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Geography, Uncertainty, and Polarization

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Geography, Uncertainty, and Polarization
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Z7H44N
 
Creator McCarty, Nolan
Rodden, Jonathan
Shor, Boris
Tausanovitch, Chris
Warshaw, Christopher
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Using new data on roll-call voting of U.S. state legislators and public opinion in their districts, we explain how ideological polarization of voters within districts can lead to legislative polarization. In so-called “moderate” districts that switch hands between parties, legislative behavior is shaped by the fact voters are often quite heterogeneous: the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans within these districts is often greater than the distance between liberal cities and conservative rural areas. We root this intuition in a formal model that associates intra-district ideological hetero- geneity with uncertainty about the ideological location of the median voter. We then demonstrate that among districts with similar median voter ideologies, the difference in legislative behavior between Democratic and Republican state legislators is greater in more ideologically heterogeneous districts. Our findings suggest that accounting for the subtleties of political geography can help explain the coexistence of polarized legislators and a mass public that appears to contain many moderates
 
Subject Social Sciences
 
Contributor Tausanovitch, Chris