A word that has been used incessantly to describe the fraught state of American politics and society is Merriam-Webster’s 2024 word of the year. That word is “polarization.” Defined as a “division ...

The first and perhaps the most serious such consequence is the decline of public trust in the military. When people perceive the military as representing one particular ideological view, especially ...

For the first time, the United States has been classified as a “backsliding democracy” in a global assessment of democratic societies by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral ...

There was a time, not all that long ago, when the idea that American political life was dangerously polarized was controversial, and often vehemently denied. In 2004, Morris Fiorina and his co-authors ...

Think polarization is new to American politics? Harvard research reveals counties with the highest slave populations in 1860 still predict conservative voting patterns today—and that’s just one of ...

Polarization is the splitting of a whole into opposing parts. Source: Dids / Pexels What is Polarization? Polarization is defined as “the act of dividing something, especially something that contains ...

American political polarization follows predictable historical cycles, with today’s divisions resembling the Civil War era more than the post-WWII bipartisan period. Historical knowledge gaps in ...