The Forum
Manuscript 1516
Voting vs. Thinking: Unified Partisan Voting
Does Not Imply Unified Partisan Beliefs
Jeremy C. Pope, Brigham Young University
©2012 De Gruyter. All rights reserved.
Voting vs. Thinking: Unified Partisan Voting
Does Not Imply Unified Partisan Beliefs
Jeremy C. Pope
Abstract
The Myth of the Independent Voter crystallized views that were becoming accepted in political
science and began an effort to convince the press that self-described independent voters were not
truly independent, but that these “leaners” were really closet partisans. Despite the success of that
book, its argument has come with a cost. Most especially, a misrepresentation of the argument can
play into the myth of a deeply polarized electorate. When scrutinized closely, it becomes clear that
Americans often vote in a highly partisan way, yet they are far less likely to think in a clearly
partisan fashion. All partisans, but especially weak partisans and independent leaners, disagree
frequently with their respective parties. Indeed, just as we no longer see independents as a united
block, we should avoid making claims that partisans are united, because even though these partisans
often vote alike, they do not always think alike.
KEYWORDS: independent voter, unified partisan voting
Author Notes: Jeremy C. Pope is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young
University and a Research Fellow with the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy. His
interests include elections, public opinion, legislatures, political parties and the American founding.
Pope: Voting vs. Thinking
1
Political scientists sometimes do not reflect enough on just how successful the
discipline has been at educating the public and the press. There is obviously much
work to do as journalists and commentators continue to perpetuate myths that do
not reflect reality (Noel 2010). Nevertheless there are successes, like reminding
people of the efficacy of negative ads (Geer 2006), the fact that money cannot buy
an election (Ansolabehere, Figueiredo and Snyder 2003), or that election
fundamentals are crucial for studying the campaign (Nyhan and Sides 2011).
Despite these successes, there are occasions where strengths can become
weaknesses, and one element of our collective success exhibits that very pattern.
Introducing the Problem
In the 1980s, political discussion was awash with claims about the rise of
independents. Political scientists knew that the claim of independence was at best,
exaggerated and at worst fraudulent: “[Leaners] are never neutral and the extent
of their [partisan] affect almost invariably resembles that of weak partisans”
(Keith, Magleby, Nelson, Orr, Westlye and Wolfinger 1992, 70, emphasis in
original). In other words, leaners are not true independents but “closet partisans.”
This finding has become so widely accepted in political science that it is difficult
to overstate its importance. When the media and political scientists speak about
partisans now, they often explicitly include leaners in their accounting. (Though
there are exceptions; see Magleby, Nelson, and Westlye 2012). Despite some
dissenters, few if any of the efforts of political scientists to correct media
misperceptions have been as successful.
Success has come, however, with a hidden cost. Media accounts often
overstate the argument that is central to The Myth of the Independent Voter: that
there are few true independents because most people vote according to an
underlying partisanship. The emphasis on that term “vote” is important, because
the claim was never that partisans are divided into two camps that consistently
think differently. In chapter seven, the authors of The Myth of the Independent
Voter went looking for issues that showed why the number of independents had
grown in size, but they conclude by saying they “[acknowledged] a failure to
locate the issues that led to the rise of independents (168).”
That was because, with a few exceptions noted below, they found that on
many public policy questions, there was little evidence for a correlation between
issue attitudes and partisanship. People in the different categories may have been
voting for different candidates (and parties), but each category had a diverse range
of opinion on many questions. Put differently, the evidence for partisan voting
does not imply two united camps of partisans, marching in lockstep, always
thinking alike, always taking the same position, always in agreement with their
party.
2
Submission to The Forum
The irony is that it is often activists within the parties who peddle the
claim that there are two camps of united voters: Democrats voting and thinking as
a block and Republicans voting and thinking in opposition. Markos Moulitsas, the
proprietor of Daily Kos, wrote earlier this year that “[d]espite repeated efforts by
Beltway hacks to appeal to a mythical and nonexistent bipartisan ‘middle,’ it’s
clear there is zero appetite for such constructs from the American public
(Moulitsas (2012).” The right has its own version of this argument. In a piece
titled “Two Tickets: Two Americas,” Stanley Kurtz, writing in National Review,
argues that “we need to understand that our political divisions are real and
growing. They are rooted not in top-down political rhetoric but in profound and
lasting social and cultural differences (Kurtz 2012).” The meme makes its way
into all kinds of places.
For activists to offer the image that the public is divided into two united
partisan camps is, perhaps, a sensible strategy. They can try to convince
moderates or the uninterested that the side they lean away from is clearly
deranged and dangerous for the country. Certainly at an elite policy level, the
activists may have a point about unified extremism (see, e.g., Mann and Ornstein
2012), but there is a crucial difference between voting for a party and thinking like
a party—or at least always agreeing with one’s chosen party. Political scientists
need to be clear about this difference or we lead the media astray.
This is not to say that all media accounts on this right now are wrong. For
instance, Ron Brownstein suggests that “America has reverted to being a 50-50
nation (Brownstein 2012),” but he goes on to argue that the party leaders should
“seek compromises that reflect the nation’s diversity of opinion.” Whatever one’s
normative opinion about compromise, Brownstein presents an accurate portrayal
of the public. It is diverse and without really consistent policy views. It is this
crucial difference between voting alike and thinking alike that matters in the way
we portray the electorate.
How can it be true that relatively few citizens are true independents and
simultaneously be true that the electorate is not deeply polarized into two camps?
The answer is actually pretty simple: the parties, especially among the electorate,
are not nearly as unified many people seem to think. Descriptions of them as
unified blocks are overstated.
Alan Abramowitz obviously disagrees and writes that “Americans who
identify themselves as independents but who indicate that they lean toward one of
the two major parties generally think and behave more like partisans than like true
independents (Abramowitz 2012; see Abramowitz 2011 for a similar argument).
A perusal of Pew’s latest report on public opinion “Partisan Polarization Surges in
Bush, Obama Years” documents a “growing partisan divide (p. 2).” The key piece
of evidence is that on an average of selected values questions, the average
Pope: Voting vs. Thinking
3
difference between Democrats and Republicans has moved from 10 points in
1987 to 18 points in 2012. 1
When one reads deeper, though, it becomes clear that there is a great deal
of diversity within those two parties. To take just one example, it is true that more
Republicans take a positive view of Wall Street than Democrats, but the
difference is hardly a chasm: 69 percent to 53 percent (p. 64). Majorities of both
camps view Wall Street as a positive force despite the meltdowns, bank bailouts,
and other financial arguments. 2 A similar investigation of most of the questions
reveals that deep chasms in partisan opinion tend to be more connected to
candidates and elections; less often are they simply discrete policy questions.
The claim that independents can be a new force in American political life
is out there (Killian 2012) and needs to be corrected as well, but in doing so we
should not be arguing that “[independents] who lean toward the Republicans think
and vote just like regular Republicans” or that they “think and vote just like
regular Democrats (Teixeira 2012).” This ignores too much diversity and
difference in thinking within the parties. There is nothing wrong with the idea
that leaners are closet partisans when they vote. Just as there is nothing wrong
with the idea that leaners often look very much like the weak partisans in their
attitudes. The problem is that the parties in the electorate do not have nearly the
policy coherence necessary to think of them as unified camps. A return to The
Myth of the Independent Voter helps tell the story.
Data on Partisanship and Policy
This is not the place for an exhaustive review of party positions on policy, but it is
useful to return to The Myth of the Independent Voter to see how they tackled the
question of the policy content of partisan views. In a chapter on issues and
dealignment, the authors suggest that they have been unable to locate any
particular issue that is motivating the rise of independents. In general, they looked
for issues to explain the rise of independents in the public (Vietnam, women’s
roles, and busing, among others). With respect to these issues, they conclude that
“the range of opinion among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans is rather
narrow (Keith et al. 1992, 157).” When they turned to New Deal issues like
government provided jobs and health insurance, they found somewhat wider
1
The scale here is theoretically 100 points, meaning that there has clearly been some movement
but hardly into two unified camps. Another possible interpretation of the data is that the public is
better sorted into parties now than twenty-five years ago, but hardly characterized by the unity
necessary to think of the polity as being in two camps.
2
On a similar note, more than two-thirds of both camps believe that Wall Street only cares about
making money for itself.
Submission to The Forum
4
ranges of opinion. With respect to these scales, they always found a monotonic
relationship between policy attitudes and partisanship.
Careful not to make any strident claims about these differences, they
merely noted that economic issues were different from other issues. These areas
where they did find the greatest partisan differences thus seem like the best place
to look for unified political party blocks. To that end, I take up three issues merely
as an example and a brief replication of the work in The Myth of the Independent
Voter. 3 They used the ANES seven-point scales where voters are asked:
Some people feel that the government in Washington should see to it that
every person has a job and a good standard of living. Suppose that these
people are at one end of this scale [at which point a card illustrating the
scale is shown to the respondent] at point number 1. Others think the
government should just let each person get ahead on his own. Suppose that
these people are at the other end—at point number 7. And of course, some
other people have opinions somewhere in between. Where would you place
yourself on this scale, or haven’t you thought much about this?
Three issues that were relevant then, and clearly remain relevant today, are
government health insurance, government services and spending, and the
guaranteed jobs and income scales. Each of those scales has a similar wording to
the scale described here (see the ANES for specific question wording). This list
limits us to economics and government spending. The issues seem clearly salient
in 2012 and have been salient for the past several years (and so have been asked
often). And, just to emphasize the point, these are the issues where we see the
largest differences between the parties. Tables 1 through 3 are similar to those
presented in The Myth of the Independent Voter. They present the mean
placement on that seven-point scale for each level of partisanship. As a check on
the overall range of the distribution, the final column of each table includes the
standard deviation for the distribution. 4
Scrutinizing Tables 1 through 3 reveals a few patterns. First of all, it is
clearly still true that there is a relationship between partisanship and policy.
Monotonically, Democrats place themselves on the left of each scale and
Republicans place themselves on the right. It also appears still to be true that
“leaners” look a great deal like weak partisans. Their policy views are usually
closer to the party’s weak partisans than they are to the pure independents. This
confirms the basic findings argued in The Myth of the Independent Voter.
3
Though, for reasons laid out in the text, The Myth of the Independent Voter focused on white
respondents, whereas here I will include all adult respondents.
4
Respondents who indicated that they did not know how to answer survey questions were placed
at a 4 on the scale.
Pope: Voting vs. Thinking
5
Table 1. Mean Self-placement on the Government Health Insurance Scale
Health Insurance
Year
SD WD
LD
I
LR
WR
SR
σ
1972
1976
1984
1988
1992
1996
2000
2004
2008
3.2
3.5
3.8
3.5
3.0
3.6
3.4
3.1
3.0
3.7
4.0
3.8
3.7
3.4
3.7
3.5
3.7
3.5
4.2
4.5
4.3
4.3
4.0
4.3
4.3
4.0
3.9
4.5
4.5
4.4
4.1
4.0
4.5
4.5
4.0
4.4
4.5
4.9
4.4
4.8
4.4
5.4
4.9
4.9
5.2
2.4
2.4
1.9
2.0
1.9
1.9
1.9
1.9
2.0
3.2
3.5
3.4
3.2
2.9
3.2
3.3
2.9
2.9
3.9
3.7
3.9
3.7
3.2
3.6
3.5
3.4
3.3
Note: the far right column indicates the standard deviation for the overall scale for each year.
Table 2. Mean Self-placement on the Guaranteed Jobs and Income Scale
Jobs
Year
1972
1976
1980
1984
1988
1992
1996
2000
2004
2008
SD
3.6
3.6
3.4
3.6
3.5
3.7
3.6
3.9
3.3
3.0
WD
4.1
4.1
4.0
3.9
4.2
3.9
4.2
4.5
3.8
3.7
LD
4.1
4.3
4.2
3.6
4.0
4.0
4.1
4.3
3.7
3.9
I
4.3
4.6
4.4
3.9
4.3
4.0
4.2
4.4
4.0
4.0
LR
4.7
4.7
4.8
4.4
4.8
4.8
4.9
5.0
4.5
4.5
WR
4.7
4.6
4.9
4.6
4.7
4.8
4.9
5.0
4.7
5.0
SR
4.7
5.2
5.0
5.0
5.2
5.1
5.6
5.6
5.5
5.4
σ
1.9
1.8
1.7
1.7
1.7
1.7
1.7
1.7
1.8
1.8
Note: the far right column indicates the standard deviation for the overall scale for each year.
Submission to The Forum
6
Table 3. Mean Self-placement on the Government
Services and Spending Scale
Services / Spending
Year
SD
WD
LD
I
LR
WR
SR
σ
1984
1988
1992
1996
2000
2004
2008
3.4
3.4
3.4
3.3
2.9
2.8
2.9
3.6
3.7
3.6
3.8
3.3
3.2
3.3
3.6
3.5
3.7
3.8
3.3
3.2
3.1
4.0
3.7
3.8
4.0
3.4
3.5
3.3
4.3
4.1
4.3
4.6
4.4
4.0
4.0
4.3
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.3
4.0
4.4
4.8
4.6
4.6
5.2
4.5
4.4
4.7
1.5
1.4
1.4
1.4
1.5
1.5
1.6
Note: the far right column indicates the standard deviation for the overall scale for each year.
As to the question of the range of opinion across the groups, there is some
evidence that it has grown larger. In Table 1, the difference between strong
Democrats and strong Republicans is 1.3 units on the scale in 1972. By 2000, that
difference had grown by a full point to 2.3 units. In Table 2, the growth is even
larger, as the difference between the two camps grows from 1.1 points to 2.4
points (more than doubling). Finally, in Table 3 (which has a shorter time-period
under consideration) growth still exists, though it is a much smaller amount. The
difference there shifts from 1.4 points to 1.8 points.
All of this is consistent with a “partisan sorting” thesis discussed
elsewhere (Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2006 and Levendusky 2009). The
phenomenon is also referred to as “partisan polarization” (Bishop 2009 and
Abramowitz 2010). I prefer the term “sorting” on the grounds that describing it as
polarization could lead one to think that the underlying distribution of opinion has
spread out a great deal. As a check on this claim, each table includes a measure of
the standard deviation of the overall distribution for each year.
This measure, in the case of both health insurance and guaranteed jobs and
income, is actually smaller than it was in the 1970s. On the question of
government services and spending, the distribution has spread out since 1984: by
one-tenth of a point on the scale. Whatever term one uses for “sorting” or
“partisan polarization”, the overall distribution has not grown much larger. The
remaining question is whether the groups represented by the categories have
moved so far apart as to make it impossible for them to see eye to eye on policy.
Do they usually think alike by consistently taking similar positions?
This question taps deeper issues about the nature of deliberation and
compromise (Gutman and Thompson 2012). However, one way of approaching it
Pope: Voting vs. Thinking
is just to ask exactly how consistent are these partisans? We know that only the
small group of pure independents in the middle of the spectrum are switching
their votes between parties. We further know that the leaners tend to vote heavily
for their party, though that can vary by election. For instance in 2008 (relying on
the ANES), of those who classified themselves as “leaning” Democrats, 93
percent voted for Barack Obama. The equivalent calculation for Republicans was
smaller, but still quite high, at 75 percent. These numbers can be affected by
election-specific conditions like those that favored Obama in 2008.
So, as to voting, the consistency is unquestionably high, but what about
the thinking? Do voters consistently think alike as well? This raises a thicket of
definitional issues relating to standards of consistency. How much is necessary to
define an individual or a group as ‘consistent’? That is beyond the scope of a
single short comment on the issue. However, we can look at the scales to see how
often respondents are consistent across the scales, and the best way to do this is
not by looking at agreement but at disagreement.
A sports analogy may be useful here. When one wants to learn how good a
team is, the best way to do so is not to simply look at their overall record. A better
way is to look at the limits of their record. If a team is quite good, we ask “which
teams beat them?” This gives a sense of the limits of that team’s strengths. (We
would do the reverse for a really bad team: did they beat anybody?) This is
similar to what exams measure for students: which questions did a student miss
on the exam? That tells a teacher what he or she has taught poorly or where there
is a gap in student knowledge. The corollary for voters is probing the limits of
their agreement, or finding where they “disagree” with their party.
To operationalize disagreement on these scales, I will define it as placing
oneself on the opposite side of the consensus view of the party. (Merely placing
oneself in the center of the scale or offering a “don’t know” response will not
count as disagreement). Overwhelmingly, respondents place the Democratic Party
on one side of each of those scales and the Republican Party on the other. Voters
seem to know where to place the parties: they know that Democrats are on the left
and Republicans are on the right. Given that fact, how likely are voters in each
category to express an opinion in disagreement with the parties on at least one of
the scales? The percentage of voters, by partisan identification, who are in
opposition to their party on at least one of those scales is calculated and displayed
in Table 4.
7
Submission to The Forum
8
Table 4. Democratic and Republican Party Disagreement
Republican
Disagreement
1984
1988
1992
1996
2000
2004
2008
SD
WD
LD
I
LR
WR
SR
73
83
83
80
82
88
85
65
66
77
70
81
77
77
77
78
80
70
74
80
83
63
66
72
59
76
79
72
45
50
52
44
48
52
57
48
50
52
38
47
52
46
41
37
41
15
29
37
31
Democratic
Disagreement
1984
1988
1992
1996
2000
2004
2008
SD
WD
LD
I
LR
WR
SR
52
42
41
45
48
32
33
58
57
47
60
65
49
49
60
56
49
60
58
44
44
55
57
53
64
60
54
53
75
77
75
80
82
70
70
77
79
76
77
82
70
78
87
86
84
95
93
86
92
Cell entries indicate the percentage within each category (Strong Democrat to Strong Republican)
who placed themselves on the opposite side from which most voters placed the political party, for
at least one scale. Placement in the middle of the scale was not counted as “disagreement.” In each
panel the columns for the party members are bolded for emphasis.
The typical strong Republican placed himself or herself in opposition to
his or her chosen party on at least one of the scales about a third of the time
looking across all years. 5 The number goes up for the weak Republicans and the
leaning Republicans, to just under half of the time. For Strong Democrats, about
forty percent of the time we find them disagreeing with their party on one of those
scales. Among the weak and leaning Democrats, the statistic is often above half.
The pattern of sorting does reveal itself here as well. There appears to be
something of a trend toward agreement, though it is strongest among the strong
Republicans and Democrats. Among weak and leaning Republicans, the hint of a
trend is actually in the opposite direction: slightly greater disagreement in recent
years.
5
The percentage obviously does vary, for instance 1996 appears to be a rather consistent year for
that group.
Pope: Voting vs. Thinking
9
Bear in mind that this table, displaying the percent who express a policy
opinion at odds with their party, considers only a few measures. 6 By looking at
the place where The Myth of the Independent Voter found the greatest
disagreement across parties (economic issues), we have minimized the chances of
finding disagreement. Adding social-issue measures to the scale created here (or
even expanding the scope of economic measures) would not make the percentages
go down—they would only cause the percentages to rise. Clearly, citizens appear
quite comfortable expressing policy opinions that do not fit their party norms.
Furthermore, it should be noted that the real division (when we look at
these measures) is not between independents and partisans. It is between Strong
Partisans and everybody else. On both sides of the aisle, the leaners and the weak
partisans are often closer to the pure independents (on average) than they are to
the partisans. This is especially true among Democrats. The Myth of the
Independent Voter taught us that we should not think of independents as a unified
block of voters. They are too diverse for that. Similarly we should not think of the
parties (including the leaners, as we probably should for many conceptualizations)
as unified blocks. They may, on average, be different from the opposite party, but
they are rife with internal policy disagreement as well.
One objection to this entire line of reasoning might be that these questions
are insufficiently “partisan.” Some Democrats—even elite Democrats—might, in
good faith, prefer that government spending and services go down a bit, or they
might be uncomfortable with the specific language about jobs and income. (A
similar story could be told about Republicans). Certainly that is possible, but it
begs the question of unity. If one really can be consistent with the Democratic or
Republican Party and place oneself at any point on that scale, then there really is
not any standard of policy coherence to discuss in the first place.
Summary and Discussion
The preceding is obviously far from exhaustive, but I hope it reminds readers of a
few points. First, though there is some evidence that citizens have become better
sorted into political parties, there is little evidence that partisanship is as good an
indicator of policy opinion. Citizens often and easily take stands at odds with their
political party. As late as 2008, about a third of Strong Democrats (Republicans)
placed themselves in the conservative (liberal) portion on the government health
insurance, government services and spending, and the guaranteed jobs and income
scales. The pattern for weak partisans and leaners is even more striking. Certainly,
6
In an earlier version I looked at adding abortion. There was relatively less disagreement with the
party among Democrats, although among Republicans disagreement with the party was much
higher and would only make these percentages larger.
Submission to The Forum
10
partisanship and ideology have become more correlated, but that is far from
saying that a voter’s policy views can be clearly predicted by partisanship.
Second, citizens are clearly quite capable of being policy moderates—at
least in the sense of holding a diverse set of views about the world—and
simultaneously voting in a very partisan way. This makes interpreting the public
as “supportive” of broad political agendas questionable. The key lesson from The
Myth of the Independent Voter was not that the citizens are dividing into two
ideological camps. It was that persons who labeled themselves as “independents”
were very likely to be voting with a political party on a consistent basis.
There is no strong reason to believe that most citizen attitudes are
similarly unified like those of the party elites. There is just too much diversity of
opinion out there in the public (see also Levendusky and Pope 2011). Strong
partisans think the most like elites, but even there, better than a third of the
category expresses incongruent views on one of the three items. Far from being an
indictment of their irrationality or inattention to politics, this may well be due to
the fact that the political system does not invite principled consistency.
Byron Shafer’s invitation to write something for this issue began with the
prompt “The Changing American Electorate—Fact or Fiction?” That prompt
suggests that we might examine the polity by focusing on the views of the citizens
and then measure the types and amount of change in that arena. Without any
disagreement with that particular goal, let me suggest that we spend more time
thinking about the way that partisan elites have changed.
In a provocative blog post from February of 2012, Ezra Klein reminded
readers that the descriptions “left” and “right” often are taken to mean
“descriptions of where the two parties stand at any given moment rather than
descriptions of the philosophies, ideologies, or ideas that animate, or should
animate, political debates (Klein, 2012).” Because political leaders are hardly
monuments to intellectual consistency, they will often, in the pursuit of victory,
take the position(s) necessary to get elected. Klein’s entire piece is worth
rereading, but a sampling of his points is instructive.
Between the late 1990s and about 2007, supporting an individual mandate
in health insurance was much more likely to be a position of the right rather than
the left. 7 By 2010, this was a position held vigorously by the left and opposed by
the right. During the George W. Bush administration, the left often worried about
the expansion and abuse of executive authority, but since the election of President
Barack Obama, such worries have dimmed significantly. 8 Another example Klein
7
Remember that Candidate Barack Obama campaigned against the individual mandate during the
2012 primary fight against Hillary Clinton.
8
Republicans on the other hand now seem much more interested in the question of executive
power. According to Pew’s American Values Survey the percentage of Republicans that are
concerned the government is collecting too much information about people rose from 39 percent
Pope: Voting vs. Thinking
gives is the filibuster. As it has grown as a problem in the Senate, both sides have
routinely switched positions on the question. This is not to claim that the parties
are truly centrist or even interchangeable. They are just inconsistent, always
evolving given the times.
As I was drafting this short comment, I was also watching the Republican,
and then the Democratic, National Party Conventions. It was impossible to miss
Paul Ryan waxing eloquently about “saving” Medicare by maintaining spending
levels and avoiding cuts to the program proposed by President Obama. The
Republican delegates cheered. They cheered saving Medicare by increasing
government funding over what had been proposed by President Obama. (!)
Though it was not as consequential on policy, I could not help but also notice
Democrats cheering as former President Bill Clinton approvingly quoted another
former president who liked to say “There you go again.” Apparently, Ronald
Reagan has become much more popular among Democrats than we might have
expected given his career. 9
Of course there are clear reasons why the parties have taken each of these
stands. All is explainable. Democrats probably do have significant disagreements
with Ronald Reagan that might, in a different context, be more obvious. Those
disagreements just do not matter as much as they once did. However, if the
spectacle of elite Republicans cheering the restoration of funding to Medicare
does not convince us that it is a pipe dream to look for true policy consistency
among partisans, then I do not know what facts could possibly persuade us.
The key change in each of the positions cited by Klein (and noticed by
many others) was not new information about the consequences of policy. It was
the partisan context. Parties saw an advantage in taking a slightly altered position.
And this list only considers recent policy changes, hardly touching other issues
that have seen major party changes on matters like race, trade, and the military.
Party elites, existing within the constitutional restrictions and living under
the mandate to win, simply have to do what is necessary to win elections and put
their views into power. Partisan inconsistency is, literally, as old as the Republic.
Thomas Jefferson and his Republican Party came into power arguing that the
government had only very limited powers and should stay out of the business of
in 2007 to 72 percent in 2012. Among Democrats the number fell only slightly (Stable URL:
http://www.people-press.org/values-questions/q40ee/government-is-collecting-too-muchinformation-about-people-like-me/#party). Democrats have similar shifts, depending upon the
question. Between January of 2007 and August of 2011 the percentage of Democrats who felt that
the government was doing very or fairly well in reducing the threat of terrorism rose from 36
percent to 85 percent (Stable URL: http://www.people-press.org/2011/09/01/united-inremembrance-divided-over-policies/1/).
9
It is also worth noting that this was a politician speaking out against de-regulation, a former
president who had supported the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a policy widely associated with the
financial crisis (Kuttner 2007).
11
Submission to The Forum
12
the people as much as possible. He proceeded to govern by doubling the size of
the country (via the Louisiana Purchase) and then instituting an embargo on all
trade with Great Britain and France. Limited government may have been a good
principle, but when confronted with a particular reality and a particular partisan
context, it seemed less valuable than other goals. 10
Public opinion data from the early 19th century is difficult to come by but
would, no doubt, show a bit of inconsistency as well. Citizens may have never
had the kind of clear ideological views that exist among the elites. Yet the truth is
that elites rarely have quite the consistency that we imagine in the heat of the
campaign or when we focus on the present.
Government and party leaders should not be faulted for being pragmatic
and willing to update their positions based on changing circumstance, even if they
do it more for winning elections than for the public good. A willingness to rethink
one’s own positions in light of new evidence is a hallmark of intelligence.
Clinging, bitterly or otherwise, to a position purely for consistency is no virtue.
The fact that leaders update their positions and frame questions in novel
and interesting ways means that we should be placing the blame for polarization
squarely where it belongs: on the leaders of the parties. Tom Mann and Norm
Ornstein note that things “are even worse than they look (Mann and Ornstein
2012)” in Washington. Leaders—and, as they emphasize in their book, this is
even more true among Republicans than it is among Democrats—are choosing
policies far outside of the mainstream (see also Bafumi and Herron 2010).
Sometimes leaders are choosing policies solely to score political points
with relatively little policy commitment. 11 The party leaders should take
responsibility for that kind of unprincipled partisanship. Partisan sorting may have
played some role in unifying the political parties or creating an environment
where party leaders can construct extreme coalitions, but that hardly absolves the
leaders of responsibility. Morris Fiorina and Samuel Abrams have described this
pattern as a “disconnect” between voters and their leaders (Fiorina and Abrams
2009).
In a system where leaders engage in such behavior, is it any wonder that
citizen attitudes lack policy coherence? Citizens are asked by public opinion
researchers to offer their opinions on many questions, and they are given multiple
considerations and cues by the political system. In that environment, we should
not expect that they will respond consistently or clearly. We should expect that
signals will be muddy, complicated, and contingent. Citizens have many goals,
10
It should also be noted that the Federalists, while in power, had argued vigorously for a broad
interpretation of government powers. When confronted with members of the opposition party
using those powers they found new reasons to oppose such actions.
11
The opening anecdote in Mann and Ornstein about how Republicans simply cannot permit
President Obama even a small budget victory is illustrative.
Pope: Voting vs. Thinking
13
and they probably share them across the aisle: stronger economic growth, a
sufficient national defense, and economic opportunity, among others.
As the parties jockey to deliver policies that both deliver those goals and
help the party win, citizens can be excused for lacking the policy wisdom to
answer with deeply principled consistency. So let us be cautious in interpreting
even the limited changes in citizen opinion as very meaningful. In the American
political system, there is enough policy change at the elite level to keep us from
expecting too much clarity among citizens. Voters may well be partisan, even
very partisan, but the policy content of that partisanship is decidedly limited:
citizens may consistently vote alike, but they do not consistently think alike.
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Submission to The Forum
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Pope: Voting vs. Thinking
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