Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity

Our hyperpartisan era has occasioned a sea change in understandings of American political behavior—or perhaps more accurately, a returning tide. Following decades of research divining substantively “rational” behavior in the heuristics employed by American voters, recent work has reemphasized the affective, group-oriented, psychological drivers of party affiliation and voting first detailed in classics of mid-twentieth-century behavioralism. Lilliana Mason’s impressive new book serves as a definitive statement of this view as it relates to polarization, masterfully synthesizing existing work with a battery of original studies while applying a novel framework borrowed from social identity theory in psychology.…