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The Perils of Polarization
When Ideology Trumps Analysis
PHOTO: DIANE BALDWIN |
When President Obama appealed for bipartisanship during his State of the Union address in January, many observers doubted his ability to break the partisan gridlock. I sympathize with both the appeal and the doubts.
I’ve been involved in public policy analysis for 90 percent of my professional life. Over that time — the past 35 years — Washington, D.C., has become a less analytical and more ideological place.
There’s a role for ideology in public policy. But decisionmakers first need to get the facts straight before overlaying them with political outlooks and worldviews. Unfortunately, we have seen less and less of that in recent decades. Among our elected representatives, the founding fathers’ ideal that public problems should be solved by deliberation seems a distant prospect.
Political scientists Keith Poole, of the University of California at San Diego, and Howard Rosenthal, of New York University, have found that in critical policy areas — the role of the government in the economy, abortion, guns, immigration, crime, and national security — congressional Republicans and Democrats have now coalesced into completely separate conservative and liberal ideological camps. Voting on these diverse issues is now aligned. In other words, it is possible to predict fairly confidently a representative’s vote on nuclear arms or immigration, for example, if one knows his or her voting record on the government’s role in health care.
In the early 1970s, the two parties substantially overlapped on the ideological scale. Now they are entirely detached. The primary victims of this process, among elected officials, have been moderates, who have largely disappeared from both sides of the aisle.
The principal reason behind this polarization has been a geographic sorting of voters into congressional districts, states, and counties that are increasingly conservative or liberal. Oddly, the American electorate as a whole is not all that polarized — there is a substantial middle ground. But it is becoming harder to find places on the map that are in the political center.
Why has this happened? In The Big Sort, Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing argue that generational change and internal migration are producing communities that are increasingly homogeneous in terms of education, race, income, and way of life. In choosing new communities, people seek out places with people like themselves.
The implications of polarization are profound. They also hit home for us as analysts. If certain policies are deemed off limits for ideological reasons, then institutions like RAND are in deep water. We need the intellectual and analytical freedom to study all options, to determine if “off-limits” policies are effective or if “within-limits” policies are not, and to make policy recommendations based on those findings. America’s leaders and the American public deserve no less. 
Related Reading
A House Divided: Polarization and Its Effect on RAND, James A. Thomson, RAND/OP-291-RC, 2010, 34 pp., ISBN 978-0-8330-4960-5.
The American electorate as a whole is not all that polarized — there is a substantial middle ground. But it is becoming harder to find places on the map that are in the political center.
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