Political Polarization and Democratic Erosion: Mapping the Institutional Design Gap in Contemporary Scholarship

In an age when democratic orders strain beneath the inexorable advance of division, this paper discloses a profound and hitherto unacknowledged lacuna at the heart of contemporary polarization scholarship. Though the literature has advanced from the first-generation focus upon elite ideological divergence, through the second-generation emphasis on affective hostility, to an emergent third-generation recognition of institutional incentives, it has remained captive to a fundamental category error: the treatment of polarization as a phenomenon of individual psychology and attitude formation rather than a systemic property generated by coupled institutional designs, stratified epistemic architectures, and self-reinforcing feedback loops. By mapping these conceptual gaps with precision, the essay demonstrates how additive accounts of institutions fail to capture the constitutive mechanisms that translate identical levels of emotional antipathy into radically divergent democratic outcomes. It reconcieves polarization as a wicked problem of institutional specification.