Polarization in Congress: A Growing Partisan Divide in the House and Senate
How has does polarization in the modern US Congress compare to the past? Using the period of 1945-2012, this visualization depicts the mean ideology of parties in Congress across time in both the House and the Senate as well as a measure of the difference between the parties. This trend has emerged since the late 1970s and reached a peak in recent years. This stands in contrast to the previous period, where the differences between the parties were less stark.
