The math shows how differences between Republicans and Democrats create an unstable American…
Everyone in the United States is more polarized these days. We have a President with some of the lowest approval rating in history…
Everyone in the United States is more polarized these days. We have a President with some of the lowest approval rating in history following another President of the other party who also had some of the lowest approval ratings in history. The US Senate is currently split 50–50 between each party. Meanwhile the voting patterns of the two parties, Republicans and Democrats, have become increasingly disconnected. Except for a brief respite in providing war assistance to Ukraine bipartisanship seems to be a thing of the past.
It goes beyond the federal government. States have also been sorting themselves increasingly into blue and red buckets.
A 2014 pew research center study of the public’s feelings about certain issues bear this out. Democrats and Republicans are moving further apart with the Democrats shifting left and the Republicans shifting right.
When this study repeats in 2024, one might expect it to look like the parting of the Red Sea.
The more politically engaged people are the more partisan they are.
I begin to feel like moderates like myself are becoming an endangered species.
The recent SCOTUS leak on Roe v. Wade seems to prove the point. While there is angry protest on the left, there are shouts of triumph on the right. Everyone is in one camp or the other.
Like many data watchers, I come back to studies like Pew to get my information about what is going on. Facts don’t lie: America is indeed stuck in a red vs. blue contest that is not at all funny. Regional differences like urban vs. rural, north vs. south, coastal vs. land locked, seem to dictate people’s points of view and those points of view are increasingly homogeneous. Political positions that, on their face, don’t seem to have anything to do with each other or are downright contradictory are packaged together into platforms. Of all the platforms that exist out there, only two seem to really matter.
Like global warming, the data on polarization is so strong now, no one can question it, only discuss the why and how do we get out of this mess.
This doesn’t appear to be an invention of the media either. University researchers who study polarization have shown through numerous peer-reviewed studies the march of political schism, including that the US is polarizing faster than Europe.
Political polarization isn’t uniform, however. In fact, studies consistently show that the more educated and privileged classes are far more polarized than the poor and the disengaged (and I would add disenfranchised).
Political elites have, for a long time, added fuel to the fire by pushing one another to the right or left and claiming polarizing positions that they never held before.
Real differences between Americans, rich and poor, rural and urban, do contribute to political polarization somewhat, but most Americans are moderate in their beliefs. Their polarization doesn’t necessarily relate to what they believe at all, in fact. They are not picking sides in some imagined culture war. Rather, they are whipped into false ideological camps in much the same way that groups have always been turned against some portion of their population or another nation. They turn the opposition into monsters, exaggerating their behavior. In other words, it is easier to try to change voters opinions with a long-term propaganda campaign that runs them to the right or left than to try to serve voters. If they are pushed far enough into an ideological camp, as we have seen in numerous red and blue states, the opposition ceases to become a threat.
All of this makes perfect sense if you see politics as a game. In fact, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader and long-time puppetmaster of the GOP, titled his own book The Long Game. While some critics painted him as cynical, I think he is realistic. Everyone is playing the game, but not everyone is going to admit it.
The polarization game is also asymmetric as political scientist Prof. Matt Grossman shows. Each side has different personality characteristics. The right tends to be more unified and ideological while the left is a looser net of groups with shared interests. The right’s unity gives them an advantage in many areas such as picking candidates for the ballot and insisting on certain legislative measures. The left, meanwhile, never seems to be able to “get its act together” because it doesn’t have an act to get together. Instead, it is a coalition of interest groups, each of which is more committed to their own particular interest than any unifying definition of liberalism.
This means that polarization is happening far more on the right than on the left. The left is broken into a set of groups each of which is committed to wanting the government to tackle a particular issue: access to abortion, same sex rights, climate change responses, social programs, educational programs, gun control, addressing racism, immigration reform, labor reform, housing, and on and on. The right has interests in all these areas, of course, but they tend to form a singular platform where adherents commit to all of them much more uniformly rather than simply committing to one issue or another.
Thus, the game of political polarization is a one-against-many game because the unity of the Democratic Party is an illusion while the unity of the Republican Party is real. This may also explain why Democrats are abandoning the middle more slowly than the Republicans. Ultimately, the Democratic Party is still a “big tent” party while the Republican Party seeks to develop litmus tests for membership. For example, only the Republican Party has an epithet like RINO (Republican In Name Only) while the Democrats have no real definition for what makes someone a “true” Democrat other than voting.
In other words, the Democratic Party is a circus while the Republican Party is a NASCAR race. Democrats have a variety of acts and performances to try to amuse their many distinct constituencies, i.e., they have something for everyone. This may explain why so many people who vote Democrat lament that they “have to” vote blue. You will suffer the clowns to see the trapeze artists and vice versa. Republicans, meanwhile, are in a race to see who wins the crown of “most Republican”, and second place is first loser.
The mathematics of game theory can lend us a lot of insight into why this is happening. Game theory is about anything but games these days having been applied for decades to everything from consumer choices to nuclear arms. I have written quite a bit about asymmetric game theory already when talking about both nuclear deterrence as well as the war in Ukraine. Now I want to talk about why polarization is happening from a game theoretic perspective and why it tends to benefit the Republicans more than the Democrats. I also talk about why this mess is almost impossible to get out of.
The game we are playing here is often called the escalation game because it is used to study escalation in conflicts. In politics escalation can mean becoming more hostile to the opposing side, engaging in dirty deeds (done dirt cheap), and also moving to the right or left from one’s previous position. The game can be studied in the context of individual politicians, such as when one politician has a primary challenger. It can also be studied in terms of the reactions of particular voters to a policy. Here I want to study the asymmetry between the two parties.
The game starts with the ball being in one party’s court to shake things up. The other party has an interest in maintaining the status quo. Who has the most interest in the status quo? Oddly enough, those who identify as conservative have, at least since the 1970s, had the most interest in breaking up the status quo. That is because so much has changed in the past 50–100 years and conservatives have a strong desire to roll back a lot of that reform. In other words, the many special interest groups that form the progressive movement have been so successful that the status quo is progressive.
That success has bred complacency among many groups so that the Democrats now have a much stronger interest in keeping their gains than achieving more. It is not that the various special interest groups making up the party don’t want more, but they have a lot already, and fear of losing past gains trumps hoping for future change. New, potentially hidden or marginalized interest groups keep coming in as well wanting their own desires met, so there is never a complete standstill, but not a whole lot of movement. Republicans are able to block weak attempts at reform that come from politics as usual, and a lack of a large scale grassroots movement behind an issue means that the status quo stays put.
Republicans are spread across a spectrum of ideological beliefs, but the personality of the party is to single out a particular image of what the party represents. The first move the party makes, then, to upset the status quo is a move to the right. Now, what determines if that move is successful? Some of it depends on how the opposition reacts. An escalation on the right often evokes an escalation on the left as well. The left, typically just one or two interest groups, having been provoked the right can claim “ah ha! They are against us!” This causes the rest of the Republican Party to close ranks, shifting to the right in order to do so.
What has happened, however, is that while the majority of the Democratic Party hasn’t reacted at all one way or another because they have no skin in the game, the entire Republican Party has. Now the rest of the Democrats must react but that reaction is to roll out more circus acts. That is, their interest isn’t ideological, moving to the left necessarily. They are just trying to keep people in the tent. Hence, rather than reacting in kind to the Republican provocation, the Democrats have to concede in order to maintain the circus.
Why can’t the Democrats react in kind? It is because there is no real notion of closing ranks on their side. No acceleration to the finish line. Rather there is more of a back scratching going on where each interest group supports the others, not because they care about all these causes but because they want their own cause seen to. Each act must simply act harder to convince those in the tent watching that they should not leave. (There are true liberal ideologues of course, but they are relatively few on the Democrat side.)
Here is where the game theory (of sorts) comes in. The Republican Party has an interest, i.e. a reward for acting in a certain way, in moving to upset the status quo because they can expect a closing of ranks on their side while from the Democrats they expect no similar closing of ranks. The pluralistic Democrats do not make gains through ideological unity but through mutual support; hence, the Democrats need more of a critical mass of affected groups to react in kind. This asymmetry gives the Republicans an additional incentive to make provocations and move to the right.
Provocation from the Democrat side, on the other hand, usually takes the form of an interest group pushing for a particular reform, often initially under the radar. A Republican reaction to this type of reform might involve an escalation with new legislation quickly introduced in “red” states to quash that kind of reform ever happening there. The party then closes ranks and similar legislation takes the country by storm. Note that the same reaction rarely happens on the “liberal” side in recent decades but was much more common 50–60 years ago. It shows that there is a cost to making gains on progressive reforms.
In any case, the Republicans have an interest in escalating against such reforms to preserve party unity while the Democrats, because of their many interest groups, may not. This means that, while individual interest groups have a strong desire to seek their own reforms, the Party as a whole does not have an interest in escalation in favor of those reforms unless there is a critical mass of mutual support.
This game is unstable. Each provocation pushes the Republican Party further to the right while the Democratic Party slowly oozes to the left. Eventually, there will be no overlap of interests. The outcome is a major upheaval of some kind as the game tries to find a new equilibrium. A major upheaval in a democracy is usually some kind of insurrection or coup. It is not anything desirable.
Various reforms have been suggested to stop the polarization of the two parties. Most of them are against the interests of both parties and hence non-starters. Proportional democracy, where seats in legislatures are assigned by percentages of votes for each party, for example, as well as ranked choice, a slightly less radical reform that would allow people to vote for a ranking of candidates so that if their first vote didn’t work out their second vote would still count, all favor a loosening of the stranglehold that the two party system has on America. Of course, neither party will support its own diminishment, so on a national scale these proposals never go anywhere.
An alternative would be for the parties to change their own behavior. The Republicans are unlikely to change their behavior unless they experience a major defection or civil war. For a while it seemed like Donald Trump might bring that about, but the party has managed to muddle past their differences for the sake of unity.
The Democrats could change their own behavior to become more like the Republican Party, more unified in their liberalism. This has happened on some issues. It seems unlikely, however, that a circus would suddenly become a ballet given that the average big tent circus goer isn’t interested in seeing Swan Lake or even Cirque de Soleil. In other words, attempting to further unify would cause many of the special interest groups, who are in an uneasy alliance already, to split off to become independents. Some could even become Republicans if they feel comfortable enough in the security of their own special interest. This is already happening with immigrants who, having established themselves and their families in the United States, join the party of Lincoln despite its opposition to most immigration.
The Democratic Party could also go the other way making the tent even bigger at the expense of sacrificing unifying issues. Essentially, the circus can add more variety to its acts at the expense of shortening the more popular ones. This might give it a wider powerbase but would also make it much more difficult to maneuver against the unity of the opposition and risk fragmentation on issues that would keep it out of power. From my perspective, though, such a move would bring needed balance. Whether that balance is stabilizing is not clear.
Another possibility is that some issue becomes so unifying, but for some reason neither party is willing to embrace it, that a third party simply replaces one of the existing parties in a major upheaval. This is what happened to the Whigs before the civil war. The Republican Party formed out of a coalition between anti-slavery parties and replaced them.
Could this happen with some major existential issue? It seems unlikely however, given the make up of the Democratic Party, that no special interest there would not embrace a major reform movement, bringing the rest of the party with them. The Democrats were certainly not that kind of party before the civil war, and it was, perhaps, the lack of a reform movement party that led to that upheaval in the first place.
Technological changes may also bring about political reform but so far is making it worse. Social media for a while seemed like it might stop the polarization trend by forcing people to be exposed to differing views. Then it was found that social media seemed to be increasing polarization, and the theory was that it allowed people to join “echo chambers” where only like minded people expressed their views. But increasingly, scientists have found that it is the opposite. As people are exposed to differing views on Twitter, they become more entrenched in their own views, but only Republicans are affected:
[S]tudies … observe asymmetric polarization in roll call voting wherein Republicans have become substantially more conservative whereas Democrats exhibit little or no increase in liberal voting positions.
Thus, it seems that social media may be poisoning the political well, at least for Republicans. Thanks Big Tech.
From a game theoretic perspective, if you are stuck in an unstable cycle, you have to change the game or the game will change on its own. That either means changing the players, the cost and rewards of particular moves, or the moves themselves. Changing the players seems a long shot given the two existing players have an entrenched interest and power in remaining the only two.
What about the moves? The only real moves here are reform and counter-reform. Hence, the only real hope for cooperation is for the two parties to have a shared interest in a particular reform or counter-reform. Republicans, by their nature, are less willing to engage in the sort of mutual support that special interest groups engage in, at least publicly. Thus, they have to have an ideological interest in a reform or counter-reform in order to support it. Because of their ever rightward shift, however, what fits into the Republican ideology has changed significantly over the years. The menu of things that Democrats and Republicans can work together on has become ever smaller. That is how we got here.
The only reform movement that we know neither party would embrace is political reform that would threaten their own hegemony. Could Americans become so frustrated with political gridlock that they open their own bypass with major political reforms? One can only dream. More likely things will only get worse, and the less workable American democracy at a national level becomes the more likely people will find ways outside the national democratic system to get what they want.
Eventually, the build up of steam in the pressure cooker of American politics will have to be vented. If we do not do it in a controlled way, then the whole thing might explode. I have a feeling that American democracy is unstable the way it is set up. The Constitution deliberately created a weak federal government out of a fear of tyranny and kept the majority of voters from having a say in various places like the Senate and the Electoral College because of a fear of the mob. They ended up with a unique experiment that, nevertheless, only just works. While European nations have their issues, their parliamentary governments are mathematically far more stable: vesting more power in their elected bodies, avoiding having the executive and legislative branches at loggerheads, and giving their people more say. America will one day have to embrace similar constitutional reforms, as it has before.