Divergent Democracy - How Policy Positions Came to Dominate Party Competition

An innovative examination of the shift by American political parties toward issue-based differentiation

Recent Democratic and Republican party platforms display clear differences on such issues as abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, gun control, and the environment. These distinctions reflect a programmatic party system—that is, one in which policy positions serve as a key basis of electoral competition. Yet party politics were not always so issue-oriented; the rise of policy positions as the dominant marker of party appeal occurred largely over the last fifty years. In Divergent Democracy, Katherine Krimmel examines this transformation of the American party system, using innovative machine learning techniques to develop and present the first measure of party differentiation on issues since Democrats and Republicans began competing with each other in 1856.

Why did the shift to issues-based party competition take more than a century to materialize? Krimmel offe