{"id":1439,"date":"2004-06-15T14:29:05","date_gmt":"2004-06-15T18:29:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/06\/15\/american-partisanship\/"},"modified":"2004-06-15T14:29:05","modified_gmt":"2004-06-15T18:29:05","slug":"american-partisanship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/06\/15\/american-partisanship\/","title":{"rendered":"American Partisanship"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

The Times ran an interesting piece this weekend on the nature of American partisanship<\/a>.  This is pretty typical of the gist of the piece:<\/p>\n

\n

Do Americans really despise the beliefs of half of their fellow
\ncitizens? Have Americans really changed so much since the day when a
\ncandidate with Ronald Reagan’s soothing message could carry 49 of 50
\nstates?
\n \n <\/p>\n

To some scholars, the answer is no. They say that our basic
\ndifferences have actually been shrinking over the past two decades, and
\nthat the polarized nation is largely a myth created by people inside
\nthe Beltway talking to each another or, more precisely, shouting at
\neach other.<\/p>\n

These academics say it’s not the voters but the political elite of
\nboth parties who have become more narrow-minded and polarized. As Norma
\nDesmond might put it: We’re still big. It’s the parties that got
\nsmaller. <\/p>\n

Just because a state votes red or blue in a presidential election
\ndoesn’t mean that its voters are fixed permanently on one side of a
\npolitical divide or culture gap. The six bluest states in 2000, the
\nones where George
\nW. Bush fared worst – Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii,
\nConnecticut and Maryland – all have Republican governors. Even
\nCalifornia went red last year when Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate
\nRepublican, became governor.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Most voters are still centrists willing to consider a candidate from
\neither party, but they rarely get the chance: It’s become difficult for
\na centrist to be nominated for president or to Congress or the state
\nlegislature, said Morris P. Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford
\nand senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now the article sums up the conventional explanation for the increasing partisanship of the electorate as follows:<\/p>\n

Why, if the public is tolerant, would the political elites be so angry?
\nOne reason given by Professor Fiorina is the decline of party bosses,
\nwho promoted centrist candidates because their patronage systems
\ndepended on winning elections, and the corresponding rise of
\nspecial-interest groups, who are more concerned with candidates’
\nideology.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nI spoke with political scientist friends at Berkeley who actually study this
\nstuff (like Mo Fiorina), but they disagree with his conclusions,
\npartially out of a technical methodological question (which has huge
\nimplications, actually), and partially out of a very different
\nunderstanding of the chain of cause and effect.<\/p>\n

First, the method problem.  The focus of this article is on the
\nstate and national levels, but people elect Congress from their
\nparticular districts.  So we’re dealing with two different levels
\nof aggregation, as it were.  On the larger level, people are more
\nmoderate, but on the smaller level — the Congressional district —
\nvoters are actually quite intensely partisan.  Think of it this
\nway.  Pretend the political landscape actually is a
\nlandscape.  So it looks like a topographical map, where you can
\nsee the elevation of any particular point, but from which you can also
\ncalculate an average (mean) elevation above sea level.  So imagine
\nyou’ve got a landscape, and it has peaks and valleys. 
\n\"\"
Where
\nthere are peaks or valleys, their depth or height indicates the
\ndegree of partisanship.  But the average level for a picture like
\nthe one above show a fairly middle of the road elevation.  But if
\nyou lay a grid horizontally over the picture, the squares will likely
\ncontain more peak or valley than the opposite, and overall you get a
\nsector that is primarily peak or valley.<\/p>\n

This somewhat gives you an idea of the methodological problem. 
\nWhen we talk about the country as a whole or even a state or region as
\na whole, we smooth out the partisan bumps that exist.  If you laid
\na partisan map over the country, similar in approach to the graph
\nabove, you’d find wide and radical differences between parts of the
\ncountry.  Mississippi would be a fairly high peak, while the San
\nFrancisco Bay Area or Boston would be a very low valley.*  So the
\nmap of the U.S. would be pretty bumpy.  But if you look at the
\ncountry as a whole and apply the statistics and measurements that
\ndescribe the country or even a region on average and apply that
\nbackwards to the very small level of congressional districts, you get a
\nmuch smoother, more moderate topography.
\n

\n*I choose the peak and valley for the party based on how we normally
\ntreat party idenitfication numerically, with Republicans as +1 and
\nDemocrats as a -1.  No implication about relative worth exists,
\nbecause my own biases would probably reverse putting Republicans on the
\nsunny peaks.<\/font><\/font>
\n<\/font>
\n
\nSecond, in the U.S., most congressional districts
\nare highly peaked or “valleyed”, indicating a high degree of
\npartisanship in any particular district.  Most districts are
\ncomfortably Republican or Democrat, and so are a high peak or low
\nvalley.  This, according to my political scientist friends, occurs
\nfor two reasons.  First, legislatures and parties in them have
\ndrawn comfortably uncompetitive districts, where one party dominates by
\neight or ten percentage points over the other.  Second, within the
\nparties, voters just do tend to be fairly partisan.  For some
\nreason (my friends are working on the answers to this, as we don’t
\nquite know yet), voters act in intensely partisan ways, especially when
\nthey live in comfortably partisan districts.  It’s only when a
\ndistrict has a competitive balance between the parties that we see
\n“moderate” candidates emerge, and we have an extraordinarily low number
\nof competitive congressional districts in the country today.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, I learned that primary voters, who are often reputed to
\nmore partisan than their party-fellows at large don’t differ
\nsignificantly from those party-fellows.  In other words, it is
\nsomething of a myth that we get more partisan party candidates because
\npeople who vote in primaries are more extreme than those who vote in
\ngeneral elections.  Republicans and Democrats who vote in
\nprimaries are not significantly more ideological than Reps or Dems at
\nlarge.<\/p>\n

So the NY Times article provides a very interesting viewpoint on the
\npartisan wars of the country, but perhaps a little too
\nPollyanna-ish.  The data that matters, from individual
\ncongressional districts, indicates that we are an intensely divided
\npeople.  We may even out as a country, but we don’t vote for our
\npoliticians (excepting the President) by country, and so it’s not a
\nreasonable way to look at our current political atmosphere.<\/p>\n

ADDENDUM: David Brooks’ column today<\/a>
\nposits another reason for the partisan divide in today’s politics —
\nit’s based upon a conflict between professional and managerial
\nclasses.  As often, it’s an interesting read….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Times ran an interesting piece this weekend on the nature of American partisanship.  This is pretty typical of the gist of the piece: Do Americans really despise the beliefs of half of their fellow citizens? Have Americans really changed so much since the day when a candidate with Ronald Reagan’s soothing message could carry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politicks"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-nd","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}