THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Circling the Wagons
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: June 5, 2004
Over the next few months, I hope to write a fair bit about the dominant
feature of our political life: polarization. I hope to figure out how deeply
split the nation is, and what exactly it is we are fighting about —
questions that leave me, at present, confused.
Today's topic is what it means to be a partisan, because partisanship is
the building block of polarization.
In a perfectly rational world, citizens would figure out which parties
best represent their interests and their values, and they would
provisionally attach themselves to those parties. If their situations
changed or their interests changed, then their party affiliations would
change.
But that is not how things work in real life. As Donald Green, Bradley
Palmquist and Eric Schickler argue in their book, "Partisan Hearts and
Minds," most people either inherit their party affiliations from their
parents, or they form an attachment to one party or another early in
adulthood. Few people switch parties once they hit middle age. Even major
historic events like the world wars and the Watergate scandal do not cause
large numbers of people to switch.
Moreover, Green, Palmquist and Schickler continue, people do not choose
parties by comparing platforms and then figuring out where the nation's
interests lie. Drawing on a vast range of data, these political scientists
argue that party attachment is more like attachment to a religious
denomination or a social club. People have stereotypes in their heads about
what Democrats are like and what Republicans are like, and they gravitate
toward the party made up of people like themselves.
Once they have formed an affiliation, people bend their philosophies and
their perceptions of reality so they become more and more aligned with
members of their political tribe.
Paul Goren of Arizona State University has used survey data to track the
same voters over time. Under the classic model, you'd expect to find that
people who valued equal opportunity would become Democrats and that people
who valued limited government would become Republicans.
In fact, you're more likely to find that people become Democrats first,
then place increasing value on equal opportunity, or they become Republicans
first, then place increasing value on limited government. Party affiliation
often shapes values, not the other way around.
Party affiliation even shapes people's perceptions of reality. In 1960,
Angus Campbell and others published a classic text, "The American Voter," in
which they argued that partisanship serves as a filter. A partisan filters
out facts that are inconsistent with the party's approved worldview and
exaggerates facts that confirm it.
That observation has been criticized by some political scientists, who
see voters as reasonably rational. But many political scientists are coming
back to Campbell's conclusion: people's perceptions are blatantly biased by
partisanship.
For example, the Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels has pointed
to survey data collected after the Reagan and Clinton presidencies. In 1988,
voters were asked if they thought the nation's inflation rate had fallen
during the Reagan presidency.
In fact, it did. The inflation rate fell from 13.5 percent to 4.1
percent. But only 8 percent of strong Democrats said the rate had fallen.
Fifty percent of partisan Democrats believed that inflation had risen under
Reagan. Strong Republicans had a much sunnier and more accurate impression
of economic trends. Forty-seven percent said inflation had declined.
Then, at the end of the Clinton presidency, voters were asked similar
questions about how the country had fared in the previous eight years. This
time, it was Republicans who were inaccurate and negative. Democrats were
much more positive. Bartels concludes that partisan loyalties have a
pervasive influence on how people see the world. They reinforce and
exaggerate differences of opinion between Republicans and Democrats.
The overall impression one gets from these political scientists is that
politics is a tribal business. Americans congregate into rival political
communities, then embrace one-sided attitudes and perceptions. That suggests
that political polarization is the result of deep and self-reinforcing
psychological and social forces.
This theory doesn't explain how the country moves through cycles of
greater and lesser polarization. Still, I have to say, depressingly, this
picture of tribal and subrational partisanship does accord with the reality
we see around us every day.
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