Polarized America

Have you ever read a 200 page long research article? I just did. Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches, by Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, takes on the issue of determining the cause of polarized politics in America. Its structure and flow mimic that of a research article, and it reads that way as well. The authors take an enormous amount of research, statistically analyze it nearly to death, and deliver their results and suggestions for moving forward.

Their main hypothesis is that America becomes increasingly polarized as the gap between the rich and the poor widens. Plenty of factors play into this as well, like taxes, immigration levels (particularly among non-citizen immigrants), and major societal events like the Women's Suffrage movement and the Civil Rights movement. They prove their hypothesis through rigorous statistical analysis, shown through numerous charts and graphs. In the end, they bemoan the polarization of society and yearn for moderation once again. After all, government runs much more efficiently when polarization is limited. Blame falls to both sides of the table, but the authors chastise Republicans more for encouraging greater wealth inequality, which has exasperated the situation.

I enjoyed this book most of the time. The statistics clearly back up the hypothesis of the authors, and the charts and graphs are particularly interesting. I appreciated reading a book that dug deeper than surface-level. Most political books act as a forum for someone's ideas and theories with little research support. This book falls on the other end of the spectrum - just a couple of ideas with overwhelming research to back them up. The problem, though, as I read the book was the fact that I only possess the equivalent of one semester's worth of statistical knowledge. That helped me quite a bit, but this book dug into second semester statistics and beyond. I have to admit that I was lost and confused for about 25% of the book.

Despite the occasional confusion, I still found this book to be both refreshing and informative. However, given its statistical depth, I would warn potential readers that at least a semester's worth of statistics is a prerequisite to getting anything significant from this book or understanding a majority of it. I would heartily recommend this book to anyone with a statistics background who also has an interest in how the political system works.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

(82/100)