Welcome to Party Politics.

Where we preparing for your next political conversa I'm Jeronimo Cortina political scientists at the University of Houston.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus also a political science professor at the University of Houston.

True.

Talking about politics, you know, normally we talk about kind of what's going on in the news in the week and try to keep people up to date with respect to what's coming up for their weekend and prep them for all the political talk that's to come.

But we're going to take a bit of a different tack this week and talk about something that affects really everything that we talk about, and that's political polarization.

And it's a demonic word for some, but it's a natural occurrence in lots of ways that we'll talk about.

So we can definitely dive into some of these big picture concerns.

But the reality is definitely true.

And regardless of how you cut it, and that's the basically the country is more polarized politically, just for sort of a quick discussion point that the ideological overlap between the parties has diminished so that today 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat and 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican.

That's political science talk for basically, like people are polarized, people who are conservative are gravitating to the Republican Party.

People who are liberal are gravitating to the Democratic Party.

And you don't see those distributions really overlap very much.

So this has serious implications in the U.S., but the U.S. is not alone, right?

There are serious implications to this all over the country, right.

Countries like the U.K., Canada are certainly, you know, affected by this.

Australia, New Zealand polarization is something since the 1970s that has expanded across the entire globe.

So our kind of question is really why that's happening.

And so kind of one big question is, you know, why is polarization increasing in this last, say, 30 years, but really accelerated in the last 10 or 15 years?

I think it has to do with how inequality operates to the ideological core of voters.

So in the sense that, inequality is not just meaning in terms of income distribution, it's about the, the quality and the quantity of opportunity.

Interesting.

So, you know, in a sense, when you are, sold a product in this case, public policies, you are promised a certain, bag of goodies and those bag of goodies are going to be different between Democrats and Republicans.

So Democrats are going to, sell you X, Y, and Z, and Republicans are going to sell you A, B, and C. And the problem is that x, y and z and a, b and c has not, materialized for the vast majority of Americans.

So when elections come or when political chattering, including increases, the other party is demonizing the other party.

Yeah.

You were promised, X, Y, and Z.

They have been delivered.

You were promised A, B and C they haven't delivered.

Yeah.

Come to my side.

I will do it.

And that starts creating that lack of overlap that you said.

And with that lack of overlap, what starts to diminish is the type of conversations.

How do you see it.

And we have polarization both at the elite level, meaning elected representatives and the general voter or the average American voter.

Yeah, it's sort of trickle down, right?

Like elites are polarized.

And then that has the effect of basically kind of communicating those sort of limitations and those divides to the public that then kind of follow suit.

Right?

We can't blame the public for being affected by it, because the people that we listen to for advice and for leadership are the same people who are talking about these Partizan differences.

But those Partizan differences are really important.

It's not just about like differences in policy, ABC and XYZ, it's about how much we trust or alike or even in some cases hate.

The other team is what we call affective polarization.

Basically, the idea is that you have dislike of the other team, right?

And the other team can be any number of things.

Right.

You know, we typically think of it in terms of sports, but in this case it's about politics that affective polarization has implications not just for kind of the policies that we choose, but also kind of the way we shop, the people that we associate with who you date.

All these things are all connected to, like the way that we associate with the other party.

So affective polarization is increasing.

There are a lot of reasons why affective polarization is increasing, but one of them has to be just media consumption.

Right.

The fact that you've got people who are in these very disparate media silos, right?

People are getting their news and information from kind of one party or the other, one ideology or the other, and as a result, then they don't even see what the other side is thinking about.

So when it comes to hearing that you're like, that's not true, that doesn't make sense.

That's wrong.

And as a result, you kind of see this increasing tug, between, you know, kind of where your ideology is and where you are and where your opponents, you know, in quotes, ideology is and where their ideology are.

So that effect of polarization is really critical to this.

The other part is sorting.

So like we said, you know, this has been going on for a long time.

It's not like a new phenomenon, but it has exacerbated recently.

What we have seen in the last, say, 30, 40 years is that you're seeing people sort themselves into these parties.

Right?

Like I mentioned, you have people who are considered liberal, will identify with the Democratic Party, people who are conservative with the Republican Party.

It wasn't always like that.

You had people who were liberal Republicans.

You had people who were conservative Democrats, a lot of conservative Democrats.

Right.

And certainly that's true for Texas.

But we're talking sort of national politics.

Also.

The South was the haven for all of these, you know, conservative Democrats.

So those two factors affect the polarization rising.

I don't like you or your party that's increasing the other sorting that I'm choosing to back this party because my ideology, generally speaking, puts me in that box.

So those two things together really sort of sort of facilitating that.

But obviously social media has exacerbated a lot of this.

I said media because, you know, we definitely have this kind of bifurcation of the media ideologically, politically.

But we also have social media, which is driving so much of this.

So how do you think social media is affecting people's or partizan behaviors?

Well, it's once again, it has to do with the algorithm.

Yeah.

Once, once you are watching certain number of stories, that algorithm is going to multiply them.

Yeah.

So instead of, reading or watching different, news media watching Fox News and MSNBC and then you creating your own opinion about what they're both, networks presenting is you dig yourself deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.

Yeah.

You kind of create your own media bubble.

Exactly.

And they help you to do it?

Exactly.

They help you to do it.

And then that is, as you said, this lack of overlap that doesn't allow you to see what's next.

And it has to do, I think, with, your own life experience and it has to do, I think instead of, oh, yes, it has to do with effective polarization, but it has to do with your own experience.

It has to do when someone is telling you, hey, this is the American dream that, the Democratic is pushing, or this is the American dream that the Republican Party is pushing, and then you confront your own reality, your own proximity to that issue.

As I discuss in my book.

Nice plug.

Thank you.

Subtle.

And then you realize he's not.

Wait, wait wait wait.

Yeah.

This side is lying to me.

And these side is.

Tell me perhaps something more close to my own, view of the world in my own situation.

And that's why it's creating these animosity between that side and the other side.

And you have an ingroup outgroup effect.

Yeah, totally.

That time.

Well, not, basically, that diminishes the other side as X, Y or Z, whatever it is.

And you no.

Longer see that side as relevant or important.

No.

You know, useful.

It's like I'm just dismissing that.

And that's something that social media is quite good at.

Right.

Don't read the comments.

It's going to be that way no matter what.

And it's hard to have a real dialog when that's the case.

Right.

But I want to pull up on a couple things you mentioned, because a lot of research on this issue, just the two things are really critical to this, happening and the way that it's becoming more exacerbated in recent times.

And that's, first of all, racial resentment.

And the second is about status anxiety.

There's a lot of scholarship that suggests that basically that, that, you know, some groups are adopting this kind of more racially hostile attitude towards non-whites, and that's creating more resentment.

And that resentment then, of course, gets reinforced by the other side.

Who says that you're not tolerant enough so that racial resentment is really increasing in recent years, especially as race becomes sort of more central to the way we talk about politics.

The other is about status anxiety.

So your inability to kind of get ahead, right?

You're kind of, dissatisfaction with where you are currently, is an economic story that's not just about red and blue, right?

It's not about Republicans and Democrats.

It's about just sort of the way the economy functions, which may have implications to politics but isn't directly resulted from politics.

And so that status anxiety creates this moment where it exacerbates and in some sense, that kind of us versus them mentality like, well, yeah, you know, we feel certain way about something and because of this sort of, kind of outcome and, you know, it's, it's hurting us.

The other side doesn't feel that way.

And so you use that to kind of blame the other team for your own kind of economic woes, as they were.

So those things play together in a way that also is complicated and really hard to undo, because you can't just sort of change the economy with a snap of finger, like, you've really have to kind of see these things as they, as they trend.

But to me, those two things are kind of parallel to the way that you're talking about this.

I'm still speaking on.

On.

Unavoidable.

Oh, absolutely.

And on the first one, I think it's, lack of, I don't know, let's say it not clarity.

Yeah.

But on I would say intentional lack of definitional clarity in terms of what it means to be an American.

Yeah.

When you start thinking about, founding fathers, when you start thinking about the melting pot.

Right.

And I think that's a beautiful analogy.

So the melting pot is a melting pot.

You throw a bunch of ingredients from every single part of the world, and suddenly an American rises from the pot.

So what does that mean?

How can you define what it is?

An American?

It's impossible to define it because the very own definition of the melting pot doesn't allow you to say boom.

boom.

boom.

boom.

This is what defines an American.

So everyone has a very different definition of what it means to be an American.

Yeah.

Republicans have won, right?

Democrats have won at general.

Voters have won.

And that most of the time is going to circle around and sometimes cross a, a cross, for example, these foreign, racial ethnic identities, different socioeconomic status.

So when you put everything into it, it's extremely complicated, but you have your own definition of what you do.

Totally.

And the multiracial democracy is a tough thing to pull off.

Right.

And that's effectively what the US is sort of struggling to accomplish.

And the rules don't make it that much easier.

Right?

So a lot of the rules that are put into place are obviously designed by parties to kind of protect them selves.

And this is true for Republicans and Democrats.

You could look at a state like Texas.

You could look at a state like Oregon.

There will take different approaches to policy, but they're both protecting their incumbents.

And that's where you've got this sort of, you know, partizan alignment.

So you have a lot of people who, you know, are basically kind of following their Partizan identity through their parties.

And the parties say may close primaries.

We're not going to let other people participate, right?

We're going to basically say only people who are registered partizans can participate, which means that people who are consider themselves independents or people who just don't vote in primaries because only like two, like 20% of people vote in the primaries, right?

Yeah.

So those people basically also are in a position where they don't have much say.

And even if they did have say at the next stage after the primary, you've got gerrymandering, which basically hardens the kind of political world of these districts.

Right?

So you've seen the shapes of these things.

If you haven't, just Google search it because they're a tremendously bizarre, there's all kinds of case law on this.

But in a nutshell, basically the notion is that you've got gerrymandering, which really hardens the kind of attachment to these particular districts so that you have members who don't have to worry about the other side, because they aren't ever going to be in jeopardy of losing since the district is drawn to benefit their party.

Well, and then we don't have proportional represent ation.

Right.

And one of the key differences between other, Western democracies, in which also polarization happens, is that in those places in the UK, in France, in Italy, in Spain, you have multi-party systems.

So there is a party for you.

Yeah.

You're right.

You'll find a home.

Yeah.

You will find a home.

And here you have two choices.

Yeah.

Period.

That's it.

So that increases and puts more fire or more gasoline into the fire in terms of polarizing.

Yeah.

Because in the other places, yes.

You may agree with, liberal Democrats, but guess what?

We have also the extreme liberal Democrats or the super extreme liberal Democrats or the centrist Democrats or the almost liberal centrist conservative Democrats.

For you.

And on the other side, you have the conservative side, and you have the same kind of things.

And in those countries where you have especially, parliamentary democracies, you're going to be forced to create a coalition, and that coalition is going to force you.

Yeah, to create alliances with people that you might not otherwise, like here.

Yeah.

You win a majority, control the House.

You control the Senate.

Yeah.

Boom.

We don't have to play ball with you because absolutely not make us.

Yeah, yeah that's a great point.

And I'm gonna to talk about institutional reform because that's really a big factor in terms of what might solve this problem.

But one question I want to ask you in terms of how this is come about, is about the fairness of the kind of information.

Right?

That is.

Are you seeing enough of both sides now?

People can consume their own diets as they wish, but it used to be the case of the Fairness Doctrine essentially required the major networks, which were kind of the only game in town at the time, to include both sides in some generic way.

This went away in the mid 80s.

Do you think it should come back?

I think so, yeah.

I mean.

It won't be the implications if it did come back.

This is like this is like a second essay question that we to ask our students.

Right?

I mean I'm going to write it.

I'm going to.

Yeah.

I think, you know, it's it's important to have it because it presents to voters both sides.

Yeah.

And it's a way of saying, giving back the power to the people.

Yeah.

Needs you decide.

It's a great way to put it.

You are going to decide and I don't care.

The position of these, fairness doctrine is I do not care if you vote, decide or decide.

I just want to give you the facts.

And what I always tell my students is very simple.

When are you going to be voting for one?

Can the other is the same process as you decide how to purchase a car or how you decide to purchase, iPhone versus a, Samsung, Samsung or whatever it is.

You're going to do research.

And it's the same process because politics is also a free market.

And the role of the Fairness Doctrine is, I think, in my opinion, give you the power.

Yeah.

Okay.

Facilitate research.

Make your mind if you want to vote for these side fair.

If you want to vote for the other side thumps.

Yeah.

It's like a it's like a, like a politics guide.

Here's your menu.

Right.

Choose choose.

Which one you like.

Best.

Absolutely.

You choose.

Let's talk about implications to polarization which are obviously significant and have far reaching impacts in terms of how things are governed and the policies that are produced.

One thing is that lawmaking is simply harder.

You've seen the productivity of the U.S. Congress go down over time.

It's productivity.

We talk about it in the old days as being what happened when members would get together to pass a bill that was for the benefit of the nation.

It's going down significantly over the years, since the 1980s, that's really dropped.

So that's partly because there are fewer moderates around to kind of broker these deals.

Right?

The right doesn't talk to the left.

And if those rules are stable, then no one has to do anything and then nothing happens.

The moderates were in a position where they wanted to see things happen.

You still see these sort of caucuses that are form like the, kind of, you know, moderate caucuses, the Dealmakers caucus that wants to kind of try to pull things together and say, like, we can find a way to work together on these things, but it's increasingly hard to do.

So.

Polarization really does affect the kind of productivity of legislation.

And you could make the case that, look, I mean, you know, more government is bad, right?

This is sort of what a conservative might say, which, you know, maybe in fact true in some instances, but it doesn't even give you the option at that point.

So those limitations certainly are one implications.

Yeah.

To to polarization.

So I think there's three ways and how political science literature, especially in the 80s looked at it.

Yeah.

And it was.

Back when you were in grad school.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

It was a good time.

Yeah.

Good times in the 80s and.

Exactly.

Boom.

Divided we govern, right?

Yeah.

Divided we govern differently or divided we simply do not go forward.

And I think that we are getting not in the divided we governance.

I think that that especially given that moderate seats, especies getting into the extinction list.

Yeah, yeah.

You need to pick a side if you want to survive through, the other parties, we govern differently.

Maybe in some cases, one is something very, very, very clear.

But I think we're getting to the era that if the one of the two parties doesn't have a majority.

Yeah, nothing is going to get done.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And if they get a majority then they're going to do.

Yeah, whatever they whatever they want.

I also want to kind of note that there's something that's scary about losing the ability to hold members accountable for what they do.

Right.

So the way that this happens in my mind and the research that I've done on scandals is really typical of this.

And that's that basically, voters aren't concerned about that anymore.

Yeah.

If we have this role where Partizanship basically divides people and effective polarization holds people in their own party, so that what my candidates do is not that problematic.

What the other side's candidates do is awful.

The worst thing.

Yeah, that has baffled American politics.

That mindset really doesn't give us the ability to hold people accountable for things.

So as a result, scandals are less important than they used to be.

People get away with stuff that they didn't get away with before.

And ultimately, even if you like a particular candidate and you think they're doing a good job, if they've done something wrong, like we should hold them accountable, that's a good core notion.

Yes.

Democratic governance.

So to me, that's a scary feature of how polarization is really, you know, dramatized the way that accountability has been minimized in this period.

Yeah.

and it's the fact that Partizanship has become a driving identity.

Yeah, I need identities.

Yes, I need it's a way that it's there on my team.

Yes.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

You're part of my team, I gotcha and the other person is not on my team.

Yeah, you're the worst.

Yeah.

But nothing.

The problem is with public policy because things are not getting done.

Yeah, like real very important things.

Yeah.

I'm has to do nothing controversial.

Securing water supply, securing the water supply of the future in Texas.

Or in other states, paving a.

Road energy grid.

Infrastructure, energy, etc., etc., etc., etc.

those are basic things that legislation and legislators need to focus on.

Yeah, the rest is like, yeah, why are we doing.

Yeah.

And there are other scary implications too, about people's mental health and factor scholarship.

It's just that politics is a big source of anxiety and sort of mental angst that's creating in some people the probability of doing violence.

So although there's not like a direct link in most scholarship between like between polarization and political violence, we're seeing a lot more political violence now than we used to.

Oh yeah.

And it doesn't take very far to go to look at like the comment section and Twitter to see, like that.

There's a lot of anger out there for all kinds of different reasons.

And we've talked about some of them that are logical, that are like normal considering the course of sort of the economic changes.

But it's also the case that that can lead to some very significant violence, in politics, which obviously has tremendously scary implications.

So without going too far into that, let's get into solutions, because I think that's a positive way that like, you know, we can look at the literature and we can look at political science to say like, what can we do to help?

So, one thing that Congress has tried to do is to look at modernization.

They've tried to figure out ways that they can pursue a kind of, you know, bipartisan way to make Congress run more effectively, more efficiently, to have transparency, to, basically, you know, find a way to, for things to work together.

One tangible way that they do this is through what they call codes.

These are of these bipartisan congressional trips.

There's a scholarship that says that people who are on these bipartisan travel trips, where they go to fact find, are more likely to partner with somebody of the opposite party on a bipartisan piece of legislation.

That's a good outcome for the price of a ticket to Brazil or to Los Alamos or something.

We're going to go, you know, kind of research something.

So that's one way that Congress can kind of effectively make this, you know, mitigate this trend.

At least you can't solve it.

You can't.

It's like being a doctor.

You can some things you can't cure, but we can treat it.

And if we can treat it long enough, we can basically hold things steady.

So we can't maybe cure it, but we can treat it.

And that's one way that Congress can do it.

Yeah.

The other way, I think, speaking of Congress and and the policy process has to do with how, committees assignments are done.

So I think that in order to have, committees assignments, committees are going to control everything.

Yeah, some committees are going to control as well.

So the way that this assignments are made, you can make them more I don't know if random would be the correct way.

That's interesting.

But in such a way that forces you.

Yeah.

If it's random, yeah, it's going to force you to communicate to the other people.

And one of the most important implications of polarization is a lack of communication.

And it has to do with these Fact-Finding trips.

You are going to communicate with a guy that he's sitting next to you because you're driving a bus for 14 hours, and there is no other way that you are not going to talk to the other person.

So forcing these random assignment into these, committee assignments, he's going to force you to have a conversation.

Yeah.

Maybe you don't agree on 100% of everything of a particular bill, but maybe you're going to agree on 20 or 30% or 15%.

And that is significant.

And we can make a bill that that kind of accommodates people's preferences.

Yeah.

Or understands where people are not going.

Yeah.

Right.

That's also valid.

Yeah.

I also want to follow up on that talk about elections.

So there's been a lot of discussion about what we call deep canvasing.

It's a really a way for people to have conversations about what's going on.

Yeah.

So like we have people like will come to your door.

You know, there's focus groups where people would listen, just listen like we would talk about, you know, sort of your family, your values, your interests, understand where a person's coming from, what that does is a couple of things.

First of all, let you understand where people are that you meet them where they are.

The other is that it reduces the perception of threat.

There's great scholarship.

It's just that a lot of the polarization is because people perceive a threat, like your party is going to threaten my livelihood, my values, whatever.

Yeah.

If you reduce that, then there's a sense that maybe it is kind of less impactful and polarization dissipates, so that just talking, listening like that basic function is so important to that, that in correcting misperceptions, right.

People have misperceptions about people's motives.

It may be literally that they have wrong information about things.

Finding a way around that is also critical.

Social media companies can help do some of this, but like politicians can help do some of this by not spreading misinformation.

So that's another way that you can see kind of what hold the line here on information.

Just talk about the same set of things that we're worried about and then get to know each other in that way.

Like what your values are and how we can kind of accommodate and and then move forward together.

Yeah.

Because I think at the at the very end, Americans hold very similar values, one way or the other.

At the end, they're very similar in what they want to pursue or achieve at the end.

But is this lack of knowledge, this lack of, of, making the other side the villain?

And that has these implications that doesn't allow you to see the other person as another human being.

And it's yeah, we're going to disagree on X, Y and Z.

But you know, everyone agrees that kids should go to school.

Yes or no.

Yes.

We should be teaching them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well that exactly that you should have access to healthcare.

Yes or no?

Yes.

Okay.

Then the question becomes how do we get there that can accommodate some of your present preferences and can accommodate some of my preferences?

Yeah.

It's not going to be perfect.

But you know, and you got to work together to get there.

Exactly.

But if you're going to impose your view over my views is it's not going to happen.

Yeah.

But obviously, in this light and in this tone of unity, we're going to leave it here for this week.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina, and I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

This party heats up next time.