Workshop on Polarized Polities: Causes, Consequences and Solutions

Georgia State University Research Foundation, Inc., Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

This workshop aims to advance knowledge about the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to severe political and societal polarization. An important contribution is its focus on issues related to polarization in democracies around the world. The topic is important, as highly-polarized societies pose potential threats to political and social stability. Democracy is supposed to manage competing interests in a society in a peaceful manner, and provide opportunities for newly-emerging or previously-excluded sectors of the population to strive for and reach political power. Today, however, a number of democracies are straining to include these new groups without succumbing to the negative consequences often associated with political and societal polarization. The workshop will bring together a diverse group of experts to investigate this question and to develop an interdisciplinary research network on the topic. This workshop brings together a number of scholars to examine cases of polarization in democratic governments. It does so by studying democracies cross-nationally, and that represent states with varying levels of political and economic development, as well as varying cleavages (i.e. class, ideology, religion, ethnicity, urban-rural, nationalist-cosmopolitan, elites - people). This line of inquiry is important, as the conventional wisdom tends to portray established democratic systems as politically stable. As recent events show, however, democratic systems are susceptible to destabilizing anti-democratic pressures. These events are increasingly not limited to new democracies in the developing world, but are emerging in more established democracies in the developed west. States have increasingly become divided over issues of nationalism and globalism/integration which may increase such instability. In the United States, political polarization is reflected in government gridlock, in other parts of the world such polarization can potentially lead to much more destabilizing outcomes.