.Democrats

.Republicans

.House of Representatives

.Senate

.Voters

.Congress

.President

.Politics

.Single-issue groups

.Legislative Branch

I. Define party polarization.

a.  Party polarization is the division that exists between Democrats and Republicans 

because of the extreme differences that exist between the beliefs and ideas of 

many political parties.

b.  With increasing party polarization over the years, it becomes increasingly

challenging to establish a common ground between two or more parties.

II. Identify a trend shown in the graph above.

a.  Generally, party polarization was pretty high for both the House and the Senate.

b.  Around 1919, the gap that existed between the parties’ ideologies began to diminish.

c.  However, polarization began to increase once more near 1951.

d.  The Senate held a higher rate of polarization from 1879 to about 1890. Afterwards, the House displayed the most ideological differences from about 1890 to 1959. After 1959, party polarization began to rise again within both the House and the Senate.

III.  Describe two causes of party polarization in Congress.

a.  Single-issue groups entice candidates to publicly stand for and vote for the group’s issue, which can influence a candidate’s stance and drive a wedge between the opposing candidates and their parties.

b.  Voters tend to cast their votes with candidates who identify with the same party as they do. Thus if the majority of the winning candidate’s voters share similar ideologies that oppose the other party’s ideologies, the new member of Congress will most likely make decisions in favor of that majority. This then creates a division in Congress similar to the division that already exists between voters who identify with different parties.

IV. Describe one effect of party polarization on congressional policy making.

a.  Gridlock becomes more common as party polarization increases. When democrats

and republicans are at completely opposite ends of an issue, gridlocks sometimes happen because reaching a compromise is very tough.

not have a works cited page.