U.S. parties heighten divisions.

POLITICAL POLARIZATION has increasingly infected U.S. politics over the past 40 years.

But the deep gulf that separates Democrats and Republicans; liberals and conservatives; urbanites who visit museums and rural duck-hunters; college-educated agnostics and Bible-belt evangelicals; and a host of other categories in America’s culture war is barely observable among average citizens, says Delia Baldassarri, an associate professor of sociology at Princeton University.

“I think it’s important to remember that if you pick two random people from a crowd, the likelihood that they will have opposing, very different positions is very low,” Baldassarri said.

Most Americans hold moderate views that are consistent across regions and social classes.

However, political parties have heightened divisions to score advantages over their opponents, she said.

Baldassarri explained the origins and dynamics of political polarization. Q: How did political polarization start?

There are two major moments. One is at the end of the 1960s. Democrats started to lose voters in the South, mostly white voters that stopped voting Democrat because they started to be concerned with the Democratic position on civil rights issues, and later on the Vietnam War, all these protests, new lifestyles and sexual morality.

In Congress, the old cohorts of congressmen, which were usually moderate, were replaced by new cohorts of younger, more partisan representatives.

The second wave was in 1994, in the mid-term elections, when Newt Gingrich led the Republican Party to win back the House. And again we saw a new wave of very ideological, very conservative Republicans replacing moderate Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Q: How did special interest groups emerge as a political force?

What happened in the 1990s was that religious groups, conservative evangelicals especially, started to support specific candidates who were ready to push a moral agenda. Clearly, it started with money, a lot of money. There was no push from ordinary church-goers for religious groups to become more involved in politics. It was a topdown decision.

You can see this on both sides, with gay-rights supporters on the left and moral issue supporters on the right, as well as a lot of interest groups for the deregulation of financial markets.

Abortion is one of those issues that have really divided the country. Pro-life supporters were disproportionately Democrats in the beginning of the 1970s. The explanation is that historically Catholics were disproportionately Democrats.

In a couple of decades it’s completely flipped around. You have an increased likelihood of being Republican. Q: What role do income level and economic conditions play?

One thing that we know for sure is that poor and middle-class people care more about economic issues than moral issues and that is the case right across the United States.

It is still true that poor and middle-class people tend to vote disproportionately Democrat, but not by a lot. I would say it’s about 45-percent Republican and 55-per-cent Democrat.

But at the same time, there are other things that determine their decisions. So for example, if you are middle class and you feel your job is threatened by immigrants, then you might favour the Republican Party because it seems to be giving you more protection.

The Tea Party’s core has to do with economic issues. You can understand the Tea Party in the same way in which you understand Occupy Wall Street, in the sense that they are both expression of strong dissatisfaction with the way in which the government and the economic and political elite are handling economic problems in this country. Q: Why do right-wing movements attract support among low-income voters?

Even the people who are struggling with the current economic situation seem to believe that they have to rely on their own capacity, strength and hard work rather than expecting something from the state. Some people make the argument that Americans believe in meritocracy and they believe in the capacity of the individual to do things for himself and his family. Q: there have been reports in the media saying that even some Americans who depend on social programs believe such programs should be cut. How do they rationalize that?

This is actually a very interesting phenomenon. Most of the people in their 50s and 60s who are receiving Medicaid, or other sources of support like food stamps and so on, think they have earned it.

When they say cut governmental help, they think of it as something that goes to the undeserving poor, like immigrants or people who don’t have jobs because they don’t want to work. They want those benefits to be cut not for their own category but for other categories. And usually it’s immigrants and Afro-americans and so on. Q: We’ve talked about how politics has become much more partisan. Have people also become more partisan?

The people who are more likely to follow politics, to read, to discuss it and to vote, they are actually becoming more divided, although not to the extent to which government is divided.

You also see increasing divisions on things that become relevant at a certain point, let’s say the war in Iraq in the ’90s, or abortion, as I described before.

But they aren’t more divided on economic issues, they’re not more divided on gay rights, there is not a process of alignment on all sorts of issues.

The average American is still a moderate person. But the average American has a good chance not to vote, not to actually take sides in a political campaign, not to voice their preferences. Q: Who benefits from polarization?

In the long run, I think, nobody. But definitely in the short and medium term, interest groups and activists are getting a lot of attention. So the more the regular citizen withdraws from participating in politics, the more the people who are engaged are likely to get the attention of politicians, and the more private interests are likely to get the attention of politicians.

Actually, there is a clear distinction between those who are interested and those who are not, and what we find is that the people who are more interested in politics are also richer. And they tend to be disproportionately white.

And this makes it more likely for parties to listen to rich people and to white people and to people who are taking part in the debate. This interview has been condensed.