The Monkey Cage

This is an interesting reaction? Why do you call it fake?

I don’t think what Seth finds is that it’s staged, but that it is induced. The activists are more likely to get the policy outcomes that they want under this arrangement than under the other. That’s not a show for an audience; it’s delivering for a constituency.

Perhaps the difference is in the perspective of those who (primarily) study voters vs. those who (primarily) study politicians and activists?

Hans: Seth calls it “fake” in his AJPS piece — see the abstract that I quote.

I say “staged” because Seth’s results suggest that the fight club doesn’t reflect the true preferences of incumbent leaders. So I was (glibly?) wondering if some of the fighting in legislatures was a strategic act for the audience of activists. Clearly, the activists have induced something here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.

Yeesh, anytime I start quoting Jefferson Airplane, it’s time for the comment to end. Ultimately, I think your point is compatible with the implications I’m spinning from Seth’s argument.

What Seth says is that they prefer “fake” partisanship. Not that they deliver. I don’t think partisanship deviating from their own preferences is what he means there, but surely he’ll chime in on that.

I still think “staged” is inaccurate, but yes, it probably doesn’t reflect the true preferences of the leaders. That’s part of the point. The whole somewhat tired parties vs. preferences debate over the U.S. Congress asks whether parties induce legislators to behave in a way that they would not if there were no parties. Seth’s evidence is that they do. But that’s not fake, unless we say that representation is “fake” if the legislators do what voters want under threat of being thrown out of office. I don’t think we’d call that fake accountability or fake representation.

So I don’t think this point is ultimately compatible with your implications. Or at least, “staged” suggests to me that, after the performance, the outcomes are not what the activists wanted. If they get what they want, it’s not an act.

Hans: You’re right: in my feverish desire to conjure up a winsome title for the post, I’m mixing up Seth’s meaning of “fake” with my own meaning. And you’re certainly right that even staged partisanship may create the outcome that activists want. I never meant to suggest otherwise.

I think the underlying sentiment motivating the post is this: sometimes observers assume that partisanship and polarized parties reflects the true preferences of representatives — i.e., their true ideological preferences, their true feelings toward their colleagues across the aisle, etc., etc. It’s the members who are described as conservative or liberal, as firebrands or fire-breathing or firey, and so on.

To me, most interesting is that this is not how members would prefer to do business, if left to their own devices — or so Seth’s work suggests. What their sincere preferences would produce — more bonhomie, more moderate policy outcomes — is an open question.

So maybe legislators are just “strategic”: I want to stay in office, so I vote the way the activists prefer, even if that’s not my sincere preference. But given how much of the day-to-day mundane partisanship in Congress — evident in floor speeches, comments to the press, press conferences, events on the stairs of the Capitol — is largely geared for public relations, I don’t think “staged” is too far off.

If that’s what you mean by fake or staged, then I suppose we agree, but for two points.

First, if what we are now saying is that journalists and many in the public don’t know what political scientists (and economists) have understood for a long time. What a politician (or your grocer) believes in his heart can be irrelevant if incentives induce behavior. The price of milk is not determined by the grocer’s true underlying value of having the milk, but by the market incentives.
Or, to put it another way, most partisanship is “fake” partisanship, in your terms, because the main thing that parties do is create those incentives. In the end,the members are firebrands.

Second, a big part of Seth’s argument (and our argument in Bawn, Cohen, Karol Masket, Noel and Zaller 2005) is that the activists succeed in placing people who do have ideological preferences into office.

John, for the “record,” I think that you are quoting Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.”

Dick: You’re right. It’s apparently a bad day for me to blog!

I think we also have to be careful to talk about what “legislators” would do in the absence of pressure X because there’s a time element to all of this, and one which gets us into a related, but quite possibly much tougher to assess, area.

I’m generally a fan of the invisible parties school. I’m strongly inclined to believe Seth’s story here. I think that the counterfactual is harder to get at, though. Suppose ideological extremists did NOT run the local parties in modern California. What is the counterfactual world to this? The parties run by moderates or by a cross-section of the parties’ bases? And, can we really separate how much of modern voter polarization/sorting is due to the parties and the candidates they offer and how much is do to social/demographic/other changes?

If we can’t, then this counterfactual world gets even nastier. The world now has the ideologues put their weight behind an ideological candidate who ideological primary voters then support. What does the world look like with only one of those 3 parts changed? I think a lot of us envision a sort of equilibrium (in the physical sense) process whereby it slowly evolves from there, but I think it’s tough to compare CA from 80 years ago to today, because all 3 of those variables are likely different.

Ack, sorry I missed all the fun. I was teaching during the above debate. The lesson is clear: get one of those sweet non-teaching gigs.

My use of the term “fake partisanship” is of a piece with Mayhew’s “position taking.” That is, legislators would prefer a non-combative environment. They’ll make occasional speeches and other gestures to placate their activist supporters, but most of the time they’d prefer to stick with the median voter.

Activists, meanwhile, are trying to recruit politicians who are true ideologues. Even then, though, they’ve seen a lot of politicians sell out (i.e.: hug the median), so they keep the pressure on them with either implicit or explicit primary threats.

Matt, you’re right that it’s hard to separate these different forces out. We could certainly imagine a counterfactual in which ideologues were picked for office by partisan primary electorates, and we’d still get some sort of a polarized legislature from that.

What we wouldn’t see, however, is a lot of the pressure that I describe in the book. This includes episodes like Democratic activists dumping Rep. Marty Martinez in a 2000 primary because he’d moved too far to the right. Or conservative Orange County activists organizing a recall against Republican Assembly Speaker Dorris Allen in 1995 because she’d conspired with Willie Brown. Or any of the pressure we now see being exerted on the Republican legislators who voted for the Schwarzenegger budget. This sort of pressure would be unnecessary.

Demonstrating the exact contribution of this sort of pressure, apart from the other forces compelling ideological polarization in a legislature, is harder to do quantitatively. My study of cross-filing that John cited above does a bit of that, but it’s not a perfect analogue to today’s system.

First, I highly recommend Seth’s book.

Second: I can’t speak to CA politics, but in national politics one of the outcomes of all of this is that it doesn’t matter a lot what politicians truly believe in the abstract if they are constrained to surround themselves with people who act like partisans. For example at the Presidential Branch level, we’ve gone from people like Haldeman and Ehrlichman who were personally loyal to the president, and people like Kissinger and Bundy who were specialists with no party ties, to people such as Axelrod, Emanuel, and Condi Rice, who have deep party ties, and partisan sources of information. The same is true at the Congressional staff level. For campaigns, see my article with Casey Dominguez…and also see Cohen, Karol, Noel and Zaller’s book for how national party networks control nominations.