American politics is certainly full of emotions. One problem is that many of the issues at stake are not money related issues, but social and religious issues where ‘affect’ and emotions are important and very hard to minimize. Otherwise things would be easier: the Republicans would defend the rich, the Democrats would defend the middle class and the result of their conflict would be decisions that are a compromise (someone told me the poor don’t count much in the US because they don’t vote as much as the other two groups, but I still have to confirm this). If this were only about money and taxes, the whole problem would be more cognitively based because these things can be counted and agreed upon.
But there are so many issues, like religion, war, race, immigration where the emotions are at high levels. These areas of conflict are obviously far less cognitively based and therefore harder to benefit from conflict in terms of decision making. Also, ideological parties seems to create like a permanent “dialectical inquiry” because each side is offering an ‘alternative solution’ and each political party sticks to its own ‘alternative solution’, which according to our data, raises the affective, not the cognitive.