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We Don’t Even Have to Look Up From Our Phones to Hate Each Other

In theory, American federalism allows a thousand flowers to bloom, as cities and states serve as laboratories of democracy. Transparent governance — “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants” — empowers the electorate to see what its representatives are up to. The internet gives both voice and access to virtually everyone regardless of their status. The surge in small dollar campaign contributions democratizes the financing of elections, lessening the power of the rich.

The question, as contemporary developments suggest, is whether these reforms also exacerbate polarization and lead to the escalation of partisan hostility based on moral conviction.

Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, described the adverse forces at work in an emailed response to my inquiry:

In a 2017 study, “The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband internet on Partisan Affect,” Yphtach Lelkes of the University of Pennsylvania, Gaurav Sood, an independent researcher, and Shanto Iyengar of Stanford explored “the impact of access to broadband internet on affective polarization.”

They did indeed find that

More recently, in a November 2021 paper, “How social media shapes polarization,” Jay J. Van Bavel, Elizabeth Harris, Claire Robertson and Anni Sternisko, all of N.Y.U., and Steve Rathje of the University of Cambridge, concluded that “social media shapes polarization through the following social, cognitive, and technological processes: partisan selection, message content, and platform design and algorithm.” Although they cautioned that “social media is unlikely to be the main driver of polarization, we posit that it is often a key facilitator.”

On the internet, Van Bavel and his colleagues write,

Not just polarization, but negative or hostile polarization, Van Bevel and his co-authors point out:

In addition, Van Bavel and his co-authors continue,

In an email, Van Bavel wrote that in a separate study

There is an ever-increasing number of studies showing that social media enable polarization and partisan hostility.

Josh Pasek, a professor of media and communications at the University of Michigan, emailed me to argue that

Social media, Pasek continued,

Along similar lines, David Karpf, a professor of professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, argued in an email that “the overarching trend is that social media is not a primary cause of polarization, but it has been an accelerant.”

Karpf observed that

“A decade ago,” Karpf noted,

Social media heightens the level of participants’ anger and, in the process, diminishes prospects for effective resolution of legitimate grievances. In “How Effective Is Online Outrage?” William J. Brady and Molly J. Crockett, psychologists at Northwestern and Yale, write:

Social media fosters a cacophony of voices, Brady and Crockett note, making it

Brady, Crockett and Van Bavel joined forces in 2020 to write “The MAD Model of Moral Contagion: The Role of Motivation, Attention, and Design in the Spread of Moralized Content Online.”

They write that polarization is hard to reverse:

Brady, Crockett and Van Bavel sketch how this plays out:

The need to affirm a social identity, they write, provides fertile ground for politicians, with the rise of Donald Trump providing perhaps the best example:

In “Digital Media and Democracy: A Systematic Review of Causal and Correlational Evidence Worldwide, a working paper being prepared for publication, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Lisa Oswald of the Hertie School in Berlin, Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol and Ralph Hertwig of the Max Planck Institute write that social media produce both positive and negative effects — although the latter outweigh the former.

“Our results,” they write, “highlight that digital media are a double-edged sword, with both beneficial and detrimental effects on democracy.”

For democratic countries, Lorenz-Spreen and colleagues continue,

On the negative side, however,

Their conclusion: “Our results provide grounds for concern. Alongside the positive effects of digital media for democracy, there is clear evidence of serious threats to democracy.”

The destructive power of polarization is not limited to social media. Take the case of laws and regulations requiring transparency of government proceedings to empower the public to fight corruption and special interest influence.

In “Transparency’s Ideological Drift,” a 2018 article in the Yale Law Journal, David Pozen, a law professor at Columbia, wrote:

Since then, Pozen wrote by email,

Pozen elaborated:

Or look at another mainstay of American democracy, federalism. In “Laboratories of Democracy,” which was published in 1988, David Osborne, a journalist and senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, described how state governments had become engines of beneficial innovation and change. 34 years later, Jacob Grumbach, a professor of political science at the University of Washington, has a very different perspective in “Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics.”

Grumbach argues that polarization has, in effect, turned state governments into “laboratories of democratic backsliding.”

In his book, Grumbach writes that

Indeed, Grumbach argues, “contrary to the hopes of Louis Brandeis, state governments may not be ‘laboratories of democracy’ but laboratories against democracy.”

In an email, Grumbach described the thesis of his book:

Richard Pildes, a law professor at N.Y.U., described how polarization and the internet have interacted to turn small dollar contributions into an instrument of partisan division and zealotry:

On top of that, Pildes continued,

In an article to be published soon by the California Law Review, “Democracies in the Age of Fragmentation,” Pildes writes:

Technology-driven changes, Pildes continued,

In a November 2019 commentary published in the Yale Law Journal, “Small-Donor-Based Campaign-Finance Reform and Political Polarization,” Pildes succinctly described the upheaval that has taken place over the last decade:

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