How Air-Conditioning increased Polarization

John Farrell has a take on polarization in the National Journal. It’s a really interesting read and I recommend it, particularly if you are interested in the electoral forces at work in polarization. There are several quotes from notable political scientists such as Keith Poole, Catherine Rudder, Thomas Mann, Norm Ornstein, among others.

Each year since 1982 the National Journal has rated legislators and measured polarization. The ratings are different than traditional DW-Nominate data the political scientists typically use. Now, there are some issues with their methodology. First, they look for votes that illustrate ideological distinctions between the parties. Second, they eliminate non-controversial votes. And third, they eliminate votes that divide along regional lines. After it’s all said and done, 11% of votes in the House and 41% of Senate votes were included. So, in a lot of ways, this rating is somewhat rigged to illustrate polarization. It does eliminate a lot of procedural votes – which could be advantageous – but isn’t very inclusive of votes that could demonstrate greater commonality than these scores might suggest. But rather than try and illustrate the potentially counter-intuitive point – we may be less polarized on policy substance than many believe (just look at Ezra Klein’s recent post, for example) – they reinforce conventional wisdom.

Farrell’s take leans on Nelson Polsby’s 2004 book, How Congress Evolves. In sum, Polsby argues that the development and expansion of air-conditioning in the South amplified the southern migration. As more northerners made the South their home, the once solid South slowly started to turn Republican. Other factors such as Civil Rights legislation in the mid-1960s also helped transform the South from a solidly Democratic region to a predominantly Republican region.

Polarization 1879-2008. Source: voteview.com

Of course, the elephant in the room is legislative procedure, which has a significant and strong effect on polarization. Without this nuance, a lot of electoral explanations fall short. For example, this particular article highlights the moderating influence of the solidly Democratic South prior to air-conditioning, etc, had a moderating effect on polarization. However, the South was also solidly Democratic from 1879~1910, the other congressional era of intense partisan polarization.

Regardless, Farrell does justice to a lot of interesting political science. It is a very interesting piece with a lot of insight into American history and congressional politics. Well worth your time.

Left and Right are Still Important: The Flux of National Debate

Ezra Klein is frustrated with the fluctuation in party positions. His most damaging critique of this dynamic: “Parties — particularly when they’re in the minority — care more about power than policy.” And parties’ fluctuation in their respective policy positions “make the labels “left” and “right” meaningless.”

“Ideological” shifts are due to a variety of reasons. Societal demands change, new issues come and go, economic conditions fluctuate, and foreign relationships strengthen or sour. And while these social changes remake the political landscape, the parties adapt. Elections anoint new political leaders, new politicians are voted in, and old politicians are defeated or retire. Emerging personalities are thrust into the spotlight to articulate party positions on issues. New coalitions emerge within the existing two-party divide (OWS and the Tea Party). New issues, and interpretations of those issues, are adopted all in an attempt to manage change. Support and opposition to policies is conditional on a multitude of social and political factors but it hardly makes left and right meaningless.

However, “ideology” is a moving target. It’s harder to peg party mantras when compromise, negotiation, and social change muddy the water. Does supporting market-based healthcare reform put you on the left? When you are forced to legislate with Republican opposition and a significant conservative wing of your own party, of course it does. However, the broad “leftist” fingerprint remains: they believe the government should provide universal health care. And despite the fact that the ACA is moderately right in its wording, the “right” would have no doubt preferred no healthcare at all. And where exactly do we place Democrats in the history of civil rights? The very same party that passed the most significant civil rights legislation in our history had successfully filibustered its passage for virtually all of American history prior to 1964-65.

And many of the examples used in the article have no ideological base at all. For example, favoring an expansive view of the presidency doesn’t put you on the right or left. Usually, it just means your party holds the presidency. When your party is in control, of course you want to expand power and influence. As fun as “states’ rights” is as a talking point, it has virtually never been an operating ideology. Even the very serious states’ righters in the antebellum South established a centralized government after they succeeded from the Union. Similarly, is opposing the filibuster going to put you on the left today? Absolutely. Will it put you on the left if Republicans win the Senate? No, because minority’s will always have a vested interest in retaining procedural tools to stop the majority’s agenda.

Parties will always exist in this country, they will always try to win elections, and they will always try to legislate their agenda. The fact that Democrats/Republicans are for an issue that they used to oppose should not be viewed as ideological infidelity but a change in our national dialogue. The fact parties no longer try to enact grandfather clauses or poll taxes is a good thing. The fact that the national deficit is a central issue to the upcoming campaign, and that each party has offered proposals to address this problem, is a good thing. Obviously the solution you prefer rests upon your ideological disposition. But the point is that political dialogue changes over time and sometimes very quickly. The fact that parties respond to those changes is not a bad thing. But when parties change their posture on an issue, it does not mean they have uprooted their ideological foundation. It more often means the debate has shifted.

Rick Santorum’s Measurement Problem: The Religious Left

As our national dialogue pivots from jobs and deficits toward religion, birth control and politics, Rick Santorum has positioned himself at the center of said debate.  His claim that Obama’s beliefs represent a “phony theology” garnered significant media attention last week.  Santroum defended his statement, claiming his words were in reference to the President’s environmentalism (not Obama’s religion per se).  But in 2008 Santorum made a similarly provocative statement about Obama’s Christian faith.  In an interview Santorum was asked whether Obama was a “liberal Christian.”  Santorum responded “I don’t think there is such a thing.”  He would go on to state “To take what is plainly written and say that ‘I don’t agree with that’…means you’re not what you say you are.  You’re a liberal something, but you’re not a Christian.”

Santorum’s claim raises an interesting question concerning conceptualization and measurement.  In simple terms: How do we conceptualize and measure ”religiousness”?  And second: How do ideology and/or party identification correlate with our measure(s) of  religiousness?

It just so happens that political scientists have some good answers to these questions.  Stephen Mockabee, Ken Wald, David Leege have authored a series of papers on this very issue (see the following, entitled “In Search of a Religious Left”).  Mockabee, Wald and Leege note that “traditional” measures of religion—such as daily prayer, reading scripture, church attendance and biblical literalism—tend to correlate with conservative ideology and Republican identification.  In this sense, Santorum may have a point (though obviously a very narrow one).  However, these authors note that the standard measures of religiosity are biased toward a particular conceptualization of religiousness (one favoring piety and individual involvement).  So for the 2006 ANES Pilot Study, Mockabee, Wald and Leege posed a different set of questions pertaining to religious doctrine and practice.  These alternatives gauged the value of sacramental beliefs, respecting church leaders and communitarianism (for example, whether “individual piety” or “helping others” was more important for one’s Christian faith).  They found clear evidence validating this alternative measure of religiosity and that it matters in terms of political ideology and party identification.  As Ken Wald noted in an interview: “We are able to uncover considerable evidence of a religious left among Christians, and the big news is that it matters electorally.  Having a strong communitarian view of faith is associated with voting for Democratic candidates.”  A longer, and more nuanced quote from their recent book chapter:

There appears to be a division of labor such that evangelical-style religiosity attends to questions of personal morality without much interest in social welfare policy, while communitarian-style religiosity addresses social welfare but gives much less priority to issues like abortion and gay rights (Olson and Carroll 1992).  Without measures of communitarian-style religiosity, scholars have not been able to trace this dialectic in American political behavior and have thus presented a one-sided portrait of religion as an inevitably conservative force.

In short, Mockabee, Wald and Leege find that religiosity is not a uni-dimensional construct, despite how we traditionally measure and talk about religion.  Rather, religiosity contains two distinct dimensions.  So when Santorum claims the there is “no such thing” as a “liberal Christian,” he’s using a particular conceptualization of religion (one based, perhaps, on biblical literalism).  But his is not the only measure available.

What do Bacon and Political Science Have in Common?

For any political scientists heading to the Midwest Political Science Association’s conference in April, apparently Chicago’s “Baconfest” is the same weekend.  Bacon milkshakes for everyone!!!

 

hat tip to Keith Weghorst

Congratulations to Josh and Nate!

I wanted to take a moment for a little Rule 22 self-promotion.  Congratulations are in order for a supermajority of this blog.

Last week, Josh was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Congressional Fellowship–the oldest and most prestigious fellowship for any student of Congress.  He joins a long line of noted congressional researchers who served as fellows (including our advisor at Florida, Larry Dodd).  In addition, Nate has accepted a tenure-track appointment at Kansas State University beginning next fall.  This is quite an accomplishment; one that is very well deserved.

So congratulations to both!

Paul Krugman and Congressional Polarization

In Friday’s The New York Times, Paul Krugman addressed what he sees as the disconnect between Republican rhetoric about the welfare state and the distribution of welfare benefits in conservative and liberal states.  Krugman’s piece is one in a series published by The Times exploring the relationship between state ideology and the scope of the social safety net.  This recent discussion has centered–fortunately in my view–on the work of political scientists.  Dean Lacy, for example, asked: “Why do Red States Vote Republican while Blue States Pay the Bills?”, while Larry Bartels addressed this topic over at the MonkeyCage in “The Narcotic of Government Dependency.”  It’s all timely stuff and worthy of continued attention.

What caught my eye in Krugman’s article was the following claim, also referencing (though only vaguely) the work of political scientists:

Modern Republicans are very, very conservative; you might even… say, severely conservative. Political scientists who use Congressional votes to measure such things find that the current G.O.P. majority is the most conservative since 1879, which is as far back as their estimates go.

Krugman doesn’t provide citations with his article, but much of this research stems from the pioneering work of Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal and Nolan McCarty (see for example here or here).  The data Krugman references can be found on Poole’s webpage: Voteview.com.  Here is the time series from 1879 to 2011 in the U.S. House of Representatives.  I’m using the absolute value of the DW-NOMINATE scores with Congresses on the x-axis:

So is Krugman correct about the modern GOP being more conservative than at any point since 1879?  Yes, according to the data.  At the same time, however, Democrats are approaching their most liberal point since 1879 (the most liberal Democratic cohort in the U.S. House was 54th Congress of 1895).  Moreover, one point I repeatedly make in lectures or class discussions is that polarization is the rule rather than the exception.  We can see in the figure that while polarization is high today, it’s not that uncommon in U.S. history.

Quick Hit: Highlights from the Blogosphere

If you were suspicious of the claim that 98% of Catholic women used birth control, it turns out you had good reason. Lydia McGrew breaks down the study Democrats used for that talking point. Matt Glassman has a nice post on this as well.

‘Political Scientists are hotter than Economists,’ via The Monkey Cage. This has been everywhere but it’s too funny not to post.

Jonathan Bernstein called Congress’s non-retaliation over Obama’s recess appointments. Point: Plain Blog. As we’ve noted here before, this has been a trend. Bernstein has been right on about recess appointments.

Fun, interactive, database that tracks members pork and their private property from the Washington Post.

And voteview came out with polarization scores through 2011. Spoiler alert: we’re still polarized. The most interesting trends are the significant conservative shift among both conservative and moderate Republicans in the Senate. On the other hand, moderate Republicans actually were slightly more moderate in 2011 in the House (though probably not statistically significant). The rest of the party moved more right, undoubtedly due to the influx of Tea Party members. Democrats on remained constant for the most part though moved slightly left in the House.