aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Closely Divided or Deeply Divided?

A gift, I’m reading Mo Fiorina’s Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. He’s speaking to me when he says that “The simple truth is that there is no Culture War in the United States.”

Then why do so many of us think there is?

He lists four contributing factors. The first is “Confusing Closely Divided with Deeply Divided:”

[p.13] Recent national elections have been exceedingly and unusually close...The question is how to interpret this electoral competitiveness. Most commentators seem to believe the answer is obvious: The American electorate is polarized… The top panel of Figure 2.1 depicts this claim graphically. Voters line up from left to right and the electorate is highly polarized… But the U-shaped distribution in the top panel of the figure by no means is the only electoral configuration that will produce close elections. In particular, consider its inverse - the bell shaped distribution in the bottom panel of Figure 2.1. In the lower figure most people hold moderate of centrist positions and relatively few are extreme ideologues. But if the Democrat and Republican parties position themselves equidistant from the center on opposite sides, then the bottom configuration, too, produces close elections. In both conditions the electorate is closely divided, but only in the top panel of the figure would we say that voters are deeply divided.