Partisanship: good or bad?

By Andrew Gelman on February 5, 2009 9:32 PM |

Nancy Rosenblum posted an article based on her recent book, "On the Side of the
Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship," which she describes as her
"analysis of antipartyism and attempt at rehabilitation." Following up at Cato Unbound is
Brink Lindsey, who writes that "under present circumstances at least, partisan zeal ought
to be attacked rather than defended."

I'll summarize what Rosenblum and Lindsey have to say and then give my reaction
(much of which is based on data from our Red State, Blue State book).

Rosenblum writes:

Partisanship needs a moment of appreciation. We recognize "partisan" as invective; the

barb comes out of improbable mouths, a virtual reflex. While party activists battle one
another each claiming they are on side of the angels, critics demonize them all and praise
independents as their undisputed moral superiors. . . . One third of survey respondents
agree with the proposition "The truth is we probably don't need political parties in
America anymore," and a third of voters prefers that "candidates run as individuals
without party labels." . . .

As Lindsey puts it:

Nancy Rosenblum makes a convincing case that American political independents don't
deserve their good press. In particular, she cites findings from the political science
literature that independents tend to be less interested in politics, less informed about the
issues, and less likely to participate in the process than are their partisan fellow citizens.
And by virtue of their "none of the above" political identity, they are "weightless" and
"atomized," free-riding off the agenda-setting and coalition-building efforts of partisans
that give political life its substance.

Partisans are biased--even about factual issues

As Rosenblum argues, citizens have good moral and political reasons to affiliate with
parties: one voter does not count for much, but as part of a larger group we can make our
voices heard. Unfortunately, as Lindsey points out, partisans differ on matters of fact as
well as opinions and values. Here are a couple more examples:

- Views on the economy. A survey was conducted in 1988, at the end of Ronald Reagan's
second term, asking various questions about the government and economic conditions,
including, "Would you say that compared to 1980, inflation has gotten better, stayed
about the same, or gotten worse?" Amazingly, over half of the self-identified strong
Democrats in the survey said that inflation had gotten worse and only 8% thought it had
gotten much better, even though the actual inflation rate dropped from 13% to 4% during
Reagan's eight years in office. Political scientist Larry Bartels studied this and other
examples of bias in retrospective evaluations.

- Climate change and college education. Reporter Brandon Keim found this interesting
nugget from a Pew survey:

Over the last year and a half, the number of Americans who believe the Earth is warming
has dropped. The decline is especially precipitous among Republicans: in January 2007,
62 percent accepted global warming, compared to just 49 percent now. . . . The
confounding part: among college-educated poll respondents, 19 percent of Republicans
believe that human activities are causing global warming, compared to 75 percent of
Democrats. But take that college education away and Republican believers rise to 31
percent while Democrats drop to 52 percent.

At first this seems weird: you might think that college grads are more likely to go with
the scientific consensus on global warming, or you might think that college grads would
be more skeptical, but it seems funny that it would go one way for Democrats and the
other for Republicans.

But looked at another way, it makes perfect sense. Among college grads, there is a big
partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans. Among non-graduates, the
differences are smaller. This is completely consistent with research that shows that
people with more education are on average more politically polarized. Basically, higher
educated Democrats are more partisan Democrats, and higher educated Republicans are
more partisan Republicans. On average, educated people are more tuned in to politics and
more likely to align their views with their political attitudes. From this perspective, it's
really not about the scientific community at all, it's just a special case of the general
phenomenon of elites being more politically polarized.

(The discussion of this point on my blog is fascinating: most of the commenters consider
the differences between less-educated and more-educated people to be effects of a college
education, whereas I--along with most other political scientists, I would guess--think of
education more as a demographic variable, with the distinction between educated and less
educated voters being a comparison of different sorts of people rather than an effect of
education.)

Attitudes on different issues are less predictable than you might think

On the other hand, things aren't quite as bad as Lindsey implies. For example, he writes,
"There's no epistemologically sound reason why one's opinion about, say, the effects of
gun control should predict one's opinion about whether humans have contributed to
climate change or how well Mexican immigrants are assimilating -- these things have
absolutely nothing to do with each other. Yet the fact is that views on these and a host of
other matters are indeed highly correlated with each other."
Is that true? The short answer is that I don't know. But the fuller answer is that I suspect
the correlations on these views are pretty low. I say this because one thing I do know is
that the correlations between attitudes on different issues are surprisingly low.

Sociologist Delia Baldassarri and I looked at this a couple of years ago in an analysis of
decades of survey responses from the National Election Study. Correlations between
pairs of issues are pretty low, typically around 0.2. These correlations have increased in
the past few decades, but slowly--only about 0.02 per decade.

Although Americans have become increasingly polarized in their impressions of the

Democratic and Republican parties, each person maintains a mix of attitudes within
himself or herself. For instance, 40% of Americans in a 2004 survey were self-declared
Republicans, but only 23% identified themselves as both Republican and conservative.
Almost half of Republicans do not describe themselves as being ideologically
conservative. If we also consider issue preferences, the constraint of people's political
preferences looks even weaker. Only 6% of respondents are Republicans who think of
themselves as conservatives, oppose abortion, and have conservative views on
affirmative action and health policy. Fully 85% of self-declared Republicans are
nonconservative or take a nonconservative stand on at least one of these three traditional
issues.

A similar picture emerges if we look at Democrats. In this case, of the 49% self-declared
Democrats in the sample, only 36% call themselves liberals. Overall, almost 90% of
Democrats are nonliberal or have nonliberal views on abortion, affirmative action, or
health policy. These numbers should not be surprising, given that in general, the
correlation between party identification or ideology and opinion on political issues is low.
Knowing somebody's political identification increases our chances of guessing his or her
issue preferences, but not by much. This supports the notion of journalists such as David
Brooks that red and blue America are cultural constructs more than bundles of issue
positions.

The preceding analyses consider five positions (party, ideology, and three issues): if each
were determined by a simple coin flip, there would be about 3% of the population (more
precisely, 1 in 32), in each of the pure categories; instead, we see about 6% for each:
more than would be expected by pure randomness, but far less than if attitudes on the
different positions were perfectly correlated.

The picture does not change if we look at correlations among issue preferences alone. For
example, consider opinions on health insurance and abortion. Overall, 46% of
respondents favored government support for health insurance. Among the people who
supported abortion, 51% supported government health insurance. Similarly, 55% of
respondents support abortion. Among those supporting health insurance, 62% were also
in favor of abortion.

The following graph, based on the research of political scientists Joseph Bafumi and
Michael Herron, summarizes voters' ideological positions on a number of issues:
House members and senators' positions are estimated based on their votes in Congress.
Voters' positions are estimated based on some survey questions where people were asked
their views on a number of issues that had also been voted on in Congress. As you can
see, elected representatives are generally more extreme than voters.

Congressmembers are more ideological--more partisanly-consistent in their views--than

most voters. When you see this graph, it should be no surprise--after all,
congressmembers are professional Democrats and Republicans in a way that few voters
are. On the other hand, we also know that to be elected to Congress you need to get a
plurality of votes in your district, and there's evidence that moderation is helpful in this
respect.

Given all this evidence of voters' lack of issue coherence, how is it that Lindsey assumes
that views on gun control, climate change, and immigration are so highly correlated? This
comes back to another thing that Baldassarri found, which is that attitudes on issues are
more highly correlated among politically active Americans--the kind of people, I assume,
whom Lindsey, Rosenblum, and I are more likely to meet and talk with about politics.

As the times change, so do our prescriptions

It helps to put concerns about partisanship in recent historical context. In this case I'll
take a slightly shorter view than Rosenblum and just look at the past forty years. In the
late 1960s and early 1970s, political scientists and journalists such as David Broder
started writing books with titles such as The Party's Over, worrying about the diminished
importance of political organizations in American life, and expressing concern with a
more shallow mass-media presentation of politics in books such as Joe McGinness's The
Selling of the President, written about Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign.

Why were the increased importance of the media and decreased importance of political
parties viewed as such a bad thing? For one thing, political scientists and journalists were
more likely to be Democrats than Republicans--as was true of the country as a whole at
that time. But Americans continued to vote Republican in presidential elections. Theories
of divided government and balancing aside, this would be disturbing to someone who
saw the Democrats as the natural majority party, hence the concern about the decline of
party influence.

Fast forward to the late 1990s and beyond. Political scientists and journalists are now
bemoaning the increase in political polarization. Why was partisanship considered such a
bad thing? Again, political scientists and journalists are more likely to be Democrats.
They noticed that many Americans agree with the Democrats more than Republicans on
specific issues but nonetheless were voting for Republicans. What was going on?
Partisanship was a possible culprit: with more Americans identifying with the
conservative than the liberal label, perhaps they were voting Republican out of an
ideological consistency that is not actually in accordance with their issue positions.

As former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay put it in 2006, "The common lament over
the recent rise in political partisanship is often nothing more than a veiled complaint
instead about the recent rise of political conservatism." Now that the Democrats are in
power, perhaps it is their turn to champion party loyalty.

Arguments for or against partisanship have to be evaluated on their own terms, and
Rosenblum's argument in particular is part of a longer tradition among political science to
show respect for and understanding of the participants at all levels of the political
process. I will say, though, that a call for a return to partisanship may find a more
receptive audience among liberal opinion leaders now than in, say, 2001 or 2005. The
current period of unified Democratic control of the federal government has put a new
spin on debates about polarization and partisanship.

Summary

Rosenblum does us all a useful service by placing partisanship and, especially, criticisms
of partisanship, in historical perspective. And, while I respect Lindsey's concerns about
the systematic errors that partisans make--djvergences that in some cases are even larger
among more educated voters, which, as Lindsey says, undermine both clear thinking and
moral integrity--I think that some of these worries may be overstated. For better or worse,
most voters remain near the political center. We may have more to fear from the
partisanship of politicians than from the partisanship of voters.

I definitely agree with Rosenblum that political scientists (and political journalists, too)
should take partisanship seriously: whether or not bipartisan agreement is desirable,
partisanship among politicians and voters is certainly the norm and is worthy of study.
And I definitely agree with Linsdey that partisanship is more ideological than it used to
be, but that these ideologies are imperfect fits for the majority of voters. This is one
reason why voters can show strong preferences for one party over the other while still
expressing a desire for bipartisan governance.

Maarten Buis | February 6, 2009 4:51 AM | Reply

Interesting experiments with lack of partisanship are the big coalitions of "natural
enemies" that occured in some European countries recently. For example, the coalitions
combining social democrats with fiscal conservatives (The Netherlands 1994-2002, and
Belgium 1999-2007) or social democrats and christian democrats (current Germany). My
impression is that these are not stable solutions in the sense that at, least in the
Netherlands, the big coalition will not be a viable option for quite some time to come,
while other coalitions may break down, but after the election they are still a viable option.

Phil | February 6, 2009 4:08 PM | Reply

The climate change result is depressing. Choosing your scientific beliefs on the basis of
your political beliefs...that's just wrong.

Benjamin Lauderdale | February 6, 2009 5:59 PM | Reply

While I agree with Phil that it would be a better world if people could independently
evaluate the quality of scientific arguments, that seems pretty naively optimistic. In what
sense do you "know" that climate change is real? Unless you are a climate scientist, you
only know because you trust scientists (or peer-review or something else about the social
structure in which they operate). Well, apparently most Republicans trust someone else
more (I am sure we could come up with names). This is a pity, but it is not clear those of
us who have the "correct" perspective on climate change are doing anything
fundamentally different in terms of how we form our views, we just trust different
people.

As a more realistic goal, we might hope that on scientific matters, most people would
trust scientists more than overtly political actors. Most Americans probably do this,
which is why intelligent design people work hard to come up with "experts" who look
like scientists, why energy companies have done the same for climate change issues, why
tobacco companies used to do this, etc., etc. I am sure that I have deluded views on some
things too, in large part because of similar efforts by interested information sources that I
am more inclined to trust. But I can't list them, because I just view them as people telling
me things that are true!

This is why it is important for scientists to not pretend they have some special authority
to talk about anything other than their actual field of study. I know this is a pet peeve of
Andrew's. In addition to being annoying, it is probably bad for the general credibility of
scientists. Of course it is fun and cheap to spend credibility accumulated by other
scientists, so keeping each other from running our mouths is a collective action problem
for scholars.

john | February 7, 2009 1:03 PM | Reply

"This is why it is important for scientists to not pretend they have some special authority
to talk about anything other than their actual field of study."

I suspect that 2-3% of every profession are mercenaries without ethics, and another 10%
or so are so incompetent as to be a coin flip away from acting like mercenaries without
ethics, although they don't realize it. Consequently, I believe this problem will be with us
until the days of 99.99% accurate psychological testing, where those people who will
happily deceive the public for pay can be assigned jobs digging drainage ditches in
Alabama in the summertime - which doesn't address the incompetence issue, I know, but
no doubt something will come up.

I also don't believe that most people, especially the people on the wrong side of the facts,
actually pay any attention to the scientists (some personal experience with a usually
intelligent friend here.) They pay attention to the received wisdom of the people they
hang out with combined with what they want to be true. They then filter the facts to
support their desires + received wisdom. (Kahneman and Tversky did a lot of work on
this.)

Short of outright censorship of incorrect beliefs, a la the Church 500 years ago or so, the
only way out I can see is better training and indoctrination of the youth in the public and
private schools - in how to think critically, how to decide between competing views, and
what is right, scientifically speaking. One hopes this will reduce the problem to one
which doesn't interfere much with our ability to get needed stuff done.

Well, I can dream, can't I?

Nadia Urbinati | February 9, 2009 3:22 PM | Reply

“As you can see,” Andrew Gelman writes, “elected representatives are generally more
extreme than voters”. This perhaps should not come as a surprise because representatives,
contrary to electors, have to seat close to each other, and in particular close to their
opponents;. They have to discuss face-to-face with their rivals and finally decide against
(yet with) them. To paraphrase J.S. Mill, they experience directly the heat of partisanship.
This is not the case with electors, who feel perhaps the animosity of political partisanship
during the electoral campaign, but since they do not have to vote on issues, their
antagonism remains at the lever of general views or visions. But voting on issues directly
(something that in representative democracy only the elected do) entails entering a
dialectics of pro and con much that involves emotionally on a deeper level because in this
case political antagonism materializes, so to speak; it takes the feature of this or that
specific topic. Antagonism takes a concrete feature here. This explains why those who
have to deal with “real stuff” (law proposals) may tend to become more radical or
extreme in their position and opposition. Ancient Athens can be used as evidence, where
assemblies of sovereign citizens registered so strong an animosity that provisos and
procedures had to be created in order not to transform legislation in a work of personal
vendetta or retaliation of citizens against each other. Vicinity of the decision-makers or of
friends to enemies, and vicinity of them to the issues to be decided on it is perhaps what
may explain Gelman’s finding.