About Us

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What do people mean when they say that politics in the United States are polarized? Polarized in what sense? How pervasively? How much more than in the past? For what reasons? Why should we care? And what, if anything ought to be done about it? In the fall of 2005, Governance Studies at Brookings in collaboration with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, set out to explore such questions. Red and Blue Nation is the result from our joint venture.

It should be stressed that Red and Blue Nation is not meant to embellish rarified and inconclusive academic debates about the phenomenon called polarization. Rather, we are interested in getting to the bottom of the subject because a great deal of conventional wisdom presupposes not only that the nation’s political divisions run deep, but also that they are wreaking great havoc

The co-directors of Red and Blue Nation are: Pietro S. Nivola, senior fellow in Governance Studies; and David W. Brady, deputy director and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Contributors:

Joel D. Aberbach
University of California – Los Angeles

Alan I. Abramowitz
Emory University

Peter Beinart
Council on Foreign Relations

Sarah A. Binder
Brookings Institution

Deborah Jordan Brooks
Dartmouth College

Andrea Louise Campbell
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

James E. Campbell
University at Buffalo, State University of New York

Carl M. Cannon
National Journal

Larry Diamond
Hoover Institution, Stanford University

E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Brookings Institution

Gregg Easterbrook
Brookings Institution

Thomas B. Edsall
Columbia University

John Ferejohn
Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Morris P. Fiorina
Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Christopher H. Foreman, Jr.
University of Maryland - College Park

William A. Galston
Brookings Institution

John G. Geer
Vanderbilt University

Hahrie C. Han
Wellesley College

Laurel Harbridge
Stanford University

Marc J. Hetherington
Vanderbilt University

Gary C. Jacobson
University of California – San Diego

Andrew Kohut
Pew Research Center

Keith Krehbiel
Stanford University

Matthew S. Levendusky
Yale University

Thomas E. Mann
Brookings Institution

Diana C. Mutz
University of Pennsylvania

Eric M. Patashnik
University of Virgina

Jonathan Rauch
Brookings Institution

Thomas Rosenstiel
Project for Excellence in Journalism

Martin M. Shapiro
University of California – Berkeley

Barbara Sinclair
University of California – Los Angeles

Martin P. Wattenberg
University of California – Irvine

James Q. Wilson
Pepperdine University

Benjamin Wittes
Brookings Institution

Alan Wolfe
Boston College