In political science, the conventional view is that polarization observed in the US is not a product of the two camps drifting further apart (in the sense of having more extreme views), it's the product of issue divisions aligning more closely to partisan camps.
Consider Kim Davis. Kim Davis was a county clerk who went to jail after illegally refusing to issue a same-sex marriage certificate after the court system ruled she must. Davis, like most southerners until recently, was a registered Democrat. Until about the year 2000, virtually every southern government was majority Democratic, in some cases supermajority Democratic. The people in those parties often voted for Republican presidential candidates and were as conservative as the Republican Party, but due to inertia, they registered as Democrats. This has largely been eroded over the last 20 years. The result is that even if no one switches their opinions on anything, conservative Democrats now identify as Republicans. There are a number of inertial reasons to stick with a party that has left you behind, or to cynically join a party for a meal ticket. So, some of the apparent "era of good feelings" -- confluence between parties -- actually occurred because a big part of today's Republicans were "mistakenly" registered as Democrats. If any other region becomes one-party dominated for a long time, you'll see the reverse. The reverse is true in Hawai'i, where many erstwhile Republicans would today be simply more conservative Democrats, because the Republican party is extinct there.
There is also a belief that voters are better able to attach positions to parties. For example, if I told you that one party in the US generally favors higher taxes and higher services, and one party generally favors lower taxes and lower services, could you match the party labels to the descriptions, imperfect as they are? There is a general belief that people are better at this than they once were.
Finally, the increase in correlations between issues positions. For example, today we largely view Republicans as a rural party and Democrats as an urban party. That was not true 30 years ago. Prior to the politicization of abortion, there were constituencies that were pro-life and voted for the Democrats (Catholics being a huge such group). Now abortion is neatly aligned across party lines: there are almost no pro-choice Republicans and almost no pro-life Democrats. Ditto immigration -- which used to be cross-cutting when the union left viewed it as a threat to working conditions but now is primarily conceived along the dimension of racial conservatism. If I tell you someone loves guns, you have a pretty good chance of guessing their position on immigration, healthcare, and school prayer, even though outwardly those four issues do not need to be attached to one another.
Finally, within congress, two institutional reforms have contributed to across-party polarization: first, banning earmarks. It used to be that if I wanted corn subsidies and you did not, I would add an amendment to my bill to fund the navy base in your district. We then both vote yes. Killing earmarks may have reduced waste and corruption, but it also reduced a procedural tool used to secure inter-party agreement on contentious bills by offering concessions to the other party. It's like "suing for peace". Second, the "Hastert Rule", a rule that the Republican party adopted to never advance any bill that does not have majority Republican support. It used to be that, say, Republican leadership might advance a bill that had 40% Republican support and 80% Democratic support when those totals add up to more than 50% of the overall congress. By committing not to "roll" their own party, the Hastert rule virtually guarantees that votes that would internally divide parties and thus reveal ideological heterogeneity within the party are less likely to happen in favour of votes that divide across parties.
Why am I mentioning these trends? They contribute to a phenomenon that many political scientists (here I am thinking Tausanovitch and Warshaw, but others as well) have noted: you can perceive polarization (increasing distances between the two parties) without anyone adopting more extreme views. Rather, polarization can emerge from how party labels map to issues and how institutions surface issues to vote on. This doesn't mean no views are changing or become more extreme, but it does mean we should resist estimators that have a simplistic appeal to our gut feeling that things have become more extreme.
Some of this is discussed in the linked article, obliquely, but I think the article suffers from being written by non-political scientists trying to think about a political science problem from first principles rather than engaging with the existing literature. Reinventing the wheel can sometimes be helpful and sometimes is not.
All of this seems to have an unstated prerequisite: The US two party system where voting for a third party actively damages your own interest. It's not perfectly solved in other countries, but having more "evils" to choose from is a good start.
Obviously politicians have have little incentive to change the process they already had to master to gain power though in the first place.
I agree that countries with more than two parties have more opportunities to create majority winning coalitions that cut across painful cleavages. In a three party system (for simplicity I'll do equal sized parties) there are four majority coalitions: all three parties, or each of the three two-party coalitions. This is very good for healing wounds and building bridges and very bad for stability (because there is a majority coalition that can always improve on the status quo, no matter what the status quo is, creating cycles between each of the coalitions). I definitely agree that it makes it easier for regular citizens to disconnect the party they support from sort of more mundane social interactions. I definitely agree it's better for negative out-group affect. It's much harder to hate the other if the boundaries of who is in the other changes regularly and people cycle in and out.
But the US is a presidential system. While the presidency isn't everything, it is a big enough prize. No system can get around the winner-take-all nature of the presidency. I favour ranked choice and/or MMP and would support any reform proposed to achieve better institutions of electoral representation, but nothing is going to get around the fundamentally two-party nature of the contestation of the presidency. If we look at the whole history of the US, the party system has changed a number of times, but each time it has been around assembling roughly two groups contesting the presidency, regardless of how those groups map to formal parties (not at all in the JQA/Jackson era, very strongly today).
Still, regardless of the institutional setup, it's the case that inter-party polarization can emerge from either increasing extremeness, or better correlation between party and ideology, or better correlation between multiple dimensions of ideology, and the same processes I mention above are visible in other multi-party countries as well, to a lesser degree.
This is a long digression, sorry. Let's say you have a presidency and that among first choice votes, 40%+1 prefer L, 40%-1 prefer R, and 20% prefer C.
In a plurality system, would-be C voters have to choose between voting sincerely (knowing their candidate has no chance of winning, or to exert a plausible threat in the next election for candidates to take them seriously) and voting strategically (picking between R and L, which is closest to them). This creates a system where the closer of the two has every incentive to co-opt the votes as early as possible and everyone who donates money or time to try to affect the major candidates early. That's what we see now. In the US, most of the negotiation happens within parties. The Tea Party and Sanders movements were both things that acted as caucuses within an existing party instead of forming new parties, because of this incentive.
In a ranked-choice system, the C voters vote for C... and then either L or R. C gets eliminated, and L or R wins. So while the strategic versus sincere tradeoff for C voters is dismantled by the voting system, there's still a center of gravity pushing people into two camps (the L/C->L and the R/C->R camp).
Besides voting, this impacts organization, campaigning, issue messaging, donations, etc. Given that the election is winner take all and there are two camps, what infrastructure should resources pass through? And we've decided that for branding purposes, the answer is mostly stable, long-term professional parties. If you're extremely conservative, you'd rather your choice win the Republican primary than go it alone in an election for senate as an independent conservative. Going it alone does sometimes happen -- but in these cases there still tend to be two main camps for the winner take all election, like how Alaskan senate seats are recently I versus R instead of D versus R, but this normally only happens when there is dysfunction in the infrastructure that should have been one of the two camps.
So, now, take France, which has runoff voting for President. The first round of voting essentially functions as a primary to determine who represents the right and who the left. The institution makes the two surviving camps explicit for the second round of voting, but even in an instant runoff framework this camp structure always would have happened because there's only one president and you can't divide the presidency.
Canada is an interesting case in that it doesn't have a presidency. It has more than two parties. But within each district, there are typically just about two parties -- the country typically has around 2.7-3.5 political parties measure by ENP but the mean district typically has about 2.2 parties. I haven't run the numbers on the 2019 election, so I'm goin by memory. The two party pressure still exists, because electoral districts are winner take all, like the presidency, but it exists at a slightly different level of organization. Canadian parties often try to nationalize their elections (make a vote for your local Liberal a vote for Trudeau, or what have you) but conceptually the competitive dynamics are multiparty only at a national level and two party in most districts. Where they aren't, the third party almost always acts against its own interests as a spoiler, and so they should be. The pressure is powerful.
Thus Duverger's law is best formalized as: in any winner take all election, there is strong strategic pressure to reduce the number of parties competing. Where more parties emerge, it is often a transition state that will in equilibrium reduce down to 2 over time.
The best way to reduce the two camp effect is to reduce the number of things that are winner take all. An MMP or PR electoral system is best suited to ensure this at the voting stage. Even in these systems, the two camp effect often emerges during coalition formation (see: Netherlands; GL and PVV and VVD and Labor can all exist in parliament, but the ways in which they form coalitions are mostly left versus right depending on relative party sizes).
To fully get rid of it, you'd also have to figure out a way to divide the executive in parliament in a stickier way than coalitions do. Something like the Lebanese system (which is designed to ensure every ethnicity controls one major political role) could work. If you imagine a parliamentary country with PR and with a restriction that winning coalitions must rotate the prime minister by party every six months, that would be an interesting start. I am not aware of any countries that go this far.
My post is way too long. I suggest you read the short book "An Economic Theory of Democracy" by Anthony Downs. It is maybe 100 pages and has a wonderful quality of starting with very simple models and then relaxing assumptions until it approximates reality. It's the canonical political science reference to this and one of the main things that kicked off the sort of "median voter" approach to social choice, which as other commentors here mentioned is one of the main approaches to thinking about this problem.
It would change the dynamic, but the issue is the fact that the presidency is "winner takes all." In a multiparty legislature, they parties compete at the polls, and THEN they form a coalition. The stakes for the presidency are such that it encourages coalition building BEFORE the polls, to produce a candidate with an expected majority.
You can see the dynamic during some of the less polarized political cycles of the past. The parties and candidate had to build coalitions of "interests" groups that weren't necessarily pre-committed to one party or another. I could imagine a transferable vote system looking getting us back to that "coalition" state where the parties platforms changed based on the dynamic coalitions.
The current system seems to be as extreme as it's possible to be without outright civil war. Generally the business of negotiating coalitions tends to temper extremism - see for example the new three-way Green and Centre-Right coalition in Ireland, which would have been unthinkable a couple of decades ago.
But considering the fact that political positions appear to correlate with brain structures, I honestly wonder if progressives and conservatives are no longer the same species.
Speciation happens when two mutations can no longer breed with each other. There's nothing in evolutionary theory that says the impediments can't be social and behavioural instead of anatomical.
That’s not a party problem, it’s an artifact of our mass experiment with various flavors of social media and unfiltered mass communication. The situation with Twitter giving maniacs a megaphone, Facebook radicalizing anyone and YouTube offering a twisty tunnel of crazy to drive engagement isn’t sustainable.
The counter response will be a lockdown and that will address most of the issue. Unfortunately there is plenty of suffering and discord to be had before that happens.
> But considering the fact that political positions appear to correlate with brain structures
The do now, but didn't historically. So (presuming the correlation is true) are any of the historical factors relevant to changing things today?
It seems like historically there were more dimensions to consider such as class, regional interests, religion and then within those combination of factors you could have a more-liberal or conservative view.
> There's nothing in evolutionary theory that says the impediments can't be social and behavioural instead of anatomical.
There is some data to support this. Charles Murray's Coming Apart cited a big trend of separation amongst the urban/liberal/educated and rural/conservative/religious. It really isn't enough to drive evolution, it certainly has an impact on culture and politics. There is no "reversion to the mean" if the distribution is binomial.
The U.S. recently briefly had a three party system with the emergence of the Tea Party. All it did was radicalize the GOP. Just ask John Boehner.
Arguably this radicalization was only possibly because of the Hastert Rule. Under the Hastert Rule the smart strategy was to only caucus with the GOP, and obstruct the GOP when they didn't get what they wanted. That provided the Tea Party with maximum effectiveness. Without the Hastert Rule and some other technical developments, the Tea Party could have and would have occasionally shifted their support.
Another way to look at it is that without the Hastert Rule and similar mechanisms that bolster the power of parties, a two party system is largely a two party system in name only. What matters isn't the number of nominal parties, but the effective autonomy of individual representatives. You don't need 3 or 5 or 12 parties, which in almost every country invariably come to represent niche interests (similar to all the caucuses in Congress) but otherwise usually align with one of the main parties. You can have the same outcomes so long as politicians and informal caucuses can more easily defect. Not only will they defect, but it softens the official stance of the remaining parties.
We don't need to copy the structure of multi-party European systems. Rather, if we want the same outcomes[1], we should understand the dynamics and replicate or the types of dynamics that matter. Without the latter, simply copying the structure is unlikely to be effective. With the latter, copying is unnecessary.
[1] That assumes the outcomes are different and desirable. But the notion that multi-party systems tend to more centrist and inclusive politics seems stale to me. The rise of populism and even nationalism has hardly been confined to traditionally two-party systems, like in the Anglosphere. Heck, when it come to issues of abortion and immigration the U.S. has always been and remains more liberal than almost every European country.
The Tea Party was not a separate political party. It was a faction in the Republican party that was focused and non-compromise with the Democratic party.It's hard to argue that this would be the same dynamic with a true third party.
"The U.S. recently briefly had a three party system with the emergence of the Tea Party. All it did was radicalize the GOP. Just ask John Boehner.
"
In a multiparty system they probably would have been a separate minority party.
I think what the US is really suffering from is that the country is maturing. For a long time people could just claim new areas, start living there and create new lives. The country is now fully owned and populated so moving around to start anew from scratch is not that much of an option anymore. Basically the country is filling up with people. Europe had this going on for much longer and the US is going that way too.
Of the explanations you have given here, most of them appear to be good things. Voters learning more about and becoming more aware of the actions of their representative parties.
Except the hastert rule.
The hastert rule appears to be uniformly evil, and would appear to be an underlying reason for all of the other trends you've described in your post. Because it makes it impossible to govern, except in an extremely polarized manner. Leading to all of the other changes you've described.
I deliberately avoided arguing the normative side of the question and will continue to do so, but I just wanted to reply to say that your position is not unheard of within Political Science. There are some drawbacks I didn't mention (how institutional / party polarization leads to affective / interpersonal polarization, which is probably good for in-group out-group borders and bad for not wanting to kill your neighbor) but I just wanted to say that you aren't, like, inherently or facially wrong in describing some of the things that have increased polarization actually being good from a civic engagement / representation POV.
Particularly, in the mid-century period, EE Schattschneider was probably the single most famous figure in American Political Science, and he used his stature to aggressively argue for what he called "responsible two-party government" wherein each party has a very clear and distinct brand and everyone does what they can to match voters up with parties. You might look at his work and responses to it if you want to see what political scientists in 1955 were thinking about this.
Rather I am surprised to discover that the speaker has so much power in suppressing proposed legislation. How are member of Congress called lawmakers if they are not allowed to propose laws?
They are allowed to propose laws (and amendments to bills). However, the House and Senate leadership has control over the voting schedule.
There are still ways around it (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discharge_petition), but they are not particularly fast and the legislative calendar is crowded. Worse yet, these measures also stick it to leadership – a plucky Representative has to not just want something, but want it badly enough to embarrass the rest of their party. That’s rare.
There are at least two approaches to govern while maintaining the rule. First, to bring different points of view closer, which may bring minority to a majority while keeping majority on the other side. It's not easy, of course; it encourages position reformulation, determining the crucial issues etc. - a work for negotiation. Second, one of the party may get majority on the next elections because of the opposition of another party. This approach takes more time, but in general encourages more awareness of positions in the electorate.
Hastert rule had reasons to appear; why it's worse than what it was before that?
The White House and the Pauline Kael Syndrome. Short version: In 1973, all six major US class segments were centrist. Over the next 35 years, five of the segments moved slightly to the right, but "Intellectual Upper Class" moved far out to the left.
The essay below makes an outstanding point about polarization.
The thesis is that the Western Right's outgroup is people who aren't Westerners. BUT the Western Left's outgroup is the Right. It's the best explanation I've ever heard at this link. A bit long but worth reading every word because it answers SO many questions.
"The leftist elites are out of control" is not even close to a new idea, and it's not exactly an apolitical viewpoint. AEI is hustling goods on this one.
The thesis is plainly wrong (or, at least, wildly incomplete):
+ On most social issues, for example, the country -- all of it -- has moved substantially to the left since 1973. The sort of rhetoric regarding homosexuality that was commonplace 30+ years ago will get you side eyes at all but the most fundamentalist churches these days. Quantitatively, there was a 30 point swing in opinion polling on gay marriage just from 2002 until 2018 [1]. Support for gay marriage was so radical and fringe prior to the 1990s that it wasn't even polled. And even a lot of the early polling in the 90s asked only about "acceptance" rather the marriage. Homosexuals were still being charged with sodomy in the 1980s [2]. It's impossible to understate the shift in opinion on homosexual rights between 1973 to today. And the shift to the left is even more pronounced in gender politics sans abortion. Stuff like [3] is unfathomable today.
+ Ditto drugs.
+ The country has moved substantially to the Left (or, anyways, away from the 1970s Right consensus views) on trade issues. It's easy to forget that pre-NAFTA it was overwhelmingly the leftists who opposed free trade. The development of a left-leaning bloc that is liberal on both immigration policy and trade policy is very much a Clinton-era thing (that, perhaps, might already be in retreat within the Democratic party).
+ And there are a lot of other issues where movement is more leftward than not. E.g., race. Remember that actual segregationists were out of national majorities but still held considerable regional power throughout the 70s, and some even held onto some elected offices into the 21st century. Strom Thurmond was still serving in the US senate in 2003, and his electoral support eroded monotonically throughout the last two decades of the 20th century.
The country hasn't moved to the left on every issue, but saying it's slightly right of where it was in 1973 is, for most of the biggest issues in contemporary politics, absolutely false.
It's my experience that discussions of the Pauline Kael Syndrome are mostly ahistorical or even anti-historical. Which is somehow quite ironic.
My father thinks that Trump is the best president in 100 years. He thinks that helping the coal industry is great, being tough on immigration and China is too, and so on. He thinks the Left is out to get Trump because they rabidly hate any conservative.
When I talk to him about issues, though, things change. He thinks "no one should die from being poor" - in the context of healthcare. He thinks there should be price controls on drugs, better pricing transparency, and perhaps even price controls on doctor salaries.
I explained to him that "defund the police" can mean different things, but that the moderate, Dem Party version of it involves reallocating funds from police to social services, and reducing the kinds of calls cops get. He said "that's the first time I've heard anyone describe it that way". Despite that being pretty much one of two ways that the entire Left sees the idea, and despite the fact he watches "news" hours a day. (Fox).
When I told him that even the radical "defund" camp doesn't want a total lack of law enforcement, but a total teardown and rebuild of police culture and procedures, he understood! He didn't buy into it 100%, but acknowledged the issues with police corruption, and the idea that good cops who hold others accountable will get run out of the system.
What does this all mean?
He is a victim of far-right media manipulation, and hyperpartisanship. On many of the most pressing issues in this country, he is a Democrat by all accounts. But he sees the "radical left" as part of the big tent, and hears about those boogymen day in and day out, and takes a contrarian view on certain progressive ideas, and boom. Trumpian Republican.
My money on fixing this is to have voting reform that allows new political parties to vibrantly exist, so we can have new parties with a better mixing of ideas.
Coalitions should exist as groups of political parties, not as one big tent.
In defense of your father on "Defund the Police", the last time I checked, the Black Lives Matter's website where the idea was first widely publicized had a release on it that I was hoping would add nuance to the phrase.
It didn't, at all. It actually reinforced an abolition viewpoint. I went to donate to BLM that day from the Airbnb website's banner, and that release caused me to donate my money elsewhere.
This line got me:
"Currently, we are fighting two deadly viruses: COVID-19 is threatening our health. White Supremacy is threatening our existence. And both are killing us every single day."
Plus (see lack of nuance)
"We call for a national defunding of police. We demand investment in our communities and the resources to ensure Black people not only survive, but thrive. If you’re with us, add your name to the petition right now and help us spread the word."
Oddly, Ben Goldacre of the NHS in Britain (I've met him in the past, and he hilariously stated on stage to a bunch of UK business people that anyone in the audience who voted for Brexit was racist.... the reaction was priceless) has a ton of data showing that black people are dying at higher rates of Covid independent of "deprivation" (UK term for poverty). The position on their website is that it's because of systemic racism. In the US, I absolutely think that is partially correct, but due to Goldacres work, I think it's one variable among others contributing. The added "White Supremacy threatening our existence" is absolutely absurd and overwrought. A little over a 1000 people were killed by police in the US last year. 24% of them were black.
If that is threatening "our existence", then their has been an unprecedented drop in the birth rate for black Americans. (there hasn't been, it's just activists can't do basic statistics and don't care to learn apparently)
Frankly, I think it's intended to be left vague enough to appeal to radicals as well as more centrist types simultaneously.
If somebody from the BLM organization is reading this, I would recommend that they add nuance to the position on their website unless they want to lose voters. My dad was planning on voting for Biden, but the combination of Defund the Police and the removal of Washington/Lincoln/Jefferson statues has pushed him to Trump, who he despises. He lives in a swing state. He tells his friends he's going to vote for Biden, but privately he told me otherwise after calling me about a vandalized Jefferson statue.
For the record, I think that police in the US have become a catch-all for badly needed social services and that reallocating funding is highly desirable.
Don't forget the NYT Op-Ed titled, "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish The Police"[0]. Which is just as ill-considered as it sounds, and includes certifiably insane arguments like, "What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police reports are often dissatisfied with the response."
I am not trying to pick a fight. The quote you provided, in and of itself, doesn’t seem certifiably insane. It seems like statements of fact that can be easily verified (or disproven). But assuming the statements are close to accurate, then it doesn’t seem “insane” to conclude that the current system has failed and should be replaced.
My apologies, I implied my point rather vaguely instead of just making it outright.
Her statements are certainly true, however they don't support her argument at all--they just attack the status quo. If you read her arguments out of context, would you think that she was arguing for less funding for the system that is failing our women across the country? After all, you can't "redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs" while still funding law enforcement at anywhere near similar levels. Her argument amounts to 'Rape is bad. The system hasn't solved it, so we don't need the system.'
This is dangerous nonsense. If the system is ineffective, it's fine to replace it. But it should be replaced by a system which will give better results. Ms. Kaba provides no evidence that any alternative will give better results. We're expected to gamble the safety of millions of people around the country on a point of progressive dogma.
Ms. Kaba's position reminds me of a parable. In the olden days, as the story goes, a (not so wise) king grew concerned about the plight of his people. Plague was sweeping across the country, killing the poor in droves. The king asked for more information on the problem at hand, and an advisor brought him a table of figures. He reviewed the figures, and saw a correlation! The provinces where the most people were dying were also the provinces where there were the most physicians! The issue was clear; the solution simple. The physicians were clearly the cause of the plague. All he had to do to save his people was get rid of all of the damned physicians.
This 'defund the police' malarkey strikes me as the same kind of unthinking gut reaction.
Democrats in the 80s supported abortion. Trump calls them after birth executions and supported throwing doctors and women in prison. Only walking back the latter when it became clear that even a lot of the right wasn't on the same page.
Dems supported progressive taxation. Trump a life long tax cheat thinks taxation is theft.
Dems in the 80s supported regulations as a prophylaxis for the harm that unregulated free markets would do to our planet and our citizens. Trump believes they are an impediment to profits and ought to be stripped to nothing starting with the ones prohibiting pollution of our environment.
What do you think he has in common with 1980s Democrats?
You really dodge the main point of my post. Trump does not support any "left-wing" legislation, or any traditional 80s/90s neoliberal foreign policy.
For someone to support Trump in 2020, and to support the concepts of universal healthcare and substantial police reform (and acknowledging systemic corruption in police), is completely mind boggling.
I disagree with your worldview that the "left" dislikes Trump for some meta outgroup reason, rather than his abhorrent leadership, destruction of apolitical institutions, and bad policy.
Trump has supported universal healthcare [0] for much longer than he's been against it, and he has quite the ongoing spat over systemic corruption in the nation's top law enforcement agency. [1] The problem is the system provides no path to electability for someone mixing and matching ingroup/outgroup ideals.
Is his spat because they are corrupt or because they investigate him for corruption? I suppose he would argue they investigate him for corruption because they are corrupt.
However, I have not seen Trump allege any cases of corruption other than investigations of Trump.
In that case, it is not so much corruption as it is political bias. But if that were the case, wouldn’t we see a disproportionate pursuit of other liberal objectives, like corporate malfeasance and voter disenfranchisement?
(Purely anecdotal) Most FBI agents I know are loudly conservative.
Basically, it seems we could
A. take Trump at his word that he has not done anything wrong and that thousands of Americans have forsaken their oaths in order to pursue a nefarious plot against a leader for whom many of them voted
Or
B. let them do their job. If Trump has done nothing wrong, the facts will bear him out.
I would add the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 to your list of reforms that broke Congress. Getting rid of the secret ballot sounds good in theory, but it creates the same hazards as any other public vote - it's easy to verify if the Congressperson you spent thousands lobbying was worth the investment or not.
I recently saw youtube video on that called the cardboard box reform. It caught my eye because I hadn't heard anyone talking about it, but it really makes sense. I don't know how you sell less transparency to the public though.
> For example, if I told you that one party in the US generally favors higher taxes and higher services, and one party generally favors lower taxes and lower services, could you match the party labels to the descriptions, imperfect as they are?
I think there's the obvious answer that most people would give, but I don't think there's great evidence that the policies implemented by the parties strongly matches the conventional wisdom here.
I agree. There is a wide literature in poli sci about principal-agent / contract theory -- what incentive parties and legislators have to actually implement the policies they stand for and how does the incomplete contract of voting actually achieve this (or not). But this is a slightly unrelated question to whether or not people are better at understanding what the parties claim to stand for.
> (Catholics being a huge such group). Now abortion is neatly aligned across party lines: there are almost no pro-choice Republicans and almost no pro-life Democrats.
Catholics have always been, and continue to be, ~50/50 democrat/republican split, give or take a few points. Kennedy, Johnson, and Truman were the only democratic candidates who had >60% Catholic support.
the whole concept of party polarization is a non-sequitur to what's important, and that's how closely our representatives represent our collective interest balanced against the forward-thinking good of the nation. the labels are clearly holding us back, but we dearly want to fit in (be in the party) and be perceived as being in the right, no matter what's good, truthful, moral, generous, patriotic, etc.
the wisdom of the crowds covers this ground too--too much correlated thinking via information cascades often leads to bad decisions and outcomes. you want more independence, even if that increases the number of "wrong" opinions. having more wrong opinions is infinitely better than poor information cascades, as long as they're relatively independent and queried in a statistically sound manner for decision-making.
The problem is that voters often disagree greatly, and the only positive way forward is a compromise, but strong partisan and ideological polarization makes that impossible.
Compromise isn't necessarily a positive way forward. Sometimes there is no way forward but to fight for power and the victors impose their will on the losers.
Look at the compromise of alternating slave and free states to prevent a rupture in U.S. politics in the mid 1800s. It satisfied neither side, and no compromise possibly could have.
but that's more of a problem of leadership, courage, and ultimately fairness. parties are not designed to fix that problem, and we've let the system devolve into this mess so that politicians can concentrate power in the smallest agreeable number of entities (two).
The problem is that when parties are highly polarized, politicians who want to be the sort of leaders you are talking about can't get into leadership positions and often are voted out at the primary election stage.
The problem is that both parties in the US are bought and paid for, and have no real interest in representing the interests of voters.
So-called progressive issues and so-called conservative issues are just attention-seeking window displays designed to farm voter interest.
Policy is controlled by the economic leverage of donors and lobbyists, not by voters, and is enacted to protect the economic interests of donors and lobbyists, not of voters.
I think the wisdom of the crowds is predicated on the individual members expressed preferences reflecting their "real" and substantial interests.
But if you apply a selection criteria to members of the crowd or the types of crowd recognized as such, you're likely going to get answers biased toward the selection criteria.
Likewise, to the extent members' expressed preferences reflect abstract arguments (i.e. ideology) rather than their real interests, then other dynamics will control. So, for example, if you go around asking the population detailed questions about their stances on abortion--when it should allowed, when, etc--you're going to get a ton of different answers and any consensus, to the extent there is one, will be sophisticated and nuanced. Ask those same people if they're pro-life or pro-choice and the majority consensus will simply reflect the ebb and flow of the dominate idealogical narratives and be as real and substantive as tallying the number of people who prefer cake vs pie.
In that sense I think Wisdom of the Crowds always had a sort of tautological character to it. And it reflected an optimism about the information age--that it would cut through rather than perpetuate all the complicated and complicating intermediate social layers.
i don't know of a cutoff offhand, but it's not the number of people (like dunbar's) but rather the amount of coordination, or in statistical terms, covariance. there's linear and non-linear considerations, like heteroscedasticity, as well, so it may need to be a set of statistical measures.
in any case, representation itself could benefit a lot from experimentation and innovation. we now have the technological means to implement a direct democracy on the scale of billions of people, something practically impossible only a few decades ago.
It is just mindboggling to me that significant parts of the electorate were and are unable to assign policy positions to the correct party. I hope at least those voters' representatives accurately reflected their wishes irrespective of party labels.
On the one hand, I am lucky enough to have received a great education so these things are clear to me, and not everyone is that lucky. On the other hand, world events are sometimes hinging on voters who don't know what they're voting for.
There has been a recent increase in the amount of literature on voter ignorance; I recommend reading at least one book on the subject, as its level is quite shocking.
A very good comment. I would add that the parties used to be more moderate in part because the Democrats included both Northern liberals and Southern racists, and the Republicans included many Northern liberals. But when the civil rights laws were passed by the Democrats back in 1964 and 5, Southern white racists started a slow process of migrating to the Republicans and the Northern liberals to the Democrats.
Also, changes in the primary system lead to party leaders, who tended to nominate moderates who could win a broad range in the middle, losing power, and the nominating process being taking over by people on both extremes who tend to vote more in primaries than the general public does.
thanks for that. what would you point us to if we were interested in learning political science? (e.g. books, courses, communities, podcasts, blogs, channels?)
My background is academic and so I worry that any recommendations I give will suffer from reflecting that. It's way easier for me to say "spend ten years of your life living and breathing this stuff, it'll clear up your thoughts nicely!" than it is to point to a YouTube channel. CGP Grey sometimes does very 101 level topics on electoral systems, but very little on what I'd call the political science of representation or US-specific institutions.
My advice, if you want to get a sense for the academic lay of the land is to try an Intro to US Politics course at any college that is well ranked, and to follow currently active professors from research universities on Twitter. Often by reading today's journal articles, you a) get a sense for new findings, and b) get a sense for whose shoulders they stand on, and where they come from. And academics do a shitty job of sharing these ideas with the public. I do read Andrew Gelman's blog, but he's a social science statistician and so mostly he's working on quant methods and not substantively interesting questions.
The main journals in US politics are: American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics.
I checked the syllabus of my first graduate level American Politics class from, err, a fair few years ago now. Here are some of the canonical books I'd recommend that speak to the kinds of questions I study:
- Anthony Downs: An Economic Theory of Democracy
- John Zaller: Nature and Origins of Public Opinion
- David Mayhew: Congress The Electoral Connection
- Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal: Ideology and Congress
- Keith Krehbiel: Information and Legislative Organization
- Mathew McCubbins and Gary Cox: Setting the Agenda (or their other book, Legislative Leviathan, both great)
These speak to some of the biggest theoretical and measurement considerations in American Politics and Representation. All of them should be readable without prior college experience. I will note that I just offered you like 5,000 pages of book that will probably take a year to get through.
Hope some of this provides a useful jumping off point.
Consider Kim Davis. Kim Davis was a county clerk who went to jail after illegally refusing to issue a same-sex marriage certificate after the court system ruled she must. Davis, like most southerners until recently, was a registered Democrat. Until about the year 2000, virtually every southern government was majority Democratic, in some cases supermajority Democratic. The people in those parties often voted for Republican presidential candidates and were as conservative as the Republican Party, but due to inertia, they registered as Democrats. This has largely been eroded over the last 20 years. The result is that even if no one switches their opinions on anything, conservative Democrats now identify as Republicans. There are a number of inertial reasons to stick with a party that has left you behind, or to cynically join a party for a meal ticket. So, some of the apparent "era of good feelings" -- confluence between parties -- actually occurred because a big part of today's Republicans were "mistakenly" registered as Democrats. If any other region becomes one-party dominated for a long time, you'll see the reverse. The reverse is true in Hawai'i, where many erstwhile Republicans would today be simply more conservative Democrats, because the Republican party is extinct there.
There is also a belief that voters are better able to attach positions to parties. For example, if I told you that one party in the US generally favors higher taxes and higher services, and one party generally favors lower taxes and lower services, could you match the party labels to the descriptions, imperfect as they are? There is a general belief that people are better at this than they once were.
Finally, the increase in correlations between issues positions. For example, today we largely view Republicans as a rural party and Democrats as an urban party. That was not true 30 years ago. Prior to the politicization of abortion, there were constituencies that were pro-life and voted for the Democrats (Catholics being a huge such group). Now abortion is neatly aligned across party lines: there are almost no pro-choice Republicans and almost no pro-life Democrats. Ditto immigration -- which used to be cross-cutting when the union left viewed it as a threat to working conditions but now is primarily conceived along the dimension of racial conservatism. If I tell you someone loves guns, you have a pretty good chance of guessing their position on immigration, healthcare, and school prayer, even though outwardly those four issues do not need to be attached to one another.
Finally, within congress, two institutional reforms have contributed to across-party polarization: first, banning earmarks. It used to be that if I wanted corn subsidies and you did not, I would add an amendment to my bill to fund the navy base in your district. We then both vote yes. Killing earmarks may have reduced waste and corruption, but it also reduced a procedural tool used to secure inter-party agreement on contentious bills by offering concessions to the other party. It's like "suing for peace". Second, the "Hastert Rule", a rule that the Republican party adopted to never advance any bill that does not have majority Republican support. It used to be that, say, Republican leadership might advance a bill that had 40% Republican support and 80% Democratic support when those totals add up to more than 50% of the overall congress. By committing not to "roll" their own party, the Hastert rule virtually guarantees that votes that would internally divide parties and thus reveal ideological heterogeneity within the party are less likely to happen in favour of votes that divide across parties.
Why am I mentioning these trends? They contribute to a phenomenon that many political scientists (here I am thinking Tausanovitch and Warshaw, but others as well) have noted: you can perceive polarization (increasing distances between the two parties) without anyone adopting more extreme views. Rather, polarization can emerge from how party labels map to issues and how institutions surface issues to vote on. This doesn't mean no views are changing or become more extreme, but it does mean we should resist estimators that have a simplistic appeal to our gut feeling that things have become more extreme.
Some of this is discussed in the linked article, obliquely, but I think the article suffers from being written by non-political scientists trying to think about a political science problem from first principles rather than engaging with the existing literature. Reinventing the wheel can sometimes be helpful and sometimes is not.