E Duo Pluribus
Negative Polarization, Electoral Systems and...Kiwis (the people, not the fruit or the bird)
E DUO PLURIBUS
“At present there is simply too much money to make and too much power to gain to think twice about punching your enemy as hard as you can.”
-David French, “Divided We Fall”
Insurrection Day Reckoning:
On Wednesday January 6th I watched a desecration of the seat of American Democracy. I’ll spare you my memories of it- I think we’ve all had enough of that.
But, what was interesting about that day was my reaction to those events. I wasn’t only scared and sad. I was also oddly satisfied? Not because I wished success for the insurrectionists, but because their actions justified my politically motivated hatreds. A small voice muttered in my skull “see, these Republicans are exactly who we thought they were- look at what they’ve done.”
And, that’s a problem.
What’s So Horrifying About Hatred and Misunderstanding:
We are a nation clenched in the grip of negative polarization. Our politics has become less about what we love and more about whom we hate.
Americans dislike their political opponents. A YouGov poll found that 38% of Republicans and Democrats would be, at least, somewhat upset if their child married a member of the opposite political party.
But the fact that we hate our political opponents isn’t what’s scary. What’s scary is that every institutional and social factor of our society seems primed to make us hate each other more.
Staring Into The Depths of the Centrifuge
Social Scientists call it “The Great Sort”. Americans tend to move to neighborhoods, towns or cities where they share common characteristics. One of these characteristics is political viewpoint. In 1992 38% of Americans lived in a county where a Presidential candidate won more than 60% of the vote. In 2016 61% of Americans lived in such a county. Even within these counties extremity in geographic political leanings has increased. In 1992 only 4% of voters lived in counties where a Presidential candidate won by a margin of 50% or higher. In 2016 21% of voters lived in such counties.
This geographic sorting is abetted by media sorting. Hundreds of television channels, vast arrays of websites and media personalities have been launched in the internet era. All these give Americans the choice to watch media that affirms their own political point of view.
This virtual and physical separation has led to increasing negative polarization through social and psychological means. How is this so?
First, surrounding ourselves with politically likeminded people breeds political extremity. Cass Sunstein in his paper, “The Law of Group Polarization” shows the mechanics of this. In his paper Sunstein argues that when groups of politically likeminded people gather, their conversations and thoughts are driven by a pre-deliberation tendency.
An example of this would be a group of 2nd Amendment activists meeting in a group to discuss opposition to gun control. Faced with such a group of likeminded activists, the group does not question its base political preference but, instead, a strong pressure grows to push this political preference to a larger extreme. This pressure defies outside research and evidence- the group’s trust in its members mean that even if one of the group pushes a false premise or extreme assertion that plays into the dominant bias of the group, the rest of the group will feel pressured to accept this claim out of social solidarity. In this way, any time a group of politically likeminded individuals gathers, the tendency is for the median political thought of that group to get more and more extreme.
As our politics becomes more extreme, social media has made it easier to negatively stereotype our political opponents. David French calls this “nut-picking”. A liberal democrat may go on twitter and see youtube video of someone wearing a MAGA hat screaming racial epithets. They will conclude: Republicans are fascists and racists. A conservative Republican finds a reddit thread where someone has taken pictures of left-wing anarchists throwing a Molotov cocktail at a Portland Courthouse. They will conclude: Democrats are violent anti-government radicals.
At the same time, politics has become a form of mass entertainment for many Americans. As Ezra Klein points out, they view it similarly to sports. Republicans root for their team to win the elections and cheer on their elected representatives when they trash-talk Democrats on twitter. Democrats cheer on AOC when she shouts down Republicans on social media.
With this rooting interest, Americans now identify strongly with their political identity. In Divided We Fall, David French cites research that a significant number of Americans change their ethnic, religious and sexual identity to fit their political identity. This research shows that Republicans often stop identifying as LGBT and Hispanic and that Democrats claim POC identity and lower their previous level of religiosity.
So, just to recap: Americans are now more physically and virtually sorted into likeminded political groups as ever before. This sorting is causing their political views to become more extreme. It is now easier for people to view extreme actions by political opponents and stereotype these opponents as a danger to the country. Americans are more tuned into politics as entertainment and now root for, and identify strongly with, their political in-groups and, as a consequence, deeply despise their political out-groups.
All of these dynamics reinforce the other. More extreme Republicans would be more incentivized to consume only partisan media. More extreme Democrats would be more incentivized to move to cities with extremely left wing policies. Rooting for your political party like a sports team will make you look ridiculous to your political opponent and will make them more likely to search for extreme members of your political tribe to hold up as objects of hatred. And on and on we go.
What Can Be Done?
So many things pull us apart. We badly need something to counteract these forces. But, what can we do? Its not like we can re-centralize media, force democrats to live next to Republicans and mandate that all Americans watch videos of their political opponents being nice to old ladies and orphans every two days.
I’ve referenced David French and Ezra Klein for a specific reason- they have both written books on the downward spiral of negative polarization. Though their diagnosis of the problem is erudite, I find their solutions unsatisfying. David French asks that we each attempt to take a more live-and-let-live attitude towards our political opponents. Ezra Klein would like our politics to focus more on outcomes and less on the culture war. Their recommendations all seem personal and idea-driven and I, therefore, doubt their efficacy.
What neither of them suggest, however, is changing the underlying structure of our political institutions.
You’ll notice that many of our issues with negative polarization have to do with the bipolarity of our politics. Americans are forced into two categories: Republican or Democrat. The reason this is so is not because of culture, social factors or tradition. The reason is our system of elections.
American electoral systems are first-past-the-post. This means that the party with the most votes in an election wins. If, let’s say, a Republican, a Democrat and a Libertarian run for a House Seat and the vote split is 40, 45, 15 respectively- first-past-the-post means the Democrat wins. But, what if the Libertarian voters would rather the Republican win than the Democrat? Well, then they shouldn’t vote for the Libertarian, they should form a coalition and alliance with the Republican. This is how we get the political alliances and fusions that make up our two party system. This is why libertarian atheists, White evangelical wage workers and conspiracy theorists vote Republican. It’s also why corporate neoliberals, African-American evangelical low-wage workers and communists vote Democrat.
This bipolarity sets the stage for our negative polarization. Communities can only get so small. It’s easy to form neighborhoods and social groups with only Democrats, it’s easy to go to a church with only Republicans.
But, what if that wasn’t the case? What if we had many parties in the United States? What if the Republican Party and the Democratic Party shattered into tiny pieces that could war with each other and form alliances of convenience with their opposites?
You might say this isn’t possible- but it is. Once you change the electoral system you can scramble the party system. And, not only that, but you can potentially create an institutional force against increasing negative polarization.
You don’t have to trust me on this- because its been done before. There is another former British Colony, made up primarily of European immigrants, who, in the early 1990’s switched from a first-pass-the-post system (duo) to a parliamentary system (pluribus): New Zealand.
The Kiwi Experience
Before 1996 New Zealand’s politics closely resembled America’s. There were two parties: National and Labor. The Labor party tended to support more statist and socialist policies and align with secular culture. The National party was more in favor of free markets and sometimes recruited from more religious parts of the population. Each electoral contest from 1935 till 1993 pitted one of these parties against the other.
New Zealand was, and is, a parliamentary democracy- so in that way it was different from the American political system. But, that structure is not what made the politics so similar. The electoral system was first-past-the-post. As we went over earlier, this forced New Zealand citizens into a game where it benefitted their political voice to coalesce around two central parties.
This all changed in 1996. In this election New Zealand introduced a new electoral system. Explaining how the New Zealand system works to a T is actually worthy of a whole article on its own. But, what’s important to note is that it switched New Zealand off of first-pass-the-post. The electoral system was now designed so that, if any party attained at least 5% of the national vote,they would get seats in parliament.
The ability for people to express their particularistic political viewpoints without electoral penalty was immediately digested. In 1996 neither Labor nor National received enough of a percentage of the vote to rule with an outright majority. In fact, their percentage of the total vote went down to 64%.
In 1996 four parties received more than 10 seats in the 120 seat parliament: National received 44, Labor received 37, New Zealand First received 17 and The Alliance received 13. Two of these parties were, to a certain extent, splinter groups from these larger parties. NZ First was a quasi-splinter group from the National Party. It was led by an iconoclastic politician named Winston Peters. Peters was known for his relatively liberal economic stances, but culturally conservative and anti-immigrant rhetoric. The Alliance was a splinter of Labor- a more left wing and radical party than its former host.
With the seat totals above there were two options: NZ First could form a coalition with Labor with Alliance entering in a supply-agreement with the coalition. Or, NZ First could form a narrow coalition with National. The decision proved difficult for NZ First. They held simultaneous negotiations with both Labor and National, with the nation looking on wondering which way the winds would blow. Finally, they announced a coalition with National at the end of the marathon negotiations.
Let’s think, for a second, what the American equivalent of this dynamic would be. Imagine if in 2016 the results were not a narrow Republican Party victory led by Trump, but, instead, a Donald Trump led third party winning just above 8 percent of the vote and then negotiating with the Hillary Clinton led Democrats and the Marco Rubio led Republicans to form a coalition (with the Bernie Sanders led Democratic Socialists playing an outside role in a possible Hillary/Trump coalition).
Think of how any partisan news organization could possibly cover this in a way that showed that one party was evil and the other was good? How would a democratic leaning media organization cover the Sanders party or the Trump party? How would the Republican leaning media organization cover the Trump party or the Clinton party? How would the nut-picking work in this instance? Most of the “crazy left” currently associated with the Democrats would then be associated with the Sanders party. Would members of the Clinton party rather focus on the outrageous antics of Sanders or Trump? Identities could not coalesce in a bi-polar way around such a result and such a negotiation. The political discourse of America would be greatly fragmented and disordered- probably in a way that greatly counteracted our current death-spiral of negative polarization.
And, this is also how it worked out in New Zealand, to a certain extent. This new rule of non-majority held for 21 years. In every election, except 2020, with this new electoral system, no one party has received enough votes to form a majority in parliament. They always had to rely on smaller splinter parties in coalitions or supply-agreements to rule. Parties rose up, disintegrated, merged, grew and faded. Members of parliament jumped from smaller deviant parties to larger parties and then back.
It is difficult to find hard numbers that prove that politics became less bipolar in New Zealand after 1996. Previous New Zealand elections did not ask standardized questions about polarization and did not extend far enough back in the 20th century.
However, voting behavior bears out the hypothesis that the new electoral system made political identification more fluid. In the first-past-the-post era, there were low amounts of voter volatility in New Zealand year over year- that is, if you voted for National one year, it was very likely that you would vote for National the next year. Same with Labor. After 1996, however, the New Zealand population responded to the increased choice of parties by choosing differently from election to election much more often. Net volatility, which measures how likely a voter would switch between one party and another in a given election, increased by about 43%from the 24 years preceding the new electoral system to the present multi-party age, according research done by Jack Vowles, a Professor of Political Science at Victoria University of Wellington.
Cursory glances at the results in a few of these elections show that this volatility was not simply within the “right” or “left” voting blocs. Some of the far left wing parties drew voters from the right-of-center party. Labor drew its second largest amount of voters from the National party. So, moderates switched from right to left and vice versa- disaffected partisans sometimes flowed to the NZ First “center” party, and even the radical wings of the political spectrum drew voters from the opposite moderate side.
The Land of the Rugby and Home of the Furry Fruit?
I hope I have given enough evidence to make even skeptical readers consider that a new electoral system could solve our most pressing political and social issues. However, I fully expect many of these people who I’ve convinced to respond with a feasibility argument. In an age where we can’t seem to impeach a sitting President from inciting a mob to storm the Capitol building, how can we possibly reform our electoral system? To that I say two things:
One- instituting some kind of electoral reform along the lines of New Zealand would take a massive political upheaval. But, that might be where we are in the near future? Frighteningly large amounts of Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen. Our transfer of power was, arguably, unpeaceful for the first time in American history. It is quite possible that the situation could degrade in unexpected ways and a larger tragedy could force a political reckoning whereby the momentum exists to change the entire system. It’s possible this is a low percentage scenario, yes. But, it would be good to emerge from this scenario with the proper perspective on electoral reform. If we have the chance to institute a new force against negative polarization, then we should be prepared to unleash that force.
Two- the first moves towards electoral reform do not have to take place at the federal level. Several states allow constitutional change through single-issue plebscites (like California, where I reside). Why can’t we try out this type of proportional system in a state? Imagine the State of California turning one of its legislative houses into a proportionally elected parliamentary body. What kinds of new parties would emerge from this? What kinds of new alliances and political thought would be injected in California politics? Its very possible that turning a few states away from first-past-the-post would do enough to scramble the American bi-polar extremities to move us more towards a functional political and social system.
At the end of the day, I don’t think this is a remedy that should be seen as a panacea. It could be that the American system is too resistant to multi-polarity? It could be that multi-polarity would, somehow, make all of this worse or keep it the same? But, we understand more, today, about what ails our system and the forces that will continue to degrade it. We also see evidence of another country using its electoral system as a bulwark against these forces. We would be foolish not to at least consider the implications of what those two things mean together.