Thomas Friedman has an “interesting column”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/opinion/30friedman.html in the NY Times today. In it he argues that “a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system”. What exactly are these trends?
# “the wild excess of money in politics”
# Gerrymandering of congressional districts
# the 24 news cycle
# a permanent presidential campaign
# the emergence of a blogosphere that “at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world” (I’m going to assume he’s talking about “The Monkey Cage”:https://themonkeycage.org/ in the former part of that quote).
As a political scientist, my response is that, OK, all of these seem like credible explanations, but how would we know if any of them are actually correct? After all, we’ve got five explanations here for what is essentially one observation: the current state of the US political system. To be fair to Friedman, he’s probably got an implicit N (the number of observations) of 2 in mind: the US now, and the US in the past. This would at least get us variation on some of the variables he has proposed (e.g., the 24 news cycle, the blogosphere, and the permanent presidential campaign), but would still leave us with more explanations than observations.
One way to get more observations would be to put the question in more of a comparative framework by examining other political systems around the world, and then seeing the extent to which both the dependent variable (the ability of idiots to overwhelm political debate, which would of course have to operationalized somehow) and the independent variables proposed by Friedman varied across different contexts. My sense is that the 24 news cycle and the blogosphere are pretty ubiquitous phenomena in most democracies these days, but that the permanent presidential campaign and gerrymandering are not. I’m not aware of any comparative research to date that tests the effects of these types of variables on the civility of politics, but would invite anyone aware of such research to add to the comments section of this post.
Of the possible explanations put forward by Friedman, the claim that gerrymandering is at the heart of problems in our political system strikes me as an important one to explore. Intuitively plausible – gerrymandering makes most congressmen or congresswomen in the United States need to worry more about a possible primary challenger than an opponent from the opposite party – it also has the advantage of being something that ostensibly could be fixed by legislation (as opposed to, for example, the 24 hours news cycle). However, based solely on my own observation of the way politics are conducted the post-communist countries I tend to follow, there would seem to be little out there to support a claim that politics is inherently less civil and more idiot-prone in the US than elsewhere.
Turning to more rigorous analysis, “Nolan McCarty”:http://blogs.princeton.edu/mccarty/, “Keith Poole”:http://voteview.com/ and “Howard Rosenthal”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/HowardRosenthal.html have a recent article in the _American Journal of Political Science_ on the effects of gerrymandering entitled “Does Gerrymandering Cause Polarization?” (“gated”:http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122465102/issue, earlier “ungated version”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1154054). Contrary to popular belief, they find:
bq. Both pundits and scholars have blamed increasing levels of partisan conflict and polarization in Congress on the effects of partisan gerrymandering. We assess whether there is a strong causal relationship between congressional districting and polarization. We find very little evidence for such a link. First, we show that congressional polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences. Second, we conduct simulations to gauge the level of polarization under various “neutral” districting procedures. We find that the actual levels of polarization are not much higher than those produced by the simulations. We do find that gerrymandering has increased the Republican seat share in the House; however, this increase is not an important source of polarization.