ON VOTING AND POLARIZATION

Abstract

Polarization has become a pressing issue in today’s American society. As much as we talk about it and have a general sense of what it is, it still seems like there is more work to do to clarify the concept. The purpose of this dissertation is to explain what polarization is, what makes it bad, and what we ought to do about it. Along the way, I will consider how voting is important in practically managing and reducing polarization. In the first chapter, I will analyze polarization as it’s popularly construed and provide a way for us to evaluate it normatively through its effect on a property of society I call Stability. In the second chapter, I review a proposed solution to addressing political polarization: instant run-off voting, or IRV. I argue that while it will address the consequential worry raised in the first chapter, it misses the social and epistemic worries, and I take a look at how expressive voting provides a better model for us to understand how to address the remaining worries about polarization. In the third chapter, I describe polarization as a moral problem akin to prejudice. After looking at two kinds of polarization, I argue that if one thinks we should resist being prejudiced, then we have the same obligation to resist being polarized. I conclude this by suggesting a bottom-up approach to resisting polarization.