Polarization

Natalie “Talia” Jomini Stroud is an associate professor of Communication Studies and assistant director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Participation at the University of Texas at Austin.

Researchers from George Mason University asked nearly 500 scientists about climate change and the results were unequivocal: 84% agreed that human-induced global warming is occurring; and only 5% disagreed that human activity is a significant contributor. Yet when the Americans are asked what the most important problem facing society is, the answer is rarely climate change.

Big cities dominate America’s cultural consciousness in ways that the countryside — amber waves of grain notwithstanding — can only dream of: Manhattan skyscrapers, L.A. movie stars and Chicago’s “big shoulders,” as Carl Sandburg put it in his 1916 poem. Cities can have political power, too, embodied by recently departed but long-serving mayors such as Boston’s Thomas Menino (21 years), Chicago’s Richard M. Daley (22 years) and New York’s Michael Bloomberg (12 years).

From health care reform and global warming to marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage, voters are increasingly polarized, particularly along partisan lines. In this context, the level of fragmentation in the media landscape is assumed to be an important explanation for this polarization.

From the Scholars Strategy Network, written by Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj, Tufts University

What is the “debt ceiling” and why does it matter?

At the most basic level, it is the limit that Congress places on the U.S. Treasury in terms of how much debt it can issue. The Treasury has been at its technical limit — $16.699 trillion — since May, but it has been using certain budgeting tactics, so-called “extraordinary measures,” to get around the stated limits. But those measures will shortly no longer be viable, if Congress does not act.