Demographic Change and Political Polarization in the United States

Levi Boxell

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: I construct an index of political polarization using seven previously proposed measures. I estimate the relative propensity for polarization across demographic groups in a regression framework and examine the extent to which demographic change can explain recent trends in polarization. Assuming fixed propensities for polarization, I estimate that 25 to 59 percent of the change in polarization between 1984 and 2016 can be attributed to demographic change in the United States.

Keywords: political polarization; demographic change; affect polarization; ideological polarization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H89 J10 J11 Z0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-03-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/85589/1/MPRA_paper_85589.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Demographic change and political polarization in the United States (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:85589

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().