Chapter 7 assesses how specific individual characteristics, particularly political awareness and beliefs, condition the impact of participatory technologies on attitudes toward authorities and individuals’ own perceptions of voice in politics. It argues that awareness of participatory technologies influences attitudes primarily among those with low levels of political sophistication and pro-regime beliefs. The chapter also demonstrates that participatory technologies can negatively impact attitudes toward authorities for regime critics, ultimately contributing to political backlash and polarization.

American politics has become sharply polarized. Partisan deadlock has prevented the addressing of critical public policy issues. A prime example is Congress’s inability to pass campaign finance legislation. Corporations spend unlimited amounts of company funds to promote management’s preferred candidates without disclosure. The distortive effects of large unaccountable corporate political expenditures are evident, and the opportunity for corrupting our politics is clear. In addition, large undisclosed corporate contributions pose a threat to a well-functioning marketplace and democracy. This chapter addresses the challenge of addressing corporate political spending through the informal, non-state suasion and advocacy of the nonprofit Center for Political Accountability. CPA is a case study in successful private ordering, prompting S&P 500 companies to disclose corporate political spending; develop policies that will ensure good compliance and governance; adopt codes of conduct to reflect and inspire pro-accountability behavior; and successfully compete with other firms for best disclosure and accountability practices.

Social interactions provide a large proportion of the information that people gather on a daily basis. The fundamental question guiding this chapter is whether and how social motivations influence the samples people gather, and how this drives downstream evaluative biases. We begin by highlighting how group-based motivations may influence three different stages of information processing: (1) where and how much information people gather, (2) how people interpret sampled information, and (3) how sampling strategies change recursively over time based on the congeniality of the environment. We then review recent empirical work that tests these possibilities using different social identities and contexts. Across seven studies we found that most participants began sampling from their own group, and that they sampled overall more information from their own group, giving rise to more variable ingroup (relative to outgroup) experiences. We also found that participants asymmetrically integrated their initial experiences into their evaluations based on congeniality: initial positive experiences were integrated into evaluations, whereas initial negative experiences were not. Lastly, we demonstrated that participants adopted different sampling strategies over time when the ingroup was de facto worse, obfuscating real-group differences. Together, we demonstrate that group-based motivations permeate each stage of information sampling, collectively giving rise to biased evaluations. These results unite extant research on sampling and interpretive sources of bias and provide a springboard for future research on sampling behavior across social motivations and contexts.

The present chapter proposes an organizing framework for understanding the effects of political ideology on consumer behavior. We first summarize how political ideology is conceptualized and operationalized in the literature. We then describe three levels at which political ideology shapes consumption decisions. At the individual level, the political ideology of consumers has wide-ranging effects on their acquisition, consumption, and divestment decisions. At the company level, the political ideology of companies with which consumers interact influences corporate political actions (such as lobbying) and activism (such as taking a stand on sociopolitical issues and events), with tangible implications for consumer behavior and company outcomes. At the system level, the political ideology of systems, reflected in the media, cultural, policy, and social environments that consumers and scholars navigate, has far-ranging implications for consumer decision-making, well-being, and even the body of knowledge generated on the topic of political ideology.

Harsh political polarization between Left and Right not only poses a serious threat to the viability of democracies, but also undermines the ability of governments to respond to planet-level challenges in an effective and timely manner. The politicization of science has been one unfortunate side effect of this broader trend toward political tribalism. The chapter surveys several strategies for mitigating, or dialing down, the political gridlock that afflicts many democratic countries: organizing citizens to elect politicians who seek pragmatic compromise rather than partisan advantage; pursuing trust-building initiatives across the Left-Right divide; and adopting the tools of deliberative democracy as a way to combat the “fake news” epidemic afflicting political debates. Individual citizens have many avenues for making a direct impact on these problems through their own behaviors and choices.

Since the 1970s the American political system has undergone a dramatic increase in partisan polarization. By polarization, we mean that the parties are “far apart” from each other. This is largely, but not exclusively, a matter of policy views, although it may include important elements of identity-based tribalism. In a highly polarized environment, parties view one another as competing camps engaged in a battle where the stakes attached to victory or defeat are extremely high.

In this essay we review the recent history of “social sorting” in American politics. We describe how partisan identities have grown increasingly aligned with other social identities such as race, religion, ideological identity, region, and culture. We connect this phenomenon with research from social psychology and comparative politics on the psychological and sociological effects of this type of identity sorting. In particular, well-aligned identities increase intolerance of political and social outgroups, and societies politically divided along ethnic and/or religious lines are at greater risk of descending into civil war. In fact, early American political scientists suggested that the unique stability of American democracy lay in the cross-cutting (unaligned) nature of American political and social identities. We build on these theoretical connections with new findings from our own research on the depths of partisan animosity in the U.S. today. We find that Democrats and Republicans vilify their partisan opponents in the strongest terms, they feel less negatively when those opponents physically suffer, and a small minority advocate outright violence against them. We situate those modern hostilities in a broader American historical context. Finally, we discuss the normative implications of these findings. The obvious negative implications extend to the risk of widespread civil unrest and escalating political violence. One positive implication emerges, however. Under the current partisan alignment of racial and religious identities, the overwhelming divide between the parties is between traditionally high-status (e.g. white, Christian) and traditionally marginalized (e.g. non-white, non-Christian) groups. This provides unprecedented power to previously marginalized groups – an entire political party pressing for their advancement. The social unrest that we currently see can therefore either be seen as the path toward violent division, or as a step toward an inherently disruptive movement toward social justice.

Politics in the United States has become more polarized in recent decades as both political elites and everyday citizens have been divided into rival and mutually antagonistic partisan camps. Increasingly, these rival camps question the political legitimacy and democratic commitments of the other side. Such polarization or “teamsmanship” can have a number of important political consequences: it can drive actors further apart, intensify political conflict, impede negotiation and compromise, and block the construction of bipartisan legislative and policymaking coalitions. Since polarization makes it difficult, if not impossible, to find common political ground, it can prevent democratic institutions from making important policy choices and responding to the critical issues of the day. Polarization, in short, can easily lead to democratic gridlock, paralysis, the decay of rights, and, in the extreme, violent conflict, as the Trump administration’s waning weeks so vividly demonstrated.

Donald Trump has polarized the country more than any other time in the last 75 years. What are the forces that pushed him into the Oval Office? Further, what are the implications, if any, of his election? Drawing on prior work on the Tea Party movement, when we put Trump’s victory in historical context of reactionary movements of the past, his election is simply an extension of a process that began with the Know Nothing Party of the 19th Century. We demonstrate that Trump’s rise, like the formation of other reactionary movements, was fueled by a sense of existential threat: the belief that “real American” culture is under siege. Unlike other recent accounts of Trump, we go a step further to explore another application of threat: the threat the election of the 45th president posed to the progress of people of color (POC). We demonstrate that the Trump movement represented threat to racial minorities who were motivated to vote against Trump because of perceived racism, above and beyond ideology or partisanship. Finally, we conclude by demonstrating that for both groups, threat was a mobilizing force with both White Trump supporters and POC Trump opponents reporting heightened rates of political participation in 2016. We end interrogating the proposition that Trump is really “killing” American democracy. To us, the mobilization of POC suggests otherwise, something borne out in results of the 2020 election cycle.

This chapter unpacks and critically discusses the idea of democratic resilience vis-à-vis polarization that becomes “pernicious,” that is, it divides societies into mutually distrustful Us vs. Them camps. Democratic resilience, we argue, is a polity’s ability to produce electoral, programmatic, discursive, and organizational behavior that can jointly contain and reverse pernicious polarization and its democracy-eroding consequences. We apply comparative lessons to assess US resilience and vulnerability to such consequences, focusing on three factors: institutional constraints, formative rifts, and opposition capacities and strategies.