America's Biggest Political Division Isn't Left vs. Right It's the super-political vs. everyone else.

• Author: Fiorina, Morris

WITH THE OTHER DIVIDE, political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan have made a significant contribution to the polarization debate. Wait! What debate? Everyone knows that Americans are more polarized now than at any time since the Civil War. There is no debate. The science is settled.

Well, actually not--or at least not in political science, whatever the average political journalist might erroneously believe.

When the polarization narrative first became popular in the early 2000s, my collaborators and I wrote a short book showing that in terms of ideologies, issue positions, and partisanship, the American electorate was no more polarized than it was when it chose between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford in 1976. In fact, significantly fewer Americans were willing to claim affiliation with either of the major parties than had been the case in the supposedly pre-polarized era. (Political scientists still debate how to think about those independents.)

Yet contemporary politics indisputably seemed more contentious, gridlocked, uncivil, and polarized than it used to be. The explanation for this seeming contradiction soon became apparent: The parties had sorted. Several decades ago, conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans roamed the halls of Congress, and cross-party voting coalitions were common. Conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans even competed for their parties' presidential nominations. (In 1976, Carter was viewed as a respectable alternative to George Wallace.) Today, conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans are virtually extinct in Congress and many state legislatures, and they have no chance of winning their parties' presidential nominations.

Consequently, we have partisan polarization within an electorate that has not changed much. The middle still exists, but it is not welcome in either party. Debates continue over such matters as whether the sorting is top-down or bottom-up (the latter is a minority view, but one held by some serious scholars); how much the broader electorate has sorted compared to political elites (not nearly as much, many believe, but again some serious scholars disagree); and the size of the middle (there is considerable disagreement about this). There is more agreement about the composition of "the middle": It is heterogeneous, comprising not just moderates but cross-pressured libertarians and populists, the alienated, and the apoliticals.

Some psychologically inclined scholars...