Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
In this book, Matthew Levendusky addresses fundamental questions of relevance to scholars of political behavior and political institutions. Given the broad consensus that political elites have become more polarized in the past half century, he focuses on the implications of elite polarization on belief systems in the mass public. He argues that elite polarization leads to partisan sorting among ordinary citizens, but not necessarily mass polarization. for Levendusky's purposes, sorting means that the party affiliation and ideology/issue positions of ordinary citizens have become aligned. In contrast, mass polarization refers to extremity in the distribution of preferences. Elite polarization leads citizens to become sorted into different camps, but not necessarily to become more polarized in their views.
Levendusky provides three key contributions. First, he articulates a theoretical argument regarding how sorting occurs and why. Second, he leverages experimental data to isolate the causal mechanism by which sorting occurs. Third, he elucidates the implications of sorting for both the mass public and political elites.
The author's theory is based on elite-driven cue taking. As elites become polarized, the connections between partisanship and ideology become clearer, citizens become aware of these clearer connections, and they align their partisanship with their ideology. The theory harkens back to central concepts articulated by Phillip Converse ("The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," 1964): As elites send more messages regarding "what goes with what" (Converse 1964, p. 212), citizens receive and internalize such messages, leading to greater levels of constraint among partisanship and ideology/issue positions (or increased sorting, to use Levendusky's terms). Levendusky argues that the direction of influence is initially top-down: Elites polarize and the masses sort; once the masses sort, they can subsequently exert some checks upon elite behavior. Yet, what predicts first movement in the dance between elites and citizens; that is, what are the conditions under which elites decide to polarize? Do elites act because they anticipate a readiness and receptiveness among citizens? Are elites responding to movement among key segments of the citizenry?...