Jarvis (2009) argues that ideological polarization in California’s state legislature creates unique problems for the … state because of the interaction between polarization and the requirement that the budget pass with a 2/3 supermajority … order to reduce polarization. However, that is the wrong solution. Increasing the number of competitive districts would have …

to the nature of the state's finances, partisan polarization in the legislature interacts with many of these to produce … polarization or possibly even provide an occasional supermajority. While districts are not necessarily the primary cause of …

Over the past 50 years, partisan polarization—the ideological distance between the typical Democratic and the average … Republican legislator—has widened in California. This article asks whether growing polarization has led to increasing legislative … legislative party polarization exerts no direct effect, but that higher levels of polarization magnify the impact of divided …