Over the past 100 years or so, polarization and inequality have often moved in tandem.
Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" has sparked a good deal of discussion on the rise of wealth and income inequality in the U.S. Separately, the mid-term election year has prompted the usual reckonings of growing political polarization and partisan gridlock.
What we often miss, however, is the historic links between the two: over the past 100 years or so, polarization and inequality have often moved in tandem.
We tend to think of our era as exceptional, both in terms of polarization and, to a lesser extent, inequality. But as the chart shows, the 2000s bear similarities to the early part of the 20th century on both measures, especially inequality.
Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" has sparked a good deal of discussion on the rise of wealth and income inequality in the U.S. Separately, the mid-term election year has prompted the usual reckonings of growing political polarization and partisan gridlock.
What we often miss, however, is the historic links between the two: over the past 100 years or so, polarization and inequality have often moved in tandem.
We tend to think of our era as exceptional, both in terms of polarization and, to a lesser extent, inequality. But as the chart shows, the 2000s bear similarities to the early part of the 20th century on both measures, especially inequality.
We can further separate out the polarization figures by party. As Tom Mann noted in The Atlantic Monday, modern political polarization is largely a Republican phenomenon. The Republican party voters, he writes, "are more skewed to their ideological pole than Democratic Party voters are to theirs."
And indeed, as the charts below show, inequality is much more closely correlated with Republican partisanship than with Democratic partisanship. Those r-squared values noted on the charts are the key - higher numbers indicate a closer relationship between the variables plotted. And that value is much higher when you're looking at the relationship between inequality and Republican partisanship, versus Democratic partisanship.
The full article is available here
