Political Polarization in the American Public

For more than two decades political scientists have discussed rising
elite polarization in the United States, but the study of mass polarization
did not receive comparable attention until fairly recently.
This article surveys the literature on mass polarization. It begins
with a discussion of the concept of polarization, then moves to a
critical consideration of different kinds of evidence that have been
used to study polarization, concluding that much of the evidence
presents problems of inference that render conclusions problematic.
The most...