbents, and overall enable candidates to take positions broadly unpopular with the general public, but acceptable within their coalition.
This explains the finger on the scales we observe: the concentration of voters into highly liberal and highly conservative districts enables more and more highly conservative and highly liberal candidates to get elected (even when the views of the voters involved don’t change at all), as primaries determine winners instead of general elections and extreme candidates become able to lose more moderate voters from their own side and still win.15 Were voters not sorted in this way, candidates would have to appeal to moderates and reach across the aisle—as we still see in the few remaining competitive districts.
Geographic sorting, however, is a tricky problem to solve. Ending partisan gerrymandering will help, but as Jacobson points out, since urbanization is also to blame and urbanization is nigh-intractable, it isn’t a cure-all.[16] One might ask if we can use gerrymandering to our advantage, by attempting to make every race as competitive as possible, but this comes with plenty of its own problems. First of all, it would fracture communities, breaking up neighborhoods in a desperate attempt to squeeze rural voters and urbanites together into the same district despite them having little in common. Second, it would suddenly throw extremely competitive, unstable elections into a highly polarized political environment: a recipe for chaos. While our current trends of polarization may have electoral roots, it is now very much a self-reinforcing cultural problem as well, one that no reform will solve overnight.
Still, there is a solution, at least in the long term. It just doesn’t involve reforming our districts; it involves reforming our voting system itself. What we need is a system that allows for the interests of voters to be accurately represented regardless of how they geographically arrange themselves. That is, we need views of moderate and dissenting voters in currently non-competitive districts to be considered, rather than drowned out. This could take numerous forms, but the two most well-tested are Ranked Choice Voting and Proportional Representation.
Under Ranked Choice Voting, conservative voters in a liberal district could express their preference for more moderate liberal candidates over more extreme ones, instead of simply failing to elect a truly conservative candidate. Furthermore, under Ranked Choice Voting, candidates have a strong incentive to make their appeal as broad as possible to secure the second and third choice votes of voters who favor other candidates, exerting a moderating influence on elections.[17]
Alternatively, Proportional Representation could do away with districts entirely and tends to favor a wide diversity of political parties and platforms,[18] meaning that those with moderate views — still the majority of Americans[19]—can support parties that actually represent them (and have their vote count), rather than settling for extreme liberal or conservative candidates in whichever direction they lean.
Some combination of these two systems could also work, such as the ranked-choice multi-member district system used in Ireland. The important aspect for the purposes of reducing polarization is not the exact system we choose, but that it provides an avenue by which our representatives can be made to represent all Americans, not just the members of the winning coalition.
Difficult as it may be in the era of partisanship, if we can do that, we can begin the road back to a less chaotic, more effective government. Those who represent us can look less like the warring factions the constitutional Framers feared, and more like the Americans they represent. It will be a long road to heal the deep divides ripped by affective polarization, but we need to start somewhere — at the problem’s systemic, electoral root.
Works Cited
[1] “Political Polarization in the American Public.” Pew Research Center – U.S. Politics & Policy, 31 Dec. 2019,
[2] Abramowitz, Alan. “Beyond Confrontation and Gridlock.” Solutions to Political Polarization in America, edited by Nathaniel Persily, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 202
[3] “Here Are All 21 Government Shutdowns in U.S. History Since 1976.” ThoughtCo, 29 Jan. 2020, www.thoughtco.com/government-shutdown-history-3368274.
[4] Gallup. “Congress and the Public.” Gallup.com, Gallup, 6 Oct. 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx.
[5] Bosch, Dan. “The Consequences of Over-Reliance on Executive Action.” AAF, 1 Mar. 2021, www.americanactionforum.org/insight/the-consequences-of-over-reliance-on-executive-action.
[6] Madison, James. “The Same Subject Continued: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection.” New York Packet, 23 Nov. 1787. The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp.
[7] Persily, Nathaniel. “Can Democracy Survive the Internet?” Journal of Democracy, vol. 28, no. 2, 2017, pp. 63–76. Crossref, doi:10.1353/jod.2017.0025.
[8] Boxell, Levi, et al. “Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization.” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020. Crossref, doi:10.3386/w26669.
[9] Dimock, Michael, and Richard Wike. “America Is Exceptional in the Nature of Its Political Divide.” Pew Research Center, 13 Nov. 2020, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/13/america-is-exceptional-in-the-nature-of-its-political-divide.
[10] Cain, Bruce. “Two Approaches to Lessening the Effects of Partisanship.” Solutions to Political Polarization in America, edited by Nathaniel Persily, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 158
[11] Diamant, Jeff. “Three-in-Ten or More Democrats and Republicans Don’t Agree with Their Party on Abortion.” Pew Research Center, 18 June 2020, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/18/three-in-ten-or-more-democrats-and-republicans-dont-agree-with-their-party-on-abortion.
[12] Kuo, Didi, et al. “Lecture 12 – Polarization.” Think 51. 27 Oct. 2021, Stanford University, Stanford University.
[13] Abramowitz, Beyond, pp. 197-207 and Jacobson, Gary. “Eroding the Electoral Foundations of Partisan Polarization.” Solutions to Political Polarization in America, edited by Nathaniel Persily, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 83–95.
[14] Abramowitz, Beyond, pp. 199-201
[15] Edwards, Mickey. “How to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans.” The Atlantic, 19 Feb. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/how-to-turn-republicans-and-democrats-into-americans/308521.
[16] Jacobson, Eroding, pp.86.
[17] Diamond, Larry. “Securing American Democracy.” American Purpose, 22 Sept. 2021, www.americanpurpose.com/articles/how-to-secure-american-democracy.
[18] “Briefing Materials Electoral Reform.11_20.docx” What’s Next America?, Nov. 2020.
[19] “Political Polarization in the American Public.” Pew Research Center – U.S. Politics & Policy, 31 Dec. 2019, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public.
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally written as a final paper for Dr. John Young’s Think 51 section at Stanford University.