Authors Meet Critics: Matt Grossmann & David A. Hopkins, "Polarized by Degrees"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This panel brings together experts on political parties, citizen politics, and the state of American democracy to discuss a new book by Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Over the past several decades, American society has experienced fundamental changes—from shifting relations between social groups and evolving norms of language and behavior to the increasing value of a college degree. These transformations have polarized the nation’s political climate and ignited a perpetual culture war. In a sequel to their collaboration Asymmetric Politics, winner of the 2018 Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of APSA, Grossmann and Hopkins draw on an extensive variety of evidence to explore how these changes have affected both major parties. They show that the Democrats have become the home of highly-educated citizens with progressive social views who prefer credentialed experts to make policy decisions, while Republicans have become the populist champions of white voters without college degrees who increasingly distrust teachers, scientists, journalists, universities, non-profit organizations, and even corporations. The result of this new “diploma divide” between the parties is an increasingly complex world in which everything is about politics—and politics is about everything.

Polarized by Degrees argues that the United States, like many other Western democracies, has entered an era in which the traditional economic class basis of partisanship and electoral choice has given way to class and party divisions centered on educational attainment. As a result, the Democratic Party has adopted the progressive cultural values of white-collar metropolitan professionals and increasingly aligned itself with the social institutions that these citizens lead and influence—including the educational system, the mainstream news media, the nonprofit world, and even elements of the corporate sector, once a bastion of Republican support. A populist Republican Party that draws most of its votes from whites without college degrees has become alienated not only from the cultural sensibilities of the well-educated but also from most major institutions, waging a populist battle against the influence of intellectuals and experts in government and in the wider society. The rise of the ”diploma divide” has not only redefined the electoral constituencies of parties and candidates; it has reinforced a larger cultural conflict between well-educated progressives and less-educated traditionalists that is now visible in nearly every corner of American life.

The research and analysis contained in Polarized by Degrees covers a broad range of topics, integrating and synthesizing evidence from opinion surveys, election returns, party platforms, policy analyses, media studies, cultural history, and the work of political scientists, historians, sociologists, economists, and business experts. Its findings will interest scholars across a variety of specialties. The emergence of a cultural battle between well-educated, technocratic, globally-minded Democrats and populist, nationalist, anti-intellectual Republicans is one of the most consequential developments in recent American history, and is part of a wider cross-national trend that has redefined politics around the world. The subject and argument of Polarized by Degrees also speaks to the theme of the 2024 APSA Annual Meetings, “Democracy: Retrenchment, Renovation, & Reimagination,” providing a comprehensive examination of the nature of party competition and governance in an age of conflict over the very character of American democracy.

Sub Unit

• Division 35: Political Organizations and Parties

Chair

• Julia Rezazadeh Azari Marquette University

Presenters

• Matt Grossmann Michigan State University

• David A. Hopkins Boston College

• Julia Rezazadeh Azari Marquette University

• Suzanne Mettler Cornell University

• Joshua N. Zingher Old Dominion University