Assoc. Prof. Chad Kendall, Ph.D.

Political Polarization

Political polarization is an increasingly concerning issue in many countries around the world, resulting in legislative gridlock and increasingly hostile attitudes towards outgroups. What role do political parties play in driving such polarization? Chad Kendall from the University of Miami will visit CES in June 2025 to deliver three CES Lectures on his work that provides some first answers to this question. First, political parties can drive polarization through their actions, disciplining members that do not vote the way the party demands. Mr. Kendall will present results from a series of papers that estimate the extent of such discipline, illustrating how it hampers political representation and drives polarization. Second, parties may drive polarization through their rhetoric – for example in the narratives they use. Chad Kendall will share some recent behavioral work that demonstrates the power of causal narratives – narratives that tell a causal story about the relationships between variables – in driving false beliefs. This work provides a first step in understanding what types of such narratives work and how they work, laying the groundwork for future work to understand their role in driving both ideological and affective polarization.

Chad Kendall is an applied microeconomist that specializes in political economy and behavioral economics. He is particularly interested in institutions such as financial markets and voting, and in the roles that information and bounded rationality play in the functioning of these institutions. His work has been published in top economics journals including Econometrica and the American Economic Review.

Chad Kendall is an Associate Professor at theDepartment of Economics, Herbert Business School, of the University of Miami. He is an NBER Research Fellow. He was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business. His PhD in Economics is from the University of British Columbia. His MA (Economics) and BASc. (Engineering Physics) are both from Simon Fraser University.