Welcome to Party Politics, where we're going to talk about everything that you wanted to know about polarization.

And you were always afraid to ask.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, along with my colleague.

And that's actually a great way for us to segue into this because we want to do a little kind of teachable moment, right on polarization.

So we're going to broaden out our focus.

Typically, we're, you know, talking about the politics of the day, right.

As always, exciting and sometimes very sad.

True.

But it's always related to polarization.

And that's something that we live with as kind of political commentators, but also in terms of scholars of political science, because it just affects everything that we do and everything that people act through in terms of the political system.

So polarization obviously is something that we've seen like dramatically increase in the last couple of decades.

It's been slow in some cases and fast and other.

But overall, the same, I think, effect is happening where you're seeing a lot of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.

So just to give you a couple of stats, the ideological overlap between the two parties has diminished.

So Republicans are are 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat and 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican.

Basically, that means that there is a consolidation of ideological interest in those two parties, and it's something that is, to some degree a U.S. phenomenon.

So that polarization among Americans has grown rapidly in the past 40 or 50 years, more fast than Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia or Germany.

That polarization is something that is unique to America.

And so my question to you, Professor, is why is it the case this is happening?

Why is polarization becoming such a dramatic issue in America?

Oh, wow.

Okay.

And I'll see you later.

Yeah, I'll let you finish that.

Thank you.

All right.

So clearly you didn't do the readings.

Right?

That's why I'm asking you.

Because I know that you did.

If you did the readings right, everything is answered in the reading.

It's all right there.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think it's a lot of things, right?

And one of the most important thing is I think it has to be thought about in terms of our own foundational myth that foundational myth is the American dream.

And when I say foundational myth is not a myth, it's just what we use in political science to denote how nations are created.

So the American dream, I think it has to do a lot with, you know, that, I guess very important.

Kind of mythology of.

Mythology, but is, you know, pursuit of happiness, pursuit of liberty, freedom, so on and so forth.

Right.

And when you look at and compare with other countries, it's one of the most powerful, I guess, motivations for a polity to pursue.

So once you have been socialized within the American dream, right, that you can be whatever you want to be.

Yeah.

That, you know, the government is here to protect you, that if you work hard, you're going to be a millionaire next week, that you can send your kids to school, etc., etc..

Interesting.

So that notion of the American dream is no longer.

Yeah, right.

I mean, it has diminished very, very, very, very, very to very, very, very few.

And that has to do with income inequality.

That has to do not only with the quantity of opportunities, but the quality of opportunities.

So I think there is a overall among Democrats and among Republicans, there is a complete, you know, breaking apart disenchantment of the American dream.

Yeah, right.

Interesting.

And then psychologically, you need to blame someone or you need to blame somebody or you need to blame an ideology of why you are suffering those consequences.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a lot of work that's been really influential on kind of status anxiety and racial resentment where people are worried about their own position in the world, especially economically, and they tend to kind of lash out at people who aren't in that group.

And so that grouping creates this sort of pattern where then we're blaming other people for these problems.

And maybe it's true, maybe it's not true.

But like that divide is creating additional polarization.

The term we use for this is called affective polarization.

We've talked about this before, but see, I did the reading, whatever, at least that one first article.

Yeah, that was the best one and the rest let you tell me.

But basically affective polarization is where you've got members of the opposite parties who don't like each other.

And it's not so much that we disagree with each other politically or we have policy differences.

It's that literally my group is better than your group, and I want my group to succeed and your group not to succeed.

right.

That kind of issue is something that's so than easy to prime, right?

So politicians and activists and just people on Twitter who are, you know, like in especially in these accounts that are, you know, kind of nameless accounts are able to exacerbate that so easily because we're so kind of psychologically prone to thinking about groups.

Right.

Right.

This group versus that group.

So that sorting is really hardwired into our consciousness.

And so a lot of scholars talk about polarization in that way.

So we'll talk about this at the end.

But there are ways to solve that problem, which is good, right?

We can sort of manufacture some relationship where you don't have to have this sort of us versus them scenario, but it definitely is exacerbated by stuff like social media and by media bubble.

So tell me about like this role.

Like how is it that the media plays the kind of divider instead of the uniter?

So, Well, the media, you know, has a very important role because everyone every single person in this world has preconceived convictions or preconceived notions or biases or something like that.

Right.

So when those biases are reaffirmed by a continuous message, by different framing, right.

How you frame an issue that simply resonates with, for example, your political ideology or resonates with, you know, the candy of your choice or whatever that gets amplified.

And then what happens is that you start describing the other people on the opposite side as wrong.

And just to give you an idea, yeah, the Pew Research Center did a couple of polls a couple of years ago.

And, you know, for example, Republicans say that Democrats are more immoral, are more dishonest.

Right.

On the other hand, Democrats say that Republicans are closed minded, that they're also unintelligent and and and lazy.

So when you have those things, it's impossible to really, really have a conversation.

Right.

Yeah.

Because your your prior is that basically this other group is somehow uniquely worse than our group.

So the otherness, the otherness effect.

And that creates a environment in which social media or the media is just basically feeding and re feeding and re feeding everything.

And now, you know, since the eighties, we have 24 hour news channels, right?

Yeah.

And what do you do?

You need content.

You need content and if something's going to be, you know, newsworthy.

Yeah, that thing is being repeated 24 seven until a news cycle comes.

Yeah.

And with social media and the internet and this and that, it's like, you know, whatever.

Yeah, new algorithms, you get heat.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No.

You keep flooding it.

Yeah.

And social media isn't the cause of it, but it's certainly exacerbating it.

Right.

And so that one two punch of like how we're wired to kind of see groups differently and then people are sorted based upon the social media or other media bubbles that they're in definitely kind of radicalizes.

And so as a result, you see this divide and it just little by little gets bigger and bigger.

So that's certainly something that's troublesome, right?

And obviously that's exacerbated by the fact that we no longer have the Fairness Doctrine, which was a doctrine that was in effect until about the mid eighties, where you had the networks were required to basically present balanced coverage.

Right.

Once that went away during the Reagan administration, it was harder for the news organizations to be held to the standard of having to balance things.

Right.

So now you can have organizations that are like one sided and sort of present just one world view.

And as a result, not surprisingly, people gravitate to those areas, not like PBS, not like NPR, right?

We are split down the middle, but we're not the, you know, the the norm now.

Right?

And now you've got sort of corporations who can see the value in making money to be able to encourage people to kind of watch one side that already promotes what they believe.

And so that creates this additional kind of outcome.

And I guess part of it is that, you know, that's the kind of, you know, sort of political side of things.

But then there's also the institutional side of things where we're drawing district lines effectively to sort of have one or the other of the parties win.

And it's almost impossible for the other side to win.

So talk to me about how gerrymandering plays into the concept of this polarization.

So gerrymandering obviously is prohibited by law based on the Voting Rights Act, especially if you're.

Technically.

Yes.

Yes.

You interrupted me.

Apologies.

Yes.

So even if it's based on race or gender or any other protected categories, political gerrymandering is not prohibited.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

And the courts say this, right?

Like basically they've sanctioned the fact that you can draw lines based upon Republican or Democratic.

Like, why not?

Right.

Yeah.

So that entails a significant problem is not only a significant problem in terms of, you know, candidates or legislators or whoever is drawing those districts picking out, Right, They're constituency.

It's like.

Right.

And reversing what democracy's democracy is.

We picking up, who is going to represent us.

But if you are not having the chance in a competitive democratic election, then that means that for certain people, right?

Yeah, that ride is completely evaporating.

Yeah.

So that's another real important issue of political polarization, right?

It's once again, you don't have that choice.

And today your choices in some places are going to be reduced to, you know, picking if you want paper or plastic bags in the supermarket.

Right.

You can not even pick right now if you want a seat on an aisle or a window in the airplane.

Right.

If you travel because you need to pay extra, you got to pay for it.

Right.

So it's those choices are reduced to very, very few things in life.

And now the very basic political right of allowing me to pick in a competitive election who I want to be represented by.

It feels tougher.

And actually to in addition to that, I am struck by this sort of findings that when they ask people about running for office, which is like one of the ways that you can participate in the system right, and give money, you can volunteer, you can go vote.

But like running for office is sort of obviously kind of the more difficult hurdle.

And what they found is that in surveys beginning in the eighties, that have sort of updated that people are worried about the cost of running for office.

And obviously that sticker price is going up a lot.

That's a subject for a different show.

But in this context, it's because it's so high or perceived to be so high that people don't want to run.

And so as a result, the people who do run tend to be backed by interest that are much more ideologically extreme than everybody else.

And so you're effectively having only some people run for office.

And that means that your choices are even further narrowed.

Even if it wasn't the case, the gerrymandering had shrunk, that it's now the case that people who are self-selecting into running for office, the elites of the parties basically are now sort of the people who are the most extreme.

So that becomes a problem.

But on the other side is that, you know, yet the public in general, I think around some public opinion polls suggest that more than 80% of the public is highly critical of the impact of party polarization of politicians.

Right.

Is blaming both sides.

Yes.

So it's a whole cognitive dissonance phenomenon, right?

That part of your brain is saying the other side is bad.

Yeah.

And then the other part of your brain is saying, yeah, both sides are bad.

Yeah.

So it creates an impossible entanglement of ideas and ideologies that basically takes a lot of of mental gymnastics in order not to have, you know, the negative consequences of these ideas that would be anxiety or uneasiness because what you're saying simply does not make any sense.

Yeah, it's hard to justify it in your mind.

And yet we're forced to choose.

Right.

And so what a lot of people do is either choose holding their nose or they don't choose at all right to vote.

And that phenomena has become a real problem.

So we see a tremendous divergence in terms of how participation functions from election to election and from state to state.

Texas in particular is like on the cellar floor when it comes to turnout.

So maybe it's not surprising, but and there are lots of factors here, but you definitely see polarization is sort of part of this where people just check out and say, I don't want to deal with this anymore.

So it's political.

It's also personal.

Some of that stuff actually interesting where they have surveys that ask people questions like, would you be unhappy if, like, you know, your son or daughter married somebody of the opposite political party?

And the numbers have been increasing over time because of this?

Like, yeah, shouldn't matter.

Right?

But yeah, it does matter.

And so that has serious consequences, which is what I want to talk about next.

We have fewer people making decisions for us.

We've been talking about the ways that that happens.

The primary electorate is such a smaller group, but in so many states and so many districts that who really makes this decision.

So in Texas, we talk about the 3%.

There's 3% of primary voters effectively who are making choices for, like all know, three, 30, 30 million of us.

Right.

So what is the implication to kind of the primary process in the way that it manifests in terms of polarization?

Well, I mean, that's a very good question, because when we think of the electorate, I think I like to think of it as you just describe it.

Right.

You have a different type of electorate.

Your electorate is going to be your primary electorate, Right.

And that's going to be the first step.

Then you're going to have your general election electorate made and the difference between one or the other are extremely important because your primary electorate can be completely on one side or the other side of the ideological spectrum in comparison to that of the general electorate.

So two things here.

One is that it depends on who goes out and vote, right?

The other thing it depends on where these elections are taking place.

A.K.A the district.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And it also depends on how competitive these race are and most elections in many cases and there's many examples here in Texas, the election is decided on the primary election for both Democrats and Republicans.

Yeah.

So it's like wait, what?

And this is not just a Texas problem.

I mean, across the country, 20% of the party votes in primaries.

That's a really low number.

And if gerrymandering has taken hold and you've got candidates who are self-selecting into more kind of partizan worlds, then the ability to choose as of really among a very small group of people, and that's in contrast the fact that, like a significant percentage of Americans consider themselves either not partizan or independent, right?

So a lot of people are simply not getting represented in that way.

So it's a political story and it's a structural story.

And the implications of it is that then you have a kind of a harder to be able to kind of resolve at the end of it.

Right.

So basically, lawmaking is more challenging.

Both parties have grown, more ideological, can be cohesive.

You've got then sort of the parties really coalescing around these much more extreme positions right.

The center is basically hollowed out.

So you've had retirements in the past couple of years of a significant number of moderates in the Senate and in the House.

And both parties have moved farther away from the ideological center.

So now the sort of you see a lot of overlap, right?

You can see I can see the graph on my head.

But basically there's a lot of these members, right, who are kind of at the, you know, both Republicans and Democrats who are in the center, little by little, they've been taken away.

Oh, in terms of Prisma color.

Right.

It's you had a lot of purple.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And that lot of purple when you look, for example, at the House or the Senate has disappeared.

Yeah.

And is now more red and more blue and the people are still, you know, raising the purple are just being left behind and alone.

There are some work that suggests that being bipartisan has a kind of effective outcome for voters.

But like, it's a small effect and like we said, combatted against all these other factors is really hard for moderates to engage in bipartisan lawmaking and have it be like a successful outcome.

Now, the better choice is for them to be more partizan.

Go on Twitter, complain about it, challenge people to like fights literally and then like reap the benefits.

That's partly because of redistricting.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And again, that is you know, it's the normal consequence of redistricting.

Yeah.

If you already know who your constituents are going to be, you have to cater to that particular set of the electorate.

True.

If you're bipartisan, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

Yeah.

Why?

Because these districts are not districts that are going to be bipartisan.

Districts are going to be very partizan for Democrats or very partizan for Republicans.

Both, though they exact same thing totally.

So you don't have an incentive, right, to be a bipartisan.

There's simply not incentive.

There's only those issues that may be, you know, once again resonate among Democrats and Republicans that given polarization, those issues are becoming less and less and less and less common.

Even like what we watch on TV, where we shop.

Right.

These are things that manifest in terms like how people see differences and how they act on those differences.

And I want to talk about the darker side of those actions, and that's about political violence.

We have seen an uptick in the number of political violence episodes beginning in about 2018.

It's always been prevalent, but politics seems to be exacerbating some of that now.

Now, we know from literature that political violence isn't something that's caused by the kind of political friction in the world, but because there are certain people who are just predisposed towards violence.

Right.

But it's also the case that that oftentimes that political interaction, that friction that they see or that they create sometimes is creating additional problems.

And so this is a real concern, because if we see political friction continuing to be presented in the way that it is and people have incentive, like you say, to press those issues, then you're going to see more and more of this.

And that has serious violent consequences for this country.

Well, I mean, and we have seen taking, you know, a note from our page from other countries, right?

Yeah.

We have seen why, you know, political binds, balance of resist needs, because, you know, the differences between groups and the otherness of, you know, the other group.

Yeah.

I have seen all.

Of the other other.

Yeah, the other other side has increased dramatically and the last resort is violence.

Yeah.

So it's extremely dangerous because when you couple everything, right and you know, the lack of the American dream, people have been basically, you know, left behind by Democrats, left behind by Republicans.

You feel disconnected, right?

You're completely isolated.

You blame the government.

You blame the other side.

Whether you're a Democrat or Republican doesn't really matter.

Right?

You work like a crazy person every single day just to make ends meet.

Right?

You don't have time for the kids you're worried about, you know, mortgage, car payment, college.

And you work, work, work, work.

And then there's a moment that You know, it's like a pressure cooker.

Yeah.

The steam has to come out somehow, right?

And the fighting about like whether, you know, President Biden released too many bears into a national park to be able to reproduce and just you snap.

Yeah and I think that's a real problem because it does exacerbate this and just continues to reinforce it.

So it's hard to get a solution to this because like you say, some of these problems are intractable, but there are some solutions people have come up with.

So for instance, from a structural point of view, like when you kind of force Congress to work together, it can be effective.

So there's a House Select Committee on the modernization of Congress that took a bipartisan approach to a bunch of issues that was pretty successful, actually.

People have also found that these kind of we'll call them junkets, but they're more kind of technically known as these bipartisan trips that, like will send a bunch of members to a particular place to go look at something like, here's a manufacturing faculty or a facility or, you know, here's a sort of, you know, kind of a someplace abroad.

They want to go inspect what's happening militarily.

These are trips are shown to increase bipartisanship.

So basically just interaction and the sense that like the people who are on the other party like aren't my enemies, Right?

They're not evil people.

Like, just those interactions can be effective.

So inside Congress, that can work.

True.

I mean, the other thing that needs to be changed eventually, right, is this issue about redistricting.

You know.

Good.

Colleagues like we believe in a capitalist economy.

Right?

Let the free market reign.

However, we always put, you know, guardrails in terms of democracy, and democracy should also be the free market of ideas.

Yeah, period.

Let the best candidate win.

Yeah, right.

Let's let the best product win.

But give the consumer, in this case, voters, the chance to pick the product that they have to, you know, that they want.

Yeah.

And that's going to make political parties more attuned with the needs of the general electorate, not just the primary electorate.

Yeah.

And the other thing and, and problem that we have, and you mentioned it before, is that we have two parties basically.

Right.

And that obviously makes polarization more likely.

If you have other choices, there's no other choice.

That's it.

But you know.

What?

And on that point, actually some of the structural alterations that political scientists talk about to try to solve this can be useful.

And some municipalities have experimented with it.

So for instance, like ranked choice voting, which lets people choose instead of for like, you know, party A party B, you choose, you know, among certain candidates.

So you can basically like rank order your preferences.

That's been something that's been shown to reduce polarization.

It's also sometimes the case that like enacting a more proportional representation, especially at the local level, has been shown to reduce the amount of political friction.

So these are hard structural choices that would require changing the rules in the middle of the game that obviously politicians are not that happy about.

But you're right, Like these are things that have been shown to be more accommodating in terms of people's preferences and then as a result, reduce the polarization.

And that will also make, you know, Election Day a holiday.

Yeah, I like that.

Yeah.

Get more people voting.

Right?

Exactly.

Like make it a family affair.

Yeah.

Make it on a Sunday.

Yeah.

And you know, and then or whatever day or Monday, right.

But it's a a.

People already have Sunday off mostly.

Right.

I know you work all the time.

But it's a it's a holiday.

Yeah.

It's a holiday and has to be like that.

A holiday.

Something that people are looking forward and that people are going to go and vote.

I mean, it's so, so important and Yeah, and here in the US we don't really realize, you know, the power that has the vote right.

If you have lived or lived in you know quote unquote you know authoritarian regimes, right.

You don't have a vote.

You don't have a say.

Yeah.

And here is sometimes we just you know don't take a take advantage.

Yeah.

Take it for granted.

No that's good.

And beyond the structural stuff, I think too that there are things that have been shown to be effective interventions like trying to reduce people's assumptions about the other sort of.

Right, right.

The other groups, when you do things to sort of have people have these deep conversations about, you know, how you live your life, where you're coming from, your job, not everybody has similar kinds of struggles.

And what people have found is that these interventions help to kind of correct misperceptions based upon identity.

You referenced earlier where, you know, you assume the other side is, you know, lazy or, you know, not doing the right thing or politically different from you.

That's often untrue.

Mostly untrue.

But there's a ways to be able to kind of reduce those.

And that interventions sort of is helpful.

So I do think that there is a kind of prospect here where you can create these sort of programs in schools or outside that let us sort of come together and think about the things that unites us instead of the things that.

divide us.

Exactly.

And I think, as I always say, my students, it's very simple, right?

You have to be able to listen to the other side.

Yeah.

Listen, don't have those preconceptions on your head.

Try to put them aside and just listen.

You may not agree with the other side, and that's perfectly fine.

Yeah, right.

But you don't have to vilify the other side.

Yeah, they have different opinions.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think that that's the beauty of this country in terms of having people with different opinions and have this ability.

And it's something that we need to work out every single day.

So listen, be kind and things are going to get better.

But we're going to continue next week with another episode of Party Politics.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

The conversation keeps up next week.