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Attitudes, Advocacy And Polarization: The New Iron Triangle Of American Public Policy, Roger L. Conner, Patricia Jordan

Roger L Conner

Electoral politics in the U.S. have always been nasty and brutish. Pervasive polarization in public policy disputes is a new an worrisome trend that has attracted considerable attention recently. Using insights gleaned from social psychology, this article finds that “strong", negative "attitudes," once attached to an “attitude object” such as the “other side” in a policy conflict, will operate subconsciously to distort cognition in ways that generate extreme and polarized thinking. Scholars from a different field, public policy studies, find that conversations about public policy increasingly occur inside of “advocacy coalitions,” vast and networks of people and groups that are …