So anyways, here’s a study showing how most of the “political polarization” in the U.S. is due to Democrats liberalizing much faster than Republicans over time, including decades before Trump was ever in office.
Here are the results for each individual issue over time:
May 10, 2025 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Interesting study from 2015 investigating 158 countries from 1960 to 2007 and comparing human development across electoral authoritarian regimes (these regimes have a legislature in which elections are held, but the executive branch is functionally completely independent and runs the show) and democracies using instrumental variables. Electoral authoritarian and democracies perform comparably in reducing infant mortality.
We see that they also perform similarly across other indicators of development:
