lunes, agosto 03, 2009

Polarized America

It looks that main issues on political debate in United States is dominated by one dimension: liberal and convservatives.

The work by McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal: Polarized America, gives hints about how many dimensions matter for explaining political decisions. What it is really interesting, is that polarization increases with inequality.

Can we generalize what happens in United State to say that countries where there is a lot of unequality are polirized. Let me elaborate a thesis on this.

On the road to development of a country there is an agenda. This a social agenda with topics that have to be socially reasoned. When the country as economic pressure, which means that there are few resources, inequality is a critical issue. In this case is quite simple to polarize. However, when economic pressure is not a pressure any more, a plethora of issues comes to political preferences. This makes harder stay in idelogoical positions, therefore polarization is reduced.

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