ARTICLES ON POLITICAL POLARIZATION
Note: by Leslie L. Downing
My course on the Psychology of Extremism, just happens to be given in the semester when the contentious political race between President George W. Bush, and Senator John F. Kerry, is taking place. While extremist political groups have always played a role in American politics, with the vast middle ground being occupied by moderate Democrats, Republican, and Independents, this political landscape seems to be rapidly changing. It is becoming less and less likely that voters identify themselves as moderates, and more and more likely that they view themselves as committed and unwavering partisans of either the Republican or the Democratic party. It is also true that voters on each side of this divide find less and less common ground with those on the other side. The portion of the electorate that may potentially be swayed, that might be influenced to change the party they will vote for in November, has shrunk drastically. The social psychological bases for such a change in the political scene, and its possible ramifications, are clearly relevant to the broader issues encompassed by the psychology of extremism as developed in my course. The following articles, which appeared in the American Statesman in April of 2004, are not by psychologists, but they do present highly relevant facts about the polarization and tendency toward extremism in contemporary politics, and they cite views of some prominent social psychologists, specifically David Myer, and Robert Baron, concerning social psychological interpretations of such phenomena.
BILL BISHOP AND THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Sunday, April 4, 2004
The assumption since the 2000 election has been that the United States is
evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. Nationally, this is still
true.
At the local level, however, that 50-50 split disappears. In its place is a
country so out of balance, so politically divided that there is little
competition in presidential contests between the parties in most U.S.
counties, according to an Austin American-Statesman study of election returns
since 1948.
American democracy is based on the continuous exchange of differing points of
view. Today, most Americans live in communities that are becoming more
politically homogenous and, in effect, diminishes dissenting views. And that
grouping of like-minded people is feeding the nation's increasingly rancorous
and partisan politics.
By the end of the dead-even 2000 presidential election, American communities
were more lopsidedly Republican or Democratic than at any time in the past
half-century. The fastest growing kind of segregation in the United States
isn't racial. It is the segregation between Republicans and Democrats.
The political division found by the Statesman and its statistical consultant,
Robert Cushing, is a change from the recent past. From the end of World War II
until the mid-1970s, U.S. counties became more and more politically mixed,
based on presidential voting. Through the 1950s and '60s, Americans were more
likely to live in a community with an even mixture of Republicans and
Democrats.
In 1976, when Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford by only two
percentage points, 26.8 percent of American voters lived in counties with
landslide presidential election results, where one party had 60 percent or
more of the vote.
Twenty-four years and six presidential elections later, when George Bush and
Al Gore were virtually tied nationally, 45.3 percent of voters lived in a
landslide county. And now the nation enters a new election year divided both
ideologically and geographically in ways few can remember.
Political and racial segregation are moving in opposite directions. John Logan
at the Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research calculated
the change in segregation between blacks and whites from 1980 to 2000 in the
nation's more than 3,100 counties. Even though the country remains deeply
divided by race, U.S. counties on average became more integrated racially over
those 20 years.
Politically, however, the nation rapidly divided. Using the same demographic
calculation that measures geographic racial disparity, and substituting
Republican and Democrat for black and white, political segregation in U.S.
counties grew by 47 percent from 1976 to 2000.
The result is that voters on average are less likely today to live in a
community that has an even mix of Republican and Democratic voters than at any
time since World War II. They are less likely to live near someone with a
different political point of view and are more likely to live in a political
atmosphere either overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic.
"I don't think we are at a really dangerous stage," said Cass Sunstein, a
professor of law at the University of Chicago and an author of books exploring
issues facing democracy, "but if it's a case that people really are pretty
rigidly Republican or Democratic and that's widespread, that's not healthy.
Our democracy is supposed to be one where people learn from one another and
listen."
Sunstein's concern is rooted in more than 300 social science experiments over
the past 40 years that have found a striking phenomenon that occurs when
like-minded people cluster: They tend to become more extreme in their
thinking. They polarize.
This research would predict that the increasing physical segregation of voters
in the United States would result in a more polarized and partisan political
culture. And that is exactly what is happening.
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press late last year examined
public opinion polls back to 1987 and found that the United States "remains a
country that is almost evenly divided politically -- yet further apart than
ever in its political values."
In mid-March, the Gallup poll found that while 91 percent of Republicans
approve of the incumbent, President Bush, only 17 percent of Democrats feel
likewise. The gap between Republican and Democratic support for an incumbent
-- 74 percentage points -- is the largest Gallup has ever observed at this
point in a presidential election year.
Highly partisan presidential politics isn't the only sign of political
segregation. As counties become more politically pure, they push their
representatives in state legislatures and Congress to more extreme positions.
Legislative compromise becomes almost impossible. Meanwhile, election
campaigns become less interested in convincing a dwindling number of undecided
voters and more concerned with whipping up the enthusiasm of their most
partisan backers.
Democrats and Republicans joke these days that they can't understand each
other, that they feel as though the parties exist on different planets.
It's no joke. They do.
Thinking in clusters
There is nothing new in saying people enjoy being around people like
themselves. The Prophet Amos asked, "Can two walk together except they be
agreed?" And Pauline Kael, the movie critic, was stunned with Richard Nixon's
victory in the 1972 Republican landslide. "I don't know a single person who
voted for him!" said the well-cloistered writer.
"Do like-minded people tend to cluster together, and to talk mostly with
others who share their inclinations?" asked social psychologist David Myers in
an e-mail. "You bet they -- we -- do. Most of us need only look at our friends
and the people we've been talking with during the last couple of days to
observe likes talking with likes."
What nobody realized until now is that the American electorate was sorting
itself into these like-minded clusters on a national scale.
The United States has undergone a vast social shift since the 1970s, a
rapid-fire change in where we live, what we think and how we vote. This
country-wide sorting of people and ideas is the unexamined backstage story of
the nation's increasingly rancorous politics.
To understand the nation here at the beginning of an unfathomably bitter
presidential campaign, it helps to toss out most of what we think we know
about American politics.
Thirty years ago, the Washington Post's top political reporter, David Broder,
wrote a book titled "The Party's Over." Broder, like most political
scientists, noticed that people had grown tired of the two major political
parties.
Voters were splitting their tickets, as party loyalty "seriously eroded,"
Broder wrote. Americans had lost the "habit of partisanship." Younger voters
increasingly thought of themselves as independents because they no longer saw
a difference between Republicans and Democrats. Members of Congress regularly
crossed party lines to support bills introduced by their opponents.
Parties were dead. Voters were independent. Parties and politics lacked
ideological fervor or consistency.
What Broder couldn't have known then was that voters were beginning to change
the way they thought about politics and parties. The 1970s were a turning
point.
What Broder also didn't realize -- what nobody knew until now -- is that the
mid-1970s was also the time, according to Cushing's analysis, that Republicans
and Democrats mixed most thoroughly. If the democratic ideal is to have
integrated communities, where people with different beliefs and of different
parties must confront one another and get along, 1976 was the high point of
post-war democracy.
Then the nation changed.
Since the early and mid-1970s, the American political scene shifted almost
completely from the independent-minded, ticket-splitting, non-partisan
landscape Broder documented:
* Voters have grown more partisan.
Party loyalties rebounded in the 1980s and by the 1990s partisanship among
American voters -- their propensity to identify themselves in polls as either
Republican or Democrat -- had increased to levels not seen since at least the
1950s. Since 1980, party loyalty has increased to levels "unsurpassed over any
comparable time span since the turn of the last century," writes Princeton
University political scientist Larry Bartels.
* Voters have become less independent.
The percentage of true independent voters peaked in 1978 and has declined
since. Meanwhile, the percentage of people who see important differences
between the parties went from 46 percent in 1972 to 66 percent in 2000.
* The parties have become more ideological.
The percentage of conservatives who call themselves Democrats -- and liberals
who call themselves Republican -- has been declining since 1972. The two
parties once were a stew of conflicting ideologies -- mixtures that included
northern liberal Republicans and conservative rural Democrats. Now they are
growing more ideologically pure.
* Congress compromises less often.
Despite the rancor caused by war and the civil rights movement in the late
1960s and early 1970s, there were fewer strict party-line votes in those years
than at any time since World War II. Since then, the number of times a
majority of Republicans in Congress has voted opposite a majority of Democrats
has steadily increased.
The percentage of these party-line votes in the 1990s was higher than for any
10-year period since 1950 and the parties "differ more on issues now than at
any time since the early days of the New Deal," wrote Colby College political
scientist Mark Brewer.
* Voters cast more straight party tickets.
In the 2000 and 2002 elections, ticket splitting -- where voters cast ballots
for both Republicans and Democrats -- "declined to the lowest levels in over
30 years," according to University of Missouri-St. Louis political scientist
David Kimball.
By the beginning of this century, compromise had disappeared from the House of
Representatives. Voters were becoming staunch supporters of parties they
increasingly saw as ideologically distinct. Democrats had more liberal voting
records. Republicans were more conservative.
Thirty years after Broder predicted the end of party and partisanship, Roger
Davidson in the Congressional Quarterly Almanac wrote that the country is "in
the midst of the most partisan era since Reconstruction."
Beneath these national measures of increasing partisanship, however, there was
another trend developing, as communities shifted and strengthened their
political allegiances. At the local level, voters were grouping in like-minded
communities. Counties were becoming either more Democratic or more Republican
each election.
At the microlevel of society families gathered to make decisions about where
and how to live. The discussions at these kitchen table summits weren't
overtly political, but decisions about schools and neighbors and lifestyle all
had political results. In deciding where and how to live, the country was
segregating by political preference.
The Reagan line
Until 1980, Williamson County was mostly Democratic. But in every other
presidential election from the end of World War II until Ronald Reagan first
won the presidency, the parties were competitive.
Williamson County flipped in 1980, voting for Republican Ronald Reagan. It
hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since. Since 1980, the
Republican margin in Williamson has only increased, until in 2000, in a
presidential election that was dead even nationally, 71 percent of Williamson
County's voters cast Republican ballots.
Los Angeles County, Calif., is the anti-Williamson. This huge county was
Republican from 1948 through the end of the Administration of President
Reagan, in 1988. The only blip was a vote for Johnson in the 1964 landslide
election. The elections were close, however. The 1960 Kennedy/Nixon contest
was a toss-up in Los Angeles County, just as in the rest of the country.
But since Los Angeles tipped Democratic in 1988, the county has grown more and
more Democratic. In the 50-50 election of 2000, 66 percent of the voters in
Los Angeles County were for Al Gore.
Los Angeles and Williamson counties are traveling in opposite political
directions, and they are moving fast. Their radically different political
trajectories aren't aberrant. If anything, Williamson and Los Angeles counties
are typical of what's happening in thousands of U.S. counties.
Counties tip to one party or another, staying with that party election after
election -- and then the counties lean further. Republican counties, on
average, are becoming more Republican. Democratic counties are becoming more
Democratic, according to the Statesman's analysis of more than 50 years of
presidential voting results.
Before counties tipped and became persistent supporters of a single party in
presidential elections, their residents voted close to 50-50.
Once these counties tipped, however, their average voting majorities became
extreme. And the longer these counties stayed with a single party, the larger
those majorities grew.
There aren't just a few counties that have tipped Democratic or Republican.
Most American voters live in counties with presidential party preferences that
haven't changed in a generation, according to Cushing's analysis. And the
majorities in those counties are growing.
Sixty percent of Republican voters live in counties that have voted for the
Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1980. Sixty percent
of the Democratic voters live in counties that have voted for the Democratic
candidate in every election since 1988.
Three of every five voters live in counties where children have been born,
graduated from high school and gone off to college without ever experiencing a
local change in presidential party preference.
The two parties do, indeed, occupy two different worlds.
Why are these political divisions being created? How is it happening? Are
people moving to places to live among like-minded neighbors? Or are the
parties changing to reflect the ideological contours that exist already in the
nation?
Nobody knows the answers to these questions. There probably isn't a single
answer, but a constellation of forces that have together divided the country.
The effects of this segregation and clustering, however, are easier to predict
and to see.
"If you don't have anyone in your network of associates who thinks the least
bit different from you, then it's pretty easy to grow confident in the
correctness of your views," said University of Maryland political demographer
James Gimpel.
"There is no opportunity in those counties or neighborhoods for dissonance to
arise. And so by keeping dissonance out, you wind up gravitating toward a more
extreme political position. This is one explanation for the increase in
ideology you see not only in the public, but in Congress."
The rancor of the presidential campaign is blamed on the personality of the
candidates, the barbarity of political consultants and on the demands of
political contributors. The one cause of this civic bitterness that has not
been fingered is the one that should be most obvious, the one that is manifest
in our communities.
Over the past 30 years, Americans have created their own communities of
political solidarity and ideological insulation. One by one and place by
place, we have constructed a great divide, boundaries of partisanship as plain
as a map and as powerful as belief.
bbishop@statesman.com; 445-3634
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/auto/epaper/editions/sunday/news_04f60cdfc47a42e000cc.html
AMERICAN-STATESMAN: Column by By Bill Bishop Thursday, April 8, 2004
The Great Divide: Where we live. What we think. How we vote.
Split among U.S. voters so great that there is little competition in
presidential contests between the parties in most U.S. counties.
Most Americans live in counties that haven't changed their party preference in
presidential elections in more than a generation. That political uniformity
comes with a cost, according to social psychologists, as followers of the two
parties look at the same set of facts and see two different worlds.
"You have people who are generally living in a Republican or Democratic
county, and they are not going to hear both sides of the story," said Robert
Baron, a social psychologist at the University of Iowa. "So the discussion
will be twisted and biased, emphasizing those things that support the dominant
norm and disparaging or questioning the credibility of the things that
contradict it."
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice will answer questions today from
the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and, if the
recent past is any guide, both Republicans and Democrats will have completely
one-sided reactions to what she has to say.
After Richard Clarke testified two weeks ago, Republicans and Democrats had
entirely different views of the former White House counterterrorism chief's
criticism of the Bush administration: Seventy-six percent of Democrats sided
with Clarke, according to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll; 83 percent of
Republicans backed Bush.
The American system was set up to encourage wide-ranging debate, University of
Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein says. It was also designed so that "people
in one community have an obligation to listen to others and do what's in the
interest of the nation."
As the nation's communities become more politically lopsided, however, "you
get people who sometimes see their fellow citizens as confused or vicious, as
not fully members of the same community, and that can make discussion and
mutual understanding difficult," Sunstein said. "I think we've seen some of
that. Some communities think extremely unfair things about the other side."
What's going on, with the polar opposite reactions to Rice, Clarke and nearly
every other issue that confronts a nation in a presidential election year?
A separation
The answer, in part, can be found in a dramatic demographic and political
shift. For eight presidential elections, from 1948 to 1976, presidential
elections at the local level on average grew more competitive.
Republican voters became more likely to encounter Democrats at the courthouse
and in the express line at the grocery. Democratic presidential voters became
more likely to have Republicans as neighbors or bowling league partners.
There were still counties filled with Republicans and communities of mostly
Democrats, but the average county was growing more politically diverse, at
least when it came to presidential voting.
After 1976, however, the political mixture began to separate, and for the next
six presidential elections, Republicans and Democrats pulled apart.
By the time George W. Bush narrowly defeated Al Gore in 2000, the nation's
counties had grown more politically segregated than at any time since the end
of World War II.
Meanwhile, those majorities are growing. Nearly seven out of every 10 voters
live in counties where presidential elections are becoming less competitive,
according to a study of U.S. election data by the Austin American-Statesman's
statistical consultant, Robert Cushing.
Does it matter that American voters are increasingly living in ideologically
homogenous communities? The American-Statesman queried more than a dozen
political scientists, social psychologists and political pollsters, and they
all said, yes, it matters a lot.
Life of extremes
Like-minded people have a peculiar effect on each other. In groups, they
become more extreme versions of what they were before. Conservative people, in
groups, become more conservative. Liberals become more liberal.
In one experiment, according to social psychologist David Myers of Hope
College in Holland, Mich., French college students prone to being critical of
the United States were asked to discuss their complaints. After the talk, the
group had become more critical of the United States. In another test,
moderately pro-feminist American women became strongly pro-feminist after a
discussion.
One of the latest experiments in what social psychologists call "group
polarization" has been conducted by University of Texas business professor
David Schkade and the University of Chicago's Sunstein.
Schkade and Sunstein examined the decisions of three-judge panels in the U.S.
Court of Appeals. It was a "natural experiment," Schkade explained. Judges are
political appointees, either Democrat or Republican. And the three-judge
panels are picked randomly, so there is a constant mix of Republican and
Democratic judges.
Schkade and Sunstein found what you would expect: Purely Democratic panels
were more liberal than groups of three Republican judges.
For instance, in environmental cases, all-Republican panels sided with a
company about three-quarters of the time. Before a Democratic panel, the
company won only 25 percent of the time.
But what happens when the panels are mixed? Here, Sunstein and Schkade
uncovered the power of group polarization.
"The very interesting thing we found is that an individual judge's vote shifts
in the direction of the average ideology of the other two judges," Schkade
explained.
A Democratic judge sitting with two Republicans voted more conservatively than
she did when sitting on a panel with a Democratic majority. Republicans worked
the same way, becoming more liberal on panels with two Democrats.
And when three Republican judges sat together, they all voted more
conservatively than when any of the three sat on a mixed panel. Democrats
worked the same way.
Federal judges are chosen for their ability to think critically, impartially.
Yet even these men and women, people who have spent a lifetime weeding bias
out of their thinking and writing, are affected by the power of the group.
An urge to be liked
The psychological forces found in the chambers of federal judges are also at
work in communities.
"If you sit around wondering what you know about President Bush, well, if you
live in a Republican place, you are likely to think of positive things,
because you have heard them so frequently and recently," Baron explained.
And if you live in a county dominated by Republicans, you are likely to hear
new and different arguments in favor of the president, so you grow more
confident in your decision as others corroborate your views, Baron said.
Groups also become more extreme, social scientists say, because of the most
basic of human emotions: People want to be liked and accepted.
If your group is Republican, Baron said, "you want to make sure that nobody
mistakes you for a Democrat. And one way to make sure you aren't mistaken for
one of those other people is to be slightly ahead of the pack in terms of your
Republican-ness."
Baron describes a subtle competition within groups, as individuals seek to
gain favor by being slightly more Republican (or Democratic or Christian) than
the group average, setting off a snowball of opinion that gradually moves the
group to more extreme positions.
"It's hard to be a moderate Republican or a moderate Democrat, in other
words," Baron said, "because you're afraid that other people will call you,
whatever. In racial terms, you would be called an Oreo, if you are black."
These are the kind of social mechanisms that work in communities with strong
majorities, according to Baron, Sunstein, Schkade and Myers. There haven't
been any large experiments or tests for group polarization in U.S. counties,
but "if you have political (concentration) in geographic terms, then the
prediction is that people are talking one to another and they'll think a more
extreme version of what they thought before," Sunstein said.
In thousands of U.S. counties, that process has been at work over the past 30
years, as where we live has influenced what we think and how we vote.
ZIP code as politics
At one time, a person's politics would reflect his class, race or occupation.
All those factors still play roles in shaping an individual's beliefs. More
recently, however, a ZIP code has come to have political meaning.
You can see in South Austin bumper stickers designed and printed soon after
the U.S. invasion of Iraq: 78704Peace. The idea came from a meeting of
residents in a neighborhood that gave Ralph Nader more votes in 2000 than
Bush.
Thirty years ago, regions and parties were more politically mixed.
"At one point in the past, it was true that Republicans and Democrats occupied
rival turf," University of Maryland political demographer James Gimpel said.
In the mid-1970s, the nation's politics started to change. Parties turned more
ideological. Democrats became more liberal. Republicans grew more
conservative. And people noticed.
"Fifty years ago, it wasn't so clear which way religious people went
politically," said Nathan Persily, a law professor and redistricting expert at
the University of Pennsylvania. "To the degree that there is a Bible Belt, and
there always was one, now the Bible Belt is affiliated with one of the major
parties, namely the Republicans."
As parties became more ideologically pure, regions that were home to people
with strong beliefs gradually became affiliated with a single party. Hispanics
turned to the Democratic Party, so immigrant centers became Democratic. Rural
voters aligned with the Republican Party, so vast reaches in the country's
middle turned red on television maps. Single women affiliated with the
Democratic party, so cities with large numbers of unmarried females trended
blue.
In other words, the parties moved to the people.
At the same time, the extraordinary prosperity of the past generation allowed
people to pick and choose among places to live. And people often chose to live
with those who were like-minded.
"When we talk about choice, what we generally end up with is people
self-segregating," said Diana Mutz, a University of Pennsylvania political
scientist. "It's one of the main problems with choice. We choose to be with
people similar to ourselves."
Those choices weren't overtly political, she said.
"When people make choices about where to live, they aren't making it on the
level of politics explicitly," Mutz said. "But they are making it on the basis
of things that correlate strongly with politics, and as a result, they end up
with mainly like-minded others."
In 78704, liberal writer Molly Ivins lives just a few blocks from liberal
radio commentator Jim Hightower, and they both live just a few blocks more
from neighbors who designed the 78704Peace bumper sticker.
Place aligned with ideology, which aligned with party. Like-minded people came
to live in the same place, which made it more likely that the group would
polarize. Party, place and people all began to agree, lined up like
matchsticks in a box.
"There is an old idea that one thing that makes for a stable, well-functioning
democracy is the presence of cross-cutting cleavages," explained Erick
Schickler, a Harvard University political scientist. "That is, your enemy on
one issue may be your ally on another issue, and that makes for stability and
keeps conflict more cordial and restrained."
Both Clarke and Rice face a public that has fewer of those "cross-cutting
cleavages" than a generation ago; people have fewer neighbors of a different
political persuasion. And Congress is more ideological, less likely to
compromise than at any time in the last 50 years.
The calls for nonpartisanship and unity on the Sept. 11 commission, meanwhile,
echo an older way of handling public business, when party, ideology and place
weren't so neatly matched.
"That was America circa 1955," Schickler said. "It's not America in 2004."
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