Polarization, Partisanship, and Health in the United States

Hyperpartisanship and polarization are defining features of contemporary American politics. According to an influential political science measure, Democrats and Republicans in Congress are now further apart ideologically, largely as a result of theGOP’s rightward turn, than at any point in the past 150 years (McCarty 2019). Congressional Democrats and Republicans increasingly vote with large majorities of their own party against large majorities fromthe other party (Lee 2015; McCarty 2019). There are recurrent partisan battles over the federal budget and debt limit, while Democrats and Republicans frequently try to block each other’s judicial nominees (Whittington 2018). In the Senate, the filibuster has become much more commonplace as a mechanism for the minority party to stop the majority from passing laws, while rates of legislative gridlock in Congress have risen (Binder 2014). The refusal of President Donald Trump and many Republican lawmakers to accept the results of the 2020 elections, and the efforts by Trump and his allies to stage a coup that would keep him in office, underscore the extent to which American democracy is itself increasingly in peril in a polarized era.