SIAM Review, Volume 62, Issue 3, Page 646-657, January 2020.
Since the 1960s, Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress have taken increasingly polarized positions, while the public's policy positions have remained centrist and moderate. We explain this apparent contradiction by developing a dynamical model that predicts ideological positions of political parties. Our approach tackles the challenge of incorporating bounded rationality into mathematical models and integrates the empirical finding of satisficing decision making---voters settle for candidates who are “good enough" when deciding for whom to vote. We test the model using data from the U.S. Congress over the past 150 years and find that our predictions are consistent with the two major political parties' historical trajectories. In particular, the model explains how polarization between the Democrats and Republicans since the 1960s could be a consequence of increasing ideological homogeneity within the parties.

中文翻译：

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为什么美国政党如此两极化？“满意”的动力学模型

SIAM评论，第62卷，第3期，第646-657页，2020年1月。
自1960年代以来，美国国会的民主党人和共和党人采取了越来越两极化的立场，而公众的政策立场仍然是中间派和温和派。我们通过建立能预测政党意识形态立场的动力模型来解释这种明显的矛盾。我们的方法解决了将有限理性纳入数学模型的挑战，并整合了令人满意的决策的经验性发现-选民在决定选民时会选择“足够好”的候选人，并使用美国的数据对模型进行测试在过去150年的国会中，我们发现我们的预测与两个主要政党的历史轨迹是一致的。