Polarization leads to nationalization of elections
Do swing states really swing? Are the presidential campaigns right to focus so much time and money on a small set of swing states?
Brad Jones, a graduate student in political science at U. Wisconsin, has produced some extraordinary graphs in a blog post at CivilPolitics.org, showing that states used to swing widely from election to election, particularly in the decades after WWII. Knowing how a state voted in one presidential election didn’t usually give you a strong basis for predicting its vote in the next few elections. So it would make sense for candidates to pour huge amounts of money into the few states that could plausibly be shifted.
But as political polarization has increased since the 1980s, the states have begun to lose their individual personalities and assume their place in a single ranked list, based (I assume) on the percentage of the population that is liberal or conservative. In other words, if you know how liberal or conservative a state is, you can predict with high accuracy how it’s presidential vote will turn out. As Jones puts it:
politics has become increasingly nationalized as it has polarized. This nationalization would explain the stable rankings and uniform shifts that have characterized recent elections. The shifts in election results are not concentrated among the handful of states that receive endless barrages of campaign advertising. Rather, all of the states have tended to move toward the candidate who ultimately wins the election.
You gotta see the graphs to believe it. One really interesting finding: this same pattern of extreme predictability is not new. Jones shows that it also held during the last period of extreme political polarization, in the late 19th Century. Polarization does weird things to our democracy. It makes one moral fault line become highly stable and salient, rather than having multiple possible fault lines and shifting coalitions, which I think is a healthier situation, less prone to demonization.
Gerrymandering has had a big impact.
Can we PLEASE get The Righteous Mind on Audio?
There is no notice that we can find that an audiobook is forthcoming.
The book is well suited to audio format.
Thanks.
Yes! i just finished recording it 3 weeks ago. I think it will be out on audio in Sept. or Oct.
actually, it’s out!
see the “buy” page.
I am delighted to have come across your thoughtful and intellectually stimulating blog……. and writings….. via Bill Moyers.
thank you!
I am about half way through “The Righteous Mind” and have never been so amazed at how true it all is! And, I am seeing the applications in every opinion piece or letter to the editor I read! Now I am hoping for some insights in how good people who disagree can solve some of America’s most challenging problems in a way that benefits…in some way…all groups.
I”m sorry i couldn’t deliver on solutions in chapter 12, but there will be more to come at http://www.civilpolitics.org
The problem must be attacked on all fronts. There’s no single solution.
But paramount among the possible solutions, in my humble opinion, is to change the path via MFT education, including the concepts Rider/Elephant and Argumentative Theory, in K-12 and beyond in this country.
Polarization may be inevitable (see my comment below).
Possibly the best, and maybe even the only, way to soften it – and decrease demonization and increase civility along the way – might be to help future generations understand how and why it happens.
I would be more optimistic that our future leaders could “solve some of America’s most challenging problems in a way that benefits…in some way…all groups” if the they had a firmer grasp on how and why human interaction works the way it does.
What better goal is there?
Here’s my vision:
Tom Peters turned In Search of Excellence into a mini industry to help the business world. Why not the same for The Righteous Mind in all realms of human interaction; personal, business, and political?
Wow, this is just about exactly the model I’ve been using to forecast how the next election will come out. If you rank the states from most liberal to most conservative, it’s as though the entire election can be determined by figuring out where the line will fall between the red states and the blue states this time.
I keep playing with the interactive electoral map, and every time, I make all the “toss up” states red if they usually go red, and blue if they usually go blue. In other words, I find myself thinking “there’s no way this state will go for Romney unless these other 2 states also go his way, and Nevada can’t go blue if Colorado is red, and so on.
Each and every time my takeaway is that Ohio will decide. Or at least be the one that gets it right. There seems to be no way for either guy to win without Ohio. Ohio has picked the winner every time since 1980, BTW. And they have reliably gone back and forth between red and blue more than any other state in this era. So I think you and Brad Jones are spot on here.
Really enjoyed the Righteous Mind, just finished my 2nd trip through.
thank you!
it is depressing how most of our votes just don’t matter, it all comes down to a few states.
But every vote does matter because every vote is part of the larger “recipe.” If you do vote, at a minimum you could offset the vote of somebody who votes for the other guy. Do you really want to stay home and let the voters for the other guy win?
This might be a fun study (Ravi, are you listening?): Which groups, if any, are more prone to think “our votes just don’t matter?” How would elections turn out if those groups stayed home and didn’t vote? Would they turn out differently? Would the groups who stayed home like or dislike the difference?
Your despair over how our votes don’t count provides a perfect opportunity to plug a proposal that would preserve the Electoral College while still insuring that every vote in every State would be meaningful. It’s called the National Popular Vote, and nine States have already passed legislation that would enable it. Details about this ingenious proposal can be found at http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
That will never pass the inevitable constitutional challenge. States can’t simply sign over or delegate their power by agreement or compact. They have to act as sovereign states. The constitution says each state has to do the choosing. If they sign over that authority, then they aren’t doing the actual choosing.
it’s the same as if dad told you to cut the grass and you got your little brother to do it. Then dad finds out, and says “I specifically told YOU to do it.” Same thing. The constitution explicitly tells each state to do it.
If we want to get rid of the electoral college, it needs to be done via amendment. There’s no way some subset of states will be allowed to enter into a compact rendering the electoral college moot.
The ideas at the end of this comment may be kind of “out there,” but in the spirit of unrestrained brainstorming and openness to new ideas I’ll toss them into the ring of discussion and see how they fare.
We seem to be lamenting this thing we call “polarization,” and pining for the good old days of a relatively even blend of political world views in the country’s neighborhoods and states.
But since groupishness is part of human nature isn’t it only natural that, given a relatively stable population size and enough time, even a popluation as large as the one in the U.S will exhibit some amount of self sorting?
I haven’t done, or even looked for, any studies that might support this idea, but just “thinking out loud” at a macro level I would imagine it could be argued that the U.S. was in a mode of population growth and geographic expansion from the arrival of the first settlers through the baby boom, and that growth and expansion operated as sort of a natural blender of ideologies. We were so busy establishing ourselves, setting down roots, filling up the available space, building, and fighting Wars that threatened the existence of the nation, that we just weren’t focused on ideology. We had bigger fish to fry, so to speak. The business of extablishing and protecting the country was at the forefront. It was Gemeinschaft.
But since the end of WWII and the baby boom the population has been, relatively speaking, stable. We’ve become, finally, established. Given that relative stability, isn’t it only natural, even inevitable, that there’d be a slow, steady settling-out of like-minded people toward each other?
We’ve known for a long time that ethnic groups tend to gravitate together in neighborhoods in our large cities. And yes, that “grouping” is based on ethnicity more than on ideology, but in the end the people are like-minded. People tend to like to be with other people who are similar to themselves.
Is it really so surprising that there would be a similar sorting on a larger scale within the country, based not so much on ethnicity and more on a larger scale like-mindedness like ideology?
After the long period of growth an expansion there’s been less need to focus on externalities like our westward migration and Wars that threatened our existence as a nation, and there’s been more oppotunity, more luxury, for us to turn inward and contemplate who and what we really are, and want to be, and want for ourselves. We’re now in Gessellschaft.
Could it be that this sorting, this “polarization,” is just part of the natural, inevitable, maturation process of a great population? If natural selection happens at the group level, doesn’t it make sense that we would naturally sort ourselves into groups?
A related question that’s always baffled me is this: If moral foundations really are the products of natural selection, which probably means that they allow us to perceive and react to real-world threats to our individual and collective well being and survivial, what could explain the existence of a sub-culture that openly and consciously denies and even defies half of them? Why, and how, could that happen?
Could it be that it happens because nature abhors homogeneity? I understand this idea defies the concept of entropy, of the natural tendency in nature toward equilibrium. But entropy is a concept of the physical world; of physics. Could it be that equilibrium is a bad thing for humans; or for human society? Could it be that separating into groups that compete with each other helps us to survive and to thrive? Could THAT explain why some groups reject half of our protective mechanisms? Additionally, could Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft also be part of that process?
I don’t know. Maybe this is just silly-talk. But as Arsinio Hall used to say, it’s something that makes me go “Hmmm.”
Nothing in moral foundations theory says that a spectrum must be divided into 2 poles. This phenomenon is more likely an artifact of the 2 party-system than human nature.
I think it makes senses that we sort ourselves into groups, but there’s nothing special about the number two. I also see no reason to think that a maturation process HAS TO apply under which we trend only in one direction of call it greater stability.
But it might. It would be interesting to hear an economist’s take. Market competition does tend to lead towards oligopoly, dominance by some small number of most fit groups. [fit being defined in terms of the political market: the ability to turn resources into votes]
Thus, Americans should not be shocked to learn that our security from Jihadist attacks in our homeland or on our foreign missions and facilities can no longer be expected. There are far too many bad actors out there and we have too few resources with which to combat them. The Benghazi debacle was not even a good example of what to expect, as we were engaged in activity in Benghazi that led to the incident. No, what is likely to come will be the result of Obama Administration policies that are nowhere near likely to secure our safety at home or abroad. Whether is in Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iraq or the terrorist states like Iran, the vast number of recruits the Islamist Jihadists have coupled with their hatred of “The Great Satan” almost surely will result in a significant uptick in actual lethal and bloody attacks. And soon.