Legislative Polarization Analysis

The increase in legislative polarization tracks the decline in political trust. Aggregate measures of polarization lower people’s trust in government from 1958 (the first year the trust question was asked) to 2012 (the most recent survey). There is a powerful relationship between polarization and economic inequality, as McCarty et al. (2006) show. Inequality has a moderate impact by itself on trust in government, but its indirect link through polarization is much stronger.
Partisan conflict in Congress stems from growing ideological differentiation between the parties (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, 2006) and the close division of seats (Lee, 2009). The ideological gap makes it more difficult to find common ground on issues of policy. The

When both parties prefer stalemate to enacting a compromise that might let one party claim any credit, the result is “gridlock”–a Congress that can’t get anything done. Binder (2015) argues: “...the degree of partisan polarization matters, as ideologically distant parties make harder the crafting of large bipartisan majorities necessary for durable policy change...Partisan polarization appears to be on the verge of passing historical levels in the Senate and has surpassed House records stemming from the turn of the century.” Polarization makes it very difficult–often seemingly impossible–-for Congress to get anything done. Congressional productivity has fallen to the lowest level in the past two decades (Desilver, 2014) No wonder people have such a low opinion of Congress, with just 15 percent approving of the job their legislature is doing (Riffkin, 2014). When people have such a negative opinion of their elected officials, trust in government will be sure to drop. The effect of gridlock on political trust is about the same as that of polarization in the aggregate

It is not just a story of our leaders behaving badly and this leads the public to lose confidence in them. Polarization is largely driven by growing economic inequality–and the conflicts between the parties reflect the divisions between those at the top and bottom of the economic ladder. As inequality has increased and as inequality has become an area of contention between the parties, it has become increasingly difficult to restore the political trust that may be necessary to enact policies that might lead to ab restoration of