An eye-opening look at how and why America has become so politically polarized

Many continue to believe that the United States is a nation of political moderates. In fact, it is a nation divided. It has been so for some time and has grown more so. This book provides a new and historically grounded perspective on the polarization of America, systematically documenting how and why it happened.

Polarized presents commonsense benchmarks to measure polarization, draws data from a wide range of historical sources, and carefully assesses the quality of the evidence. Through an innovative and insightful use of circumstantial evidence, it provides a much-needed reality check to claims about polarization. This rigorous yet engaging and accessible book examines how polarization displaced pluralism and how this affected American democracy and civil society.

Polarized challenges the widely held belief that polarization is the product of party and media elites, revealing instead how the American public in the 1960s set in motion the increase of polarization. American politics became highly polarized from the bottom up, not the top down, and this began much earlier than often thought. The Democrats and the Republicans are now ideologically distant from each other and about equally distant from the political center. Polarized also explains why the parties are polarized at all, despite their battle for the decisive median voter. No subject is more central to understanding American politics than political polarization, and no other book offers a more in-depth and comprehensive analysis of the subject than this one.

James E. Campbell is a UB Distinguished Professor of political science at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of four university press books and more than 80 journal articles and book chapters. 

His most recent book is Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (Princeton University Press). His other books include The American Campaign: U.S. Presidential Campaigns and the National Vote (Texas A&M, 2000 and 2008), Cheap Seats: The Democratic Party’s Advantage in U.S. House Elections (Ohio State, 1996), and The Presidential Pulse of Congressional Elections (Kentucky, 1993 and 1997). 

He also co-edited Before the Vote and edited thirteen journal symposia on election forecasting. He has served as Chair of the Political Forecasting Group (APSA), as President of Pi Sigma Alpha (the national political science honor society), as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association, and as a program director of the Political Science Program at the National Science Foundation. 

He has been a member of six editorial boards of political science journals and seven executive councils of political science organizations. Prior to joining the UB faculty in 1998, he was on the faculties of the University of Georgia from 1980 to 1988 and Louisiana State University from 1988 to 1998. He was Chair of UB’s Department of Political Science from 2006 to 2012.

Education

PhD, Syracuse University
MA, Syracuse University
AB, Bowdoin College, summa cum laude

Source: University at Buffalo Department of Political Science