Alex Newhouse: I, your friendly neighborhood far-right researcher/political scientist-in-training, am here to let you know that if academic research/media coverage of "polarization" feels weird to you, that's for good reason. Polarization research is, generally, fundamentally flawed and based on assumed symmetry

I, your friendly neighborhood far-right researcher/political scientist-in-training, am here to let you know that if academic research/media coverage of "polarization" feels weird to you, that's for good reason. Polarization research is, generally, fundamentally flawed and based on assumed symmetry

It's important for you to know that a chunk of conservative dark money has recently been lobbed at academic research on "polarization," and it bears reflecting on why a framing of the US's contemporary crisis that automatically suggests there's blame on all sides would be favored by them

Do you have any go-to summaries/references for this? It's a topic that comes up a lot in conversation but isn't something I've studied myself.

so there's a problem with "polarization" as a term, in that people tend to conflate various different dynamics (i think this is fairly decent: academic.oup.com/book/39301/c...) From this descends the asymmetry: ideological polarization is not symmetric in the US-- www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

another interesting look at polarization asymmetry dynamics: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... I have some takes that I hope to one day write up in research that "polarization" is a symptom of other things going on, and researchers need to distinguish proactive vs reactive polarization among other lines

I think you'd be interested in Laclau & Mouffe's "Hegemony & Socialist Strategy" (1985). They argue that polarisation is a consequence of extreme domination (e.g. colonialism) and that it's proactive/productive in those cases, but creating it in democratic societies is reactive/unproductive.

Thank you, very interesting!

I'm not published yet, so this is just my blog, but I'm also a researcher on this and I've been using a framework that focusses on the presence of apartheid-type divisions rather than "do the republicans and democrats get along" sageanastasi.wordpress.com/2023/10/08/p...

Polarisation in Aotearoasageanastasi.wordpress.com What does polarisation look like in Aotearoa? John Campbell lamented the collapse of the centre, with Labour & National holding less than 70% of the vote between them for the first time since 2002. In...

Impressive Sage, keen to see your progress as always.

I’ve been reading the book Caste for a book club and found it interestingly but overly focused on US race and not other countries, this sort of narrative starts to fill in these gaps!

They weaponize the fact that to the average dumdum, the most "reasonable" position is *precisely in the middle* between two sides. By pushing this "polarization" myth, they get to sound fancy when describing modern politics and nudge the plebs towards a direction the dummies *think* is "reasonable"

As in, you research the far-right, right? Not as in you are a far right researcher?

lol good catch

📌

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