More party competitive states have more polarized legislatures

Despite America’s traditional model of bipartisan cooperation, the US is more politically polarized than ever before. In areas of close party competition, we might expect Democrats and Republicans to search for areas of agreement to work collectively on, given that neither has an outstanding mandate. As Kelsey Hinchliffe and Frances Lee find, however, the opposite is true – borne out of the threat of close elections, party polarization is greater in more electorally competitive states, and this results in less bipartisanship than we might expect.