If Thomas Friedman was a Political Scientist
Thomas Friedman has an interesting column in the NY Times today. In it he argues that “a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system”. What exactly are these trends?
- “the wild excess of money in politics”
- Gerrymandering of congressional districts
- the 24 news cycle
- a permanent presidential campaign
- the emergence of a blogosphere that “at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world” (I’m going to assume he’s talking about The Monkey Cage in the former part of that quote).
As a political scientist, my response is that, OK, all of these seem like credible explanations, but how would we know if any of them are actually correct? After all, we’ve got five explanations here for what is essentially one observation: the current state of the US political system. To be fair to Friedman, he’s probably got an implicit N (the number of observations) of 2 in mind: the US now, and the US in the past. This would at least get us variation on some of the variables he has proposed (e.g., the 24 news cycle, the blogosphere, and the permanent presidential campaign), but would still leave us with more explanations than observations.
One way to get more observations would be to put the question in more of a comparative framework by examining other political systems around the world, and then seeing the extent to which both the dependent variable (the ability of idiots to overwhelm political debate, which would of course have to operationalized somehow) and the independent variables proposed by Friedman varied across different contexts. My sense is that the 24 news cycle and the blogosphere are pretty ubiquitous phenomena in most democracies these days, but that the permanent presidential campaign and gerrymandering are not. I’m not aware of any comparative research to date that tests the effects of these types of variables on the civility of politics, but would invite anyone aware of such research to add to the comments section of this post.
Of the possible explanations put forward by Friedman, the claim that gerrymandering is at the heart of problems in our political system strikes me as an important one to explore. Intuitively plausible - gerrymandering makes most congressmen or congresswomen in the United States need to worry more about a possible primary challenger than an opponent from the opposite party - it also has the advantage of being something that ostensibly could be fixed by legislation (as opposed to, for example, the 24 hours news cycle). However, based solely on my own observation of the way politics are conducted the post-communist countries I tend to follow, there would seem to be little out there to support a claim that politics is inherently less civil and more idiot-prone in the US than elsewhere.
Turning to more rigorous analysis, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have a recent article in the American Journal of Political Science on the effects of gerrymandering entitled “Does Gerrymandering Cause Polarization?” (gated, earlier ungated version). Contrary to popular belief, they find:
Both pundits and scholars have blamed increasing levels of partisan conflict and polarization in Congress on the effects of partisan gerrymandering. We assess whether there is a strong causal relationship between congressional districting and polarization. We find very little evidence for such a link. First, we show that congressional polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences. Second, we conduct simulations to gauge the level of polarization under various “neutral” districting procedures. We find that the actual levels of polarization are not much higher than those produced by the simulations. We do find that gerrymandering has increased the Republican seat share in the House; however, this increase is not an important source of polarization.
Comments
Are the trends that Friedman describes real?
1. We have (for the moment anyhow, as the Supreme Court may be weighing in on the matter) stricter control on campaign financing than anytime in our past. While in nominal terms (presidential) campaign spending has soared since 1976 (66.9m to 833.8m in 2008), in real terms this growth is much smaller than it might at first appear. That hardly seems like a wild excess to me, an amount that has prompted some social scientists to ask why there isn’t more money in politics.
2. Gerrymandering. Hasn’t happened in the last 8 years or so, so not a particularly compelling explanation for recent changes. And is named after an act of redistricting carried out in 1812. So not exactly new.
3. 24 hour news cycle. Ok, yes, coverage of tactics and an interpretive framework dominates coverage of policy and a descriptive framework, as rigorously documented by Thomas Patterson in Out of Order. That is, his 1994 book Out of Order, written while there was only one 24 hour news channel, documenting changes between the late 1960s and early 1980s. So clearly, a 24 hour news cycle is not necessary to make “all politics a daily battle of tactics”
4. The permanent presidential campaign. Granted, we’re now polling presidential race 4 years out. But as far as permanent campaigns go, I think you’d be hard pressed to find a better example than William Jennings Bryan, who was the Democratic Party’s (losing) nominee for President in 1896, 1900, and 1908, and spent most moments in between giving speeches. One needn’t go so far back in history to find examples of “permanent campaigns.” Did Ronald Reagan really stop running after losing the nomination in 1976? If we now are in a time of the “permanent campaign,” when does Friedman thinks it started such that it can explain our contemporary politics?
5. Ok, so the blogosphere is new, really only worth writing about since 2002 or so. But since 1988 or so, we’ve had partisan poltiical talk radio, and Friedman’s description of blogs would seem to describe talk radio equally well.
6. Are we really that much less civil now than before?
So on one hand, Friedman’s factors seem to poorly explain recent changes in the quality of American politics. On the other hand, perhaps there’s not much variance in the dependent variable to explain.
Posted by: Kevin | September 30, 2009 03:30 PM
I think that one of the more significant factors behind the current state of our political system is the rise of primaries. Given the low turnout levels in even highly publicized and competitive primaries, they are a system of selecting candidates who appeal to the base, i.e. the most committed and partisan voters. Another way of stating this is that primaries advantage extremist candidates (on both sides) over moderates. This, combined with the 24 hour news cycle, creates the conditions for extreme partisanship and vitriol that have characterized US politics in recent years.
If we don’t want to go back to choosing candidates through back room deals among the political elites, the only way out seems to be to revamp the electoral system into some kind of alternative vote (IRV) or PR system. Of course, this kind of reform would be almost impossible to bring about unless things get much much worse.
Posted by: Dmitry Gorenburg | September 30, 2009 09:17 PM
I thought Friedman’s initial point was less about ‘the state of US politics right now’ and more about the fact that a bunch of right wing loonies are taken too seriously and dominating the public sphere. You’re right that his ‘factors’ don’t provide a convincing explanation of that. The mechanism in which 24hr news and the internet are allowing idiots more influence doesn’t seem plausible without some account of the willingness of the presumably non-idiot mainstream to take those idiots seriously and allow them to set the terms of the debate. Not that I have a great explanation for that either.
Posted by: Talleyrand | September 30, 2009 10:11 PM
I think Friedman misses the point. It isn’t politics that is fundamentally changing so much as the nature of the news media itself. Fox and the ‘conservative’ press are successfully fomenting political change. I think outlets like the NYT at once don’t really understand what the audience for those folks is all about and they are seriously underestimating their impact. It’s easy to paint those folks as loony, because that seems fairly accurate. It’s harder to accept that they might actually be getting something done.
Posted by: david | October 1, 2009 10:37 PM