Making Polarization Work for You: A Politician's Survival Guide

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01/26/2023 Added

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Geoff Lorenz of the Dept. of Political Science gave the CAS Inquire lecture on Jan. 24.

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[00:00:01.240]Good evening. I'm Dr.
[00:00:02.920]Taylor Livingston,
[00:00:04.120]and I'm the director of the College of Arts and Sciences Inquire Program.
[00:00:08.480]Thank you all for coming tonight.
[00:00:10.000]In-person and via zoom to the fourth lecture in the CAS Inquire series
[00:00:14.880]Searching for Common Ground in a Polarized World.
[00:00:18.640]The Inquire program is structured around these lectures and allows students,
[00:00:23.760]faculty, staff and the wider public the opportunity to investigate
[00:00:29.680]how we as individuals and society understand social phenomena.
[00:00:35.240]Additionally, it creates an opportunity to learn about the fascinating research
[00:00:40.560]that faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences are conducting
[00:00:44.600]and enables students to see the various disciplinary perspectives on a theme
[00:00:51.400]as well as to understand the necessary,
[00:00:54.520]the necessity of multi trans and interdisciplinary insights,
[00:00:58.960]to truly understand human thoughts, behaviors and actions.
[00:01:03.480]Tonight's lecture Making Polarization
[00:01:05.920]Work for You A Politician Survival Guide by Dr.
[00:01:09.040]Geoff Lorenz, Assistant Professor of Political Science.
[00:01:13.360]His talk explores three
[00:01:14.840]strategies elected officials use to gain power and influence.
[00:01:19.360]His work has been published by the American Political Science Review
[00:01:23.000]and the Journal of Politics.
[00:01:24.520]Interest Groups in advocacy.
[00:01:26.920]In addition to being faculty in political science, Dr.
[00:01:30.240]Lorenz is a faculty affiliate for a nonpartisan Center for Effective
[00:01:34.480]Lawmaking, a partnership between the University of Virginia
[00:01:38.440]and Vanderbilt University, which seeks to generate and use knowledge
[00:01:42.640]on Congress's effectiveness or not to engender
[00:01:46.960]a Congress capable of addressing American public policy challenges.
[00:01:51.600]After his lecture, Dr.
[00:01:52.760]Lorenz will take questions from the audience.
[00:01:55.040]If you have a question and you're in person,
[00:01:56.920]simply raise your hand and Ethan will come with you to make.
[00:02:00.400]If your via zoom into your question
[00:02:02.480]in the Q&A and I'll ask it on your behalf, please welcome.
[00:02:06.640]Please join me in welcoming Dr. Lorenz.
[00:02:15.800]All right. Am I coming through okay on the mic.
[00:02:22.520]Okay. So thank you all for coming tonight.
[00:02:27.400]And so this is making polarization work for you, a politician's survival guide.
[00:02:32.760]Before I get started, I want to thank the cast and choir program for hosting me.
[00:02:36.120]I thank Dean Mark Button for spearheading and promoting it and Dr.
[00:02:39.880]Taylor Livingston for organizing this.
[00:02:41.760]But you guys probably don't
[00:02:43.880]necessarily appreciate or have the opportunity to appreciate
[00:02:46.520]just how much work that something like this takes to pull off
[00:02:50.640]and how completely unglamorous that work is.
[00:02:52.520]So I think Taylor for her for doing that, so that we can have fun and talk
[00:02:56.480]about cool data in service of something that might be slightly depressing.
[00:03:00.520]So this is Congress.
[00:03:01.680]It looks almost peaceful from this distance. Right.
[00:03:05.960]But this is what we're going to be talking about mostly today. And
[00:03:10.400]the common impression of Congress, I think, was really well
[00:03:14.440]encapsulated by my colleague Beth Theiss Morse,
[00:03:17.840]when she was giving her own CAS Inquire talk a few months ago
[00:03:22.040]where she said and I actually went back to the transcript to make sure
[00:03:24.920]I got this quote exactly right.
[00:03:28.840]There is no doubt
[00:03:30.600]Congress is a mess.
[00:03:33.720]And being the consummate professional that I am, of course, my initial reaction
[00:03:37.720]was something along these lines.
[00:03:44.520]Because Congress,
[00:03:47.280]like so many of our political institutions, has a lot going on.
[00:03:52.440]And there's a kind of a a layer of chaos and
[00:03:57.640]and seeming madness
[00:03:59.360]and people doing lots of things that seem difficult to explain on top of a
[00:04:03.840]an institution in which lots of stuff is getting done at the same time.
[00:04:07.200]So the purpose of this talk is to try to clarify some of these things.
[00:04:11.360]And a good place to start, given that especially the theme of this lecture
[00:04:16.040]series is the simple question What is polarization?
[00:04:20.360]And is Congress that?
[00:04:24.240]So political scientists who study Congress
[00:04:26.520]think about polarization in a few different ways.
[00:04:29.080]Probably the most common measure of polarization
[00:04:32.400]comes from something called D.W.
[00:04:33.760]Nominate, which generates what's called an ideal point estimate.
[00:04:36.600]You can think of this as a numerical estimate of the sort of left to right
[00:04:41.480]ideology of people based on their roll call records .
[00:04:45.120]It's not the only way of measuring ideology,
[00:04:46.920]and there's sort of a debate in the field
[00:04:48.320]about the strengths and weaknesses of this measure,
[00:04:50.320]but it's probably the most commonly used one.
[00:04:52.760]And this graph shows the distribution of D.W.
[00:04:56.240]nominated scores for members of the two major political parties
[00:04:59.640]in every Congress going back to 1963. Right.
[00:05:02.760]And I'll let you guess indeed.
[00:05:05.040]The blue density plot is Democrats in the red.
[00:05:08.000]That's a good plot as Republicans.
[00:05:09.720]And so the first the first few things that probably jump out to you
[00:05:13.640]about this visualization of the evolution
[00:05:17.000]of congressional ideology is that
[00:05:20.520]Congress is becoming more polarized between the parties
[00:05:23.320]if we think of polarization as a disagreement. Right.
[00:05:26.720]We can measure it as the distance between the median member
[00:05:30.560]of each party in Congress.
[00:05:33.080]And so by that measure, you can literally see it in the growth
[00:05:37.400]rate of the white space here between the two parties.
[00:05:40.480]The parties have moved apart in terms of their roll call records by this metric.
[00:05:44.600]And the movement comes from two sources.
[00:05:47.360]One is that the average Republican has become more conservative over time
[00:05:51.240]by this measure. Right.
[00:05:52.440]So you can see the
[00:05:54.240]the red density plot representing the Republicans moving off to the right.
[00:05:58.520]But kind of underappreciated about this is that while the median Democrat
[00:06:03.480]has stayed at pretty much the same location over this time period,
[00:06:06.800]the distribution of Democrats has narrowed.
[00:06:10.000]This results primarily from the movement
[00:06:13.800]of old, more older, more conservative Democrats, particularly from the South,
[00:06:18.280]leaving the Democratic Party and becoming Republicans in the eighties and nineties.
[00:06:24.640]So this kind of disagreement, as you might imagine, leads to gridlock.
[00:06:28.000]This is a measure of gridlock from the political scientist, Sarah Binder.
[00:06:31.280]It uses the New York Times editorial page as a kind of a denominator.
[00:06:36.320]If we're saying gridlock is happening, then that suggests that there's
[00:06:39.400]a bunch of issues out there that Congress is not addressing .
[00:06:43.240]So so this measure of gridlock says what are the percentage?
[00:06:48.040]What is the percentage in each year of the issues
[00:06:50.680]that are mentioned
[00:06:51.200]in The New York Times editorial page that Congress is not doing anything about?
[00:06:55.360]And by this measure and several others, gridlock is growing
[00:06:58.640]and Congress is having a harder time addressing major public problems.
[00:07:03.960]A more recently explored aspect of congressional polarization.
[00:07:09.800]And the one that is ultimately driving
[00:07:11.600]a lot of the forces that I study is not so much disagreement and gridlock.
[00:07:18.200]But competition between the two major parties otherwise kept a slide.
[00:07:22.400]I'll come back to it in a second.
[00:07:24.440]So this measures the control of the Senate in the top bar of the House
[00:07:29.680]and the bottom bar, and between them a little bar
[00:07:31.400]representing the partizan control of the presidency for each two year
[00:07:34.800]congress going back a quite a long ways to 1855.
[00:07:37.960]And there's a few things
[00:07:39.160]that I want to point out that have changed about how Congress works.
[00:07:43.760]So the first thing is that unified government
[00:07:45.800]where the House and the Senate and the White House were all controlled
[00:07:48.640]by the same party, was much more common in the past than it is today,
[00:07:52.640]meaning that much more frequently today .
[00:07:55.480]You're in a situation where each party controls at least one
[00:07:59.480]chamber of Congress or the White House.
[00:08:01.760]But the next thing that you may notice, if you take a closer look,
[00:08:06.280]is that there was a period from 1931.
[00:08:11.520]To 1995 where Democrats controlled the House for the entire time.
[00:08:16.040]That's like 60 years.
[00:08:17.640]It's almost unheard of today like that or it's difficult to conceive of that kind
[00:08:22.360]of unbroken or nearly unbroken length of control of one of these institutions.
[00:08:27.680]That has some impacts, too, particularly because when it changed,
[00:08:31.320]we entered this period that the political scientist
[00:08:33.560]Francis Lee, refers to as insecure majorities, where now
[00:08:37.080]control of the White House, the the Senate and the House changes much more rapidly.
[00:08:42.280]And it's much rarer for one party
[00:08:43.880]to control all three of those things at the same time.
[00:08:47.160]The final thing about the changing
[00:08:51.440]competitiveness of congressional elections is that you'll notice.
[00:08:54.960]So the final component of this, right, is the size of the majority
[00:08:59.880]that the majority parties tend to have has changed over time.
[00:09:03.040]In particular, it's become a lot smaller.
[00:09:06.600]Right. So we think of saying
[00:09:08.840]like the Democrats control the House or now the Republicans control the House,
[00:09:12.880]but there's like control and then there's control.
[00:09:16.240]And it's been a long time since since the party has had
[00:09:19.320]like really solid control of either chamber, let alone both at the same time
[00:09:24.880]. So nonetheless, despite this increase in disagreement,
[00:09:30.080]gridlock and competitiveness, Congress still get stuff done.
[00:09:33.840]And in fact, it gets stuff done as a result of bipartisan agreement.
[00:09:38.240]So this comes from Francis Lee and Jim Curry, who's another political scientist
[00:09:42.840]they look at for each year where they can identify
[00:09:46.000]the major agenda items of the majority party.
[00:09:49.120]What are the conditions under which those agenda items when they pass?
[00:09:54.000]What are the conditions under which they pass with respect
[00:09:56.040]to the support of the minority party?
[00:09:58.040]All right. So I want to clarify, these are not all bills
[00:10:00.440]that are specifically the big ticket majority party agenda items.
[00:10:03.560]These are the things that they're planning on running on.
[00:10:05.640]They want to they're putting these forward because they want to use them to whip.
[00:10:09.760]And yet, when these bills pass almost all the time,
[00:10:14.640]they pass with a majority of minority party votes in favor,
[00:10:20.200]including the explicit support of minority party leaders.
[00:10:24.280]There's one exception on the graph.
[00:10:26.240]If you can't read the number, it's the 111th Congress, which was 2009 to 2010,
[00:10:30.840]in which case there were none of these majority party
[00:10:33.600]agenda items that passed with support from the minority party
[00:10:37.000]for folks like this is I don't know if if it's like too far away
[00:10:40.800]that we can call it history now, but does anyone know what Congress this was?
[00:10:48.240]Yes. There is an audience participation component to.
[00:10:53.080]Do we know? Okay.
[00:10:58.280]So this was Obama's first term, which means the bills we're talking about,
[00:11:01.200]there are mostly the Affordable Care Act was the big one.
[00:11:04.640]There are other ones like the creation of the Consumer Financial
[00:11:06.640]Protection Bureau and some of the post recession support bills.
[00:11:11.560]But they passed without in most cases, without a single Republican vote.
[00:11:16.120]And rather than assigning blame or criticizing
[00:11:20.040]either of the parties for those choices,
[00:11:22.120]one thing we can say is like, is this an exception to the rule
[00:11:25.000]or is this the exception that proves the rule?
[00:11:27.800]And I think it's very much the latter,
[00:11:29.680]because what happened after they passed their majority party
[00:11:32.480]agenda items this way is that Democrats lost more seats in the House.
[00:11:35.240]That had been done, I think, in modern history.
[00:11:37.520]So when they went their own way, they got punished for it by the voters.
[00:11:42.400]And then, incidentally, that was the election
[00:11:45.440]that immediately preceded a redistricting cycle.
[00:11:49.880]So we've been since, as a result of this Congress, in a period that ended just now
[00:11:55.520]where Republicans who had surged to control a lot
[00:11:59.920]of state legislatures around the country got to rewrite decisions.
[00:12:04.080]Right. In a way that was, like, shaded in their favor.
[00:12:08.960]So as a result of like sort of trying to be the exceptions,
[00:12:13.160]we ended, we had a decade of stronger Republican control.
[00:12:17.400]So Democrats sort of experimented and found out what happens when you do that.
[00:12:25.960]So this increase this despite the necessity
[00:12:30.400]of bipartisan cooperation to pass even big bills like this,
[00:12:35.480]the increasing tendency toward disagreement, gridlock and competition
[00:12:39.560]produces an interesting set of incentives that individual members have to balance.
[00:12:43.840]So first, the part we can think
[00:12:46.720]that folks have talked about in terms of the party brand.
[00:12:50.080]So if we have business majors,
[00:12:53.560]how do you make sure that your brand is more successful than other brands is?
[00:12:57.920]You make it seem different.
[00:12:59.200]You engage in party brand differentiation in the context of Congress.
[00:13:02.880]What that means is that you engage in lots of messaging activities,
[00:13:06.160]whether that's by offering amendments that, you know will fail, but
[00:13:09.280]that make the other party look bad when they vote against them. Right.
[00:13:12.480]It can mean spending a lot more on communications staffers
[00:13:16.040]than legislative staff or something,
[00:13:17.360]which has become much more common in recent years,
[00:13:20.200]all geared toward this practice of making my party seem better than your party
[00:13:25.240]so that I can then gain control over the levers of government.
[00:13:30.880]On the other hand, individual legislators still have goals.
[00:13:34.160]They want to be reelected first and foremost, but they also have policy goals.
[00:13:39.480]They want to get stuff done, and they want to attain additional
[00:13:43.040]types of power, particularly when you are trying to move policy.
[00:13:48.880]Because most major policy passes with the support of the other party.
[00:13:52.960]Having a reputation
[00:13:53.880]for party brand differentiation kind of creates a tension there, right?
[00:13:57.680]How can you work with a party that you've said is evil?
[00:14:01.200]In order to pass something.
[00:14:03.840]So most of the rest of the song is going to be about ways
[00:14:07.200]in which individual members of Congress balance these competing countries.
[00:14:11.520]They need to differentiate their party
[00:14:13.840]from the other in a way that benefits their party
[00:14:16.000]so that they can gain power against the desire to get stuff done.
[00:14:23.280]And because I just couldn't help myself.
[00:14:29.120]Again, each of the broad categories of strategy is a fun
[00:14:31.800]literarily named animal mascot.
[00:14:36.840]So first, our loquacious leapfrogs.
[00:14:44.640]This is a very serious academic talk.
[00:14:46.080]I don't know what the last three or four.
[00:14:48.400]Okay. So why engage in an exercise other than party leaders?
[00:14:52.280]These are like until recently, Nancy Pelosi.
[00:14:55.160]But now on the Democratic side, Hakeem Jeffries,
[00:14:57.360]Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy or your own representative,
[00:15:00.800]you do know who your own member of Congress is, right?
[00:15:06.120]This is a test of which current members of Congress
[00:15:09.400]can you name and whose picture you would recognize.
[00:15:13.400]Okay. So I'm like a congressional scholar.
[00:15:15.640]I can name, I don't know, maybe 20 out of order. 35.
[00:15:19.520]That's not true. I can probably. But it would be a process.
[00:15:22.200]So don't feel bad if you can't name that many.
[00:15:24.600]But I bet among the ones that you do name a lot of them.
[00:15:28.840]Are these people?
[00:15:31.160]Am I wrong? I'm not one.
[00:15:34.520]Uh huh. So. So these are members of the squad and the entire squad, as it were.
[00:15:41.440]They're all have been.
[00:15:43.280]With the exception of Matt Gaetz, who's
[00:15:44.480]been around in Congress a little bit longer.
[00:15:46.680]They've all been elected to serve for the first time in the last two Congresses.
[00:15:51.840]And the fact that we all know who they are is a bit unusual.
[00:15:58.640]Four such junior members.
[00:16:00.120]In earlier eras, there was kind of this apprenticeship model.
[00:16:02.880]New members of Congress were expected to be seen but not heard that
[00:16:07.720]you would build influence slowly over time.
[00:16:11.680]Through working with members of your party or through your work
[00:16:14.400]on congressional committees
[00:16:16.480]and through the kind of insider relationships that you built
[00:16:19.560]with lobbyists who worked on the issues that were like your committees dealt with.
[00:16:23.680]Most rewards would happen through seniority,
[00:16:26.960]meaning the longer you stuck around, the more likely it is that you got like a
[00:16:29.840]committee chairmanship or you became a party leader or something,
[00:16:32.440]that you had a personal brand and your personal brand matter.
[00:16:36.840]But it mattered pretty much just within your district,
[00:16:39.480]and no one outside of your district would have really heard of you.
[00:16:43.040]And this arrangement could be kind of a bummer if you're a younger member.
[00:16:48.040]So think again about our our conflict between the
[00:16:52.840]the newer Democrats in Britain like the sixties, seventies and eighties
[00:16:57.160]against the old guard Democrats who were more what political scientists
[00:17:00.640]kind of euphemistically refer to as racially conservative. Right.
[00:17:06.520]The sort of the old guard Democrats held all of the committee chairs.
[00:17:12.160]When a new wave of
[00:17:13.600]pro-civil rights Democrats are elected from places mostly in the north
[00:17:18.280]but not exclusively took power and on a platform
[00:17:22.360]that included work on civil rights.
[00:17:26.840]So they instituted a bunch of reforms, many of which are still in place
[00:17:30.280]today, actually, that weaken the power of committee chairs to deal with it.
[00:17:34.160]But the loquacious leapfrogs of today
[00:17:36.400]don't have to adopt such a like inside procedure strategy.
[00:17:40.000]They can just go on Twitter.
[00:17:43.240]So so these loquacious leapfrogs, leveraged
[00:17:45.840]modern communications technology, so that like that
[00:17:49.880]fact in and of itself kind of helps determine who these people are.
[00:17:53.920]And so as you no doubt surmise, they tend to be members who are younger.
[00:17:59.320]So this is an analysis from Quorum Analytics, which is a consulting firm
[00:18:02.600]that kind of collects data about how Congress works,
[00:18:05.360]various aspects of congressional behavior.
[00:18:07.160]And what they've shown is that
[00:18:08.840]the younger generations of lawmakers this data, by the way, is from 2018.
[00:18:13.000]We have our first Gen Z member of Congress now.
[00:18:16.840]But you can see pretty clearly that millennials
[00:18:21.040]are more likely to take to Twitter and have a sort of a. A
[00:18:27.080]tendency to go on more hipper platforms, whereas the decidedly unhip
[00:18:32.800]traditional press release is the domain of more advanced members of Congress.
[00:18:39.880]And it's not just things like this.
[00:18:42.040]So even newer platforms like the video game streaming service
[00:18:46.440]Twitch has been a place of congressional politics.
[00:18:50.280]And so this is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez playing among us
[00:18:53.840]with a bunch of famous twitch streamers.
[00:18:55.960]So it's like you can imagine this, by the way.
[00:18:57.600]It's like people in, like, cat hats.
[00:18:59.840]And like AOC and Ilhan Omar, that turn in the red
[00:19:05.120]playing this game of like social deception on a space ship
[00:19:08.040]where you're trying to determine who are the aliens.
[00:19:11.600]And so they tend to be really
[00:19:13.960]experimental and entrepreneurial and are doing stuff like this.
[00:19:17.000]So it's fun to think about.
[00:19:18.280]And unfortunately, political science hasn't had like the opportunity
[00:19:21.400]to really do a systematic analysis of like what are the outcomes
[00:19:25.000]associated with this?
[00:19:26.000]But I did some basic descriptive data that I wanted to show you.
[00:19:28.680]So this is like data Premiere if you're ready.
[00:19:32.520]So the first thing is they get to build this as imagined because by the fact
[00:19:37.160]that we all know them, we get to they are able to build a national profile.
[00:19:41.280]So here is the media coverage of members of Congress.
[00:19:44.440]I'm sorry that you can't see the title of this up there,
[00:19:47.840]but if you plug in in News Bank, which is you analyze
[00:19:51.920]news media sort of search engine,
[00:19:55.800]the word representative and Congress,
[00:19:57.560]you get like roughly 45,000 traditional print media mentions last year.
[00:20:01.680]This is all from 2022 and about 17,000
[00:20:05.160]in sources that are web only.
[00:20:08.480]So this is like a lot of local
[00:20:11.880]like radio station websites, but
[00:20:13.800]also things like Vox and The Federalist, stuff like that.
[00:20:18.080]And so you can see is that there is roughly
[00:20:19.520]45,000 mentions of the word representative in the context of Congress.
[00:20:23.400]Of those, a pretty decent chunk are these six members.
[00:20:28.240]And for some degree of comparison,
[00:20:30.720]if you imagine that every story is mentioning only one member of Congress,
[00:20:35.280]then you would expect that
[00:20:37.280]these 45,000 newspaper stories that each representative would get 81.
[00:20:42.040]And even the lowest mentioned among these is Rashida Tlaib has over 1300.
[00:20:47.040]And it only goes up from there.
[00:20:49.280]If you want to flip it around the other way,
[00:20:50.800]how many members of Congress would have to be mentioned on the average,
[00:20:55.080]the average newspaper article in order for Rashida Tlaib
[00:20:57.760]to be an average member of Congress, they would be like 15.
[00:21:00.800]So you have to have 15
[00:21:01.760]individual members of Congress mentioned by name in every news story
[00:21:04.880]in order to have Rashida Tlaib be the average member.
[00:21:09.000]So it's I think it's fair to say that
[00:21:11.280]these members have an outsized presence in media.
[00:21:16.320]They're getting lots of attention.
[00:21:17.560]What that allows them to do is build a national brand, which is useful
[00:21:20.840]for a lot of things, like, I guess getting people to play among us with you.
[00:21:25.000]But also it means that you are really, really effective at raising money.
[00:21:28.080]You have a much broader donor base than you would expect.
[00:21:31.040]The traditional member of Congress would get some money from the district
[00:21:33.880]and some money from like interest groups, political action committees.
[00:21:37.360]But these people, some of them take money from those two sources,
[00:21:40.560]especially like, you know, local donors.
[00:21:42.280]But a lot of them get small donations from all over the country.
[00:21:46.640]And so they get a ton of money.
[00:21:51.800]So this is the same six members and this is in millions.
[00:21:55.760]This is data from the two most recent election cycles.
[00:22:01.600]And it shows that where the average House member at this time
[00:22:05.120]brought in about $2.6 million of campaign contributions
[00:22:09.120]in the two cycles ago and about $3 million in the most recent cycle.
[00:22:15.080]These members get substantially orders of magnitude above that.
[00:22:18.680]There are among the House's
[00:22:19.800]most prolific fund raisers who's who are not party leaders.
[00:22:23.560]And I don't know how to emphasize enough how completely unusual and alien
[00:22:28.760]this would have been like 30 years ago.
[00:22:33.760]So clearly this is working for them.
[00:22:35.680]And because these members, they tend to have more policy preferences
[00:22:40.120]that have less support in the middle of the congressional distribution
[00:22:43.360]is a roundabout way of describing them as extreme.
[00:22:46.080]They're not going to get a whole lot of bills passed.
[00:22:48.720]And in fact, these six members, if you're wondering, well,
[00:22:51.280]maybe they're being rewarded for their policy work.
[00:22:54.520]The in the last Congress, three of them or three bills sponsored
[00:22:59.520]by one of these six members passed, all of them renamed the post office.
[00:23:05.160]So maybe they're learning the ropes.
[00:23:06.920]And to be fair, that hides a lot of stuff.
[00:23:08.840]Like there were a lot of them
[00:23:09.800]advanced spills a little bit through the legislative process
[00:23:12.360]to a position where they could then be amended on to something else.
[00:23:14.800]But it sort of shows
[00:23:15.560]that this like the game here is not to, like, maximally pass laws.
[00:23:19.360]It's to reshape what Congress is doing.
[00:23:23.600]The the second strategy is that.
[00:23:26.640]But at a higher level and a more insider baseball. Well.
[00:23:31.440]And it's our factional foxes.
[00:23:34.800]So we don't appreciate this.
[00:23:36.200]We think of the parties as these monolithic structures,
[00:23:38.520]particularly we think of the other party as like perfectly unified and bad.
[00:23:43.680]But every party, every majority is a coalition,
[00:23:46.680]a coalition of different actors
[00:23:48.160]who have different preferences and different priorities from each other.
[00:23:52.240]These could be organized groups like we think of big labor
[00:23:54.960]as being strongly aligned with the Democratic Party
[00:23:57.400]or are going to be sort of coherent demographic groups that have shared
[00:24:01.440]policy preferences like non-college educated white men
[00:24:05.480]are more likely these days to affiliate and vote for Republicans.
[00:24:11.160]So political scientists have tried to map out these networks.
[00:24:14.920]This comes from an article, unfortunately, I would love if they did
[00:24:17.800]an updated version of this, but I haven't seen it yet.
[00:24:19.960]This is Greg Koger.
[00:24:21.440]Seth Masket in Tanzania.
[00:24:22.560]Well traced these party networks, these extended party
[00:24:25.720]networks of organizations by by giving one of them money
[00:24:29.840]and then seeing which other organizations wrote back to them
[00:24:32.840]and they would use like a special name that they would only use for that one
[00:24:36.080]for that first donation to then see who asked them.
[00:24:38.280]And then they would and then they would go out from there.
[00:24:40.800]And that's how they were able to trace these networks. Right.
[00:24:43.200]So this includes traditional.
[00:24:44.960]So if we take the Democratic network on the right and includes traditional
[00:24:49.000]organizations like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,
[00:24:53.680]but also things that interest groups
[00:24:55.520]like the NAACP and the ACLU or
[00:25:00.200]publications like The New Republic, Mother Jones.
[00:25:03.080]And there was another one out here that I thought was fun, The New Yorker
[00:25:06.880]and various others.
[00:25:08.840]Similarly, on the Republican side, we have our traditional Republican
[00:25:13.840]Party organs like the National Republican Congressional Committee.
[00:25:17.000]We also have a series of sort of more conservative publications
[00:25:21.040]and interest groups.
[00:25:24.680]So when you think of parties as extended networks like this.
[00:25:30.480]You can imagine that the factions within each of the parties change over
[00:25:35.080]time, either because the number of voters they represent get bigger or smaller
[00:25:39.440]as more people get college degrees
[00:25:40.960]than the share of the population that is non-college educated goes down.
[00:25:45.400]Or they can become more or less aligned with the parties.
[00:25:49.240]And that's where the factional foxes are really prominent.
[00:25:52.440]So who are these people?
[00:25:55.160]These are folks who are trying to appeal to misaligned
[00:25:58.240]or underestimated factions and not me.
[00:26:01.560]If you know these people.
[00:26:06.440]I think of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as like the
[00:26:09.800]the archetype archetypal factional foxes.
[00:26:14.000]So Bernie Sanders identified a coherent bloc of voters
[00:26:17.520]with shared and distinct policy preferences and priorities, and made
[00:26:21.440]has made, even though he's
[00:26:22.560]been in Congress for decades, has become much more prominent recently
[00:26:26.600]because he appealed to this bloc of voters. Who is it?
[00:26:32.320]There's a pretty good you know.
[00:26:36.640]I'll give you a. Look at you.
[00:26:41.600]Yeah. Gen-Z specifically like people like younger voters
[00:26:45.800]who traditionally have lower turnout, which is despite my best efforts
[00:26:51.360]and and who have distinct and
[00:26:55.720]decidedly progressive policy preferences and issue priorities on average.
[00:27:00.080]Obviously, there are individuals who vary on that,
[00:27:03.080]and that hasn't quite worked out for him yet in terms
[00:27:05.920]of like winning the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
[00:27:09.040]But he's clearly moved the average Democrat in Congress to the left,
[00:27:12.800]particularly on economic issues.
[00:27:15.840]Donald Trump, on the other hand, has actually pulled this off.
[00:27:20.160]So if I want to like flashback to 2015
[00:27:24.000]where he was first starting his run for Congress, for Congress,
[00:27:27.600]for the presidency, we may remember that Donald Trump was not welcomed
[00:27:32.360]as the standard bearer of the Republican Party.
[00:27:35.680]The candidates, other candidates talked about how bad it was.
[00:27:39.320]Individual members
[00:27:40.440]of Republican members of Congress talk about what a threat he was to America.
[00:27:44.840]That's not quite a direct quote of Lindsey Graham, but it's pretty close.
[00:27:48.960]The news organizations that are sort of more on the right wing
[00:27:51.560]like Fox News did their best to stop him from gaining steam.
[00:27:55.160]And when it failed, they switched.
[00:27:57.600]So how does a candidate for whom the messaging organs of the party
[00:28:02.800]and the organizational wing of the party
[00:28:05.560]are nonstarters, managed to take over that party in about a year.
[00:28:09.960]As you identify a electorally organized, geographically distributed.
[00:28:15.880]A set of people who are willing to engage in political activism on your behalf.
[00:28:22.000]This one is little bit more obscure, but if you closely read
[00:28:24.320]the description of this talk, you could predict who it is. The police.
[00:28:31.000]So the Fraternal Order of Police is what people are talking about.
[00:28:34.800]When people refer to the police unions, they're the largest set of police
[00:28:39.160]unions in the country, and they represent most like active duty police officers.
[00:28:46.480]They are. They have lodges like a lot of
[00:28:49.800]sort of professional groups like that exist at the local level like that.
[00:28:53.360]These are places like we'll have a bar built in.
[00:28:55.440]Cops can go hang out with other cops.
[00:28:56.800]They learn about issues that are relevant to law enforcement,
[00:29:00.160]and that includes political issues and they can get involved.
[00:29:03.520]And so this is not really speculation.
[00:29:06.800]The national head of the
[00:29:08.320]Fraternal Order of Police went on to NPR and gave a long form interview about why,
[00:29:12.280]like the police officers of America, were relieved to have a candidate
[00:29:16.080]who was finally making a direct appeal to them in a way that that they hadn't
[00:29:20.720]really seen before and definitely weren't getting from Hillary Clinton. So. So
[00:29:26.760]police officers as a union are interesting because they're a union
[00:29:30.160]and they care about a lot of the same stuff
[00:29:31.560]that unions care about, that make unions align with the Democratic Party.
[00:29:34.400]But they're also the police, which means they care about law
[00:29:36.720]and order issues which aligns them more closely to the Republican Party
[00:29:39.760]under the current arrangement of those things.
[00:29:43.040]So so Donald Trump made a huge amount of effort
[00:29:46.280]to appeal to those types of to appeal to police officers
[00:29:49.960]as a potential organizational base and in political science.
[00:29:53.120]By this article by Michael Zarrab,
[00:29:56.440]he showed that when you control for other stuff where police union lawyers
[00:30:02.360]were more dense relative to the population are higher, frequent,
[00:30:05.400]more frequent relative to the population.
[00:30:08.080]Donald Trump improved
[00:30:09.920]over the previous Republican candidate, Mitt Romney by more.
[00:30:14.240]So here is a map of all of the counties
[00:30:17.040]in the US shaded by the relative density
[00:30:21.480]of Fraternal Order of Police lodges.
[00:30:25.400]And it overlaps. But.
[00:30:30.760]Pretty well. With the counties where Trump improved the most over Romney.
[00:30:36.160]There's like Iowa is throwing me off and like and it's right in the middle. So
[00:30:41.680]but when you do the big multivariate regression model,
[00:30:45.600]then there's becomes a significant effect of the density of police union lodges.
[00:30:50.240]On Trump's improvement over Romney in the 2016 election.
[00:30:54.880]And so this is a good example of a candidate making a direct appeal
[00:30:58.560]to a specific, organized, but sort of improperly or misaligned,
[00:31:02.680]not improperly in a moral sense, but sort of like poorly aligned
[00:31:06.360]with either of the two major parties, bringing them into his coalition
[00:31:09.760]and using that to take over one of the two major parties
[00:31:12.680]and reshape them around that new faction's issues.
[00:31:16.480]And so so this. So it worked very well for him, at least in 2016.
[00:31:22.480]And it's sort of a
[00:31:23.640]the early example in my mind, of the factional Fox strategy.
[00:31:27.640]Last but not least, people who know me know that penguins
[00:31:30.320]have been my favorite animal since I was like at least in second grade.
[00:31:33.680]I have documentation that far back.
[00:31:35.400]So naturally I made the area where I do the most of my research
[00:31:38.480]illustrate with penguins.
[00:31:40.240]So particular penguins exhibit something that we call legislative effectiveness.
[00:31:43.320]The Bolton and Weissman define as the proven ability
[00:31:47.440]to advance a member's agenda items through the legislative process and into law.
[00:31:51.640]And you notice that I can do that definition by memory now,
[00:31:55.520]because I worked for Craig Walden and he they are these are the Center
[00:31:59.320]for Effective Lawmaking Folks where I'm an affiliated faculty.
[00:32:01.440]So I've given that definition publicly many times.
[00:32:07.240]So. So what does it take
[00:32:09.320]to be a highly effective lawmaker in an era of partizan polarization?
[00:32:13.800]Well, some of the early work on this
[00:32:15.840]focused on the institutional positions that these members hold.
[00:32:19.080]So if you were a committee chair and bills come before your committee,
[00:32:22.400]you get to decide what gets a hearing and what gets a vote.
[00:32:25.480]And it makes it really easy for you to move your own agenda item
[00:32:29.120]through at least that stage of the legislative process. I had like.
[00:32:35.160]A former congressional party leader say that he initially wasn't very impressed
[00:32:40.480]with what we were trying to do on the basis of that recognition.
[00:32:44.720]So Eric Cantor was the Republican leader in Congress
[00:32:48.800]and he did fundraising for the Center for Effective Lobbying. So we like him.
[00:32:53.200]And he pointed out
[00:32:57.720]that a lot of what makes someone an especially good member of Congress
[00:33:03.360]at doing the legislative work is skills and strategic choices.
[00:33:07.440]So a lot of the work that we do now on the in the legislative effectiveness
[00:33:11.480]literature is trying to figure out
[00:33:12.800]what are the choices that you can make, what are the strategies
[00:33:15.240]that you can employ that will make you a productive penguin?
[00:33:19.080]How do you choose effectiveness?
[00:33:23.160]So this is where we enter the lightning round of Jeff Lawrence. So.
[00:33:27.560]So here are three strategies based on stuff that I
[00:33:32.280]either have worked on or I'm in the process of work here.
[00:33:35.160]So I'll show you some stuff that is under review right now. Awesome.
[00:33:38.920]So the. So first things first is you got to hire the right people.
[00:33:42.240]The reason why the way that penguins
[00:33:43.880]works for these types of folks is penguins only survive by banding together.
[00:33:48.000]And a lot of the strategies are in play.
[00:33:49.560]Talk about how you partner with other people.
[00:33:52.840]Or at least consider other people.
[00:33:54.920]So some work that I did while I was on my postdoc with Craig Wilson
[00:33:59.280]is shows up in this chapter with Jesse Crosson and Alan Weisman also on it.
[00:34:04.800]But to look at the kind of stuff that members of Congress build
[00:34:08.480]and how focused is it on lawmaking versus communications
[00:34:11.720]or constituency service or administrative stuff?
[00:34:16.160]And what we show is that particularly for newer members, so this is
[00:34:20.560]this is a predicted like marginal effects model from a multivariate bike.
[00:34:24.680]There's a bunch of controls we can talk about that if you're interested.
[00:34:27.640]But the takeaway is that, particularly for newer members of Congress,
[00:34:31.520]having a team of highly experienced legislative staff
[00:34:34.800]is really useful for getting you out the door running.
[00:34:38.040]So even though it's difficult, particularly as a new member of Congress,
[00:34:41.280]to really push a lot of bills, some new members do, like
[00:34:45.840]Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton, enacted two laws
[00:34:49.320]in his first term when the Democrats were in the minority in the House.
[00:34:53.040]And so it's possible to do and hiring good staff helps you do that
[00:34:57.360]as you get more experience under your belt.
[00:35:00.600]Having a big team becomes kind of a burden.
[00:35:03.120]If you've ever worked in a large team before, you've served on a committee,
[00:35:06.400]you know that sometimes
[00:35:07.520]it can be difficult to coordinate lots of people towards a task.
[00:35:11.200]So it becomes it sort of shifts over time from having a big team of experienced
[00:35:16.080]people to having like one person who's really experienced and effective.
[00:35:19.160]And we show that in a different part of the same job.
[00:35:22.520]The second strategy based on things that came out of my dissertation work,
[00:35:27.040]looks at the positions of organized interest groups on legislation.
[00:35:30.240]We haven't talked very much about them.
[00:35:31.640]We will a little bit more in a second,
[00:35:34.600]but here in my dissertation, I was really interested
[00:35:38.000]in what makes an influential lobbying coalition.
[00:35:41.800]Sort of the stereotype is that you have to have lots of money
[00:35:44.880]to be a successful lobbyist,
[00:35:46.400]but that wasn't true in my own personal experience as a lobbyist.
[00:35:48.960]I got some things done and didn't have money
[00:35:53.960]and and the literature and political science
[00:35:57.240]has not really borne that out very clearly.
[00:36:00.120]So I found a dataset of
[00:36:04.600]and cleaned a dataset of interest groups positions on bills
[00:36:07.800]we've been collecting ever since.
[00:36:08.960]We're up to, I think almost or a little bit over 200,000 positions
[00:36:12.920]taken by organized interest groups and individual firms and other organizations
[00:36:16.800]or congressional legislation going back now to like 1974.
[00:36:23.640]And so we can look at the coalitions
[00:36:25.200]of interest groups arranged for and against congressional bills now.
[00:36:29.120]And what I find in this work is that
[00:36:33.400]groups that are comprised of
[00:36:35.160]interests that tend to give out lots of campaign contributions.
[00:36:38.360]Once you start controlling for things, they tend to not really make that big
[00:36:41.960]of a difference.
[00:36:42.640]This confidence interval over aligning with zero
[00:36:45.720]means that we can't statistically distinguish between between
[00:36:49.760]the effect of money on politics in this particularly narrow case
[00:36:54.000]and there being no effect.
[00:36:58.880]I find that large
[00:37:00.680]but homogenous coalitions where say you have like 20.
[00:37:04.840]I almost said 20,000, but I don't know, like like dozens of hospitals
[00:37:08.320]all signed on to the same bill.
[00:37:09.800]It doesn't make that big of a difference.
[00:37:10.880]And actually coordinating those people is really hard.
[00:37:13.840]So the coverage in here is negative, meaning that more a larger coalition
[00:37:18.520]that doesn't have other attributes
[00:37:19.840]is actually associated with a smaller probability
[00:37:21.680]of getting your bills to the early agenda setting stages in Congress.
[00:37:24.960]What seemed to work among the three things that I tested was
[00:37:28.520]what I sort of labeled interest diversity.
[00:37:31.640]This means that among the organizations that you have in your coalition,
[00:37:34.880]you have lots of different
[00:37:35.920]industries, social causes and other interests represented.
[00:37:41.320]And at that is associated with a statistically significant
[00:37:45.000]but also substantively pretty decent increase in the probability
[00:37:49.160]that your bill will clear the initial agenda setting stages of Congress.
[00:37:56.720]Last but not least.
[00:37:57.840]So the first two things about are about who you attract to your bills.
[00:38:00.880]The first one is who you're trying to appeal to with your bills.
[00:38:04.240]So you saw a nominee
[00:38:07.040]as a way of placing every member of Congress on an ideological spectrum
[00:38:10.920]in some work that I'm doing right now with with Jesse Crosson and Zander Furnace.
[00:38:15.920]We are able we use the fact that interest groups
[00:38:19.040]sometimes change positions on bills as a way to identify not only the
[00:38:23.080]ideological, ideological location of the bills themselves,
[00:38:26.400]but also the status quo that those bills would represent.
[00:38:30.160]So we're able to do things like look at what what is the ideological
[00:38:33.520]location of the status quo is that Democrats want to change.
[00:38:37.080]And unsurprisingly, perhaps they tend to be on the right. So.
[00:38:41.640]So Democratic sponsor bills tend to target status quos
[00:38:47.000]that are on the right side of the distribution,
[00:38:48.440]and correspondingly Republican bills tend to target status quo on the left.
[00:38:53.560]Now to make sure that they're actually moving policy
[00:38:56.400]in far in a direction that they like.
[00:38:58.760]They want to move policy
[00:38:59.880]toward their own ideal point for their own preferences. Right.
[00:39:03.040]But they're trapped, or at least they're stymied
[00:39:05.920]or they're constrained
[00:39:07.160]by the fact that
[00:39:07.760]they have to get other people to vote for their bills in order to pass them.
[00:39:10.800]Particularly moderate members who are like the Joe mentions of the world,
[00:39:14.800]the people who are going to be the 50th or the 51st
[00:39:17.240]vote for something in the Senate.
[00:39:19.720]And here to appeal to them, members of Congress and to
[00:39:24.520]you can imagine that they might propose bills at their own ideal point.
[00:39:28.920]This is what I want.
[00:39:30.200]Now I'm going to try to persuade you to want what I want.
[00:39:32.600]But that's not what members of Congress tend to do.
[00:39:35.160]In both parties, members of Congress tend to introduce bills that are not only away
[00:39:40.520]from their own ideal point, but specifically in a moderate direction.
[00:39:43.880]And so they're appealing to the centrist voters and what we show
[00:39:46.200]elsewhere in the paper, in a graph that is so dense that like
[00:39:49.560]it would have tripled the size of this PDF to just like put it in here.
[00:39:53.680]We show that under lots of different configurations of control variables
[00:39:57.840]and things like that,
[00:39:58.680]the members who are
[00:39:59.440]legislatively effective are the members who are willing to do this more to sponsor
[00:40:03.880]bills further from their own ideal point that are are specifically more moderate.
[00:40:09.160]So. With that. I have
[00:40:15.840]shown you that despite disagreement and competition between the parties.
[00:40:21.920]Individual members of Congress
[00:40:23.600]have strategies that they can adopt to still achieve their goals and the parties
[00:40:28.280]when they need to work together to pass legislation, they do that. Consistently.
[00:40:33.520]So you might think that this means
[00:40:36.880]that I have kind of a sanguine view on how this works.
[00:40:43.240]Underrated skill of an academic is your meme game.
[00:40:45.800]Even the old ones.
[00:40:46.920]What I learned is, by the way, this is now entered actual classic territory.
[00:40:51.200]This meme is now ten years old.
[00:40:57.120]So I'm going to focus for the last bit of the talk on
[00:41:00.840]some work that I'm doing with
[00:41:02.440]with CrossFit and Furnace that's going into a book project.
[00:41:06.000]On what happens to interest groups
[00:41:08.520]when parties become competitive.
[00:41:12.800]Specifically what happens when you make lobbyist partner?
[00:41:17.520]So one way to think about interest groups is that they organize
[00:41:22.120]paired preferences and priorities across geographical boundaries, right?
[00:41:25.640]Rather than being stuck with an interest rate.
[00:41:27.240]All of the groups that you see up here are represented by whether it's
[00:41:30.120]individuals or firms across many different districts in the country .
[00:41:34.680]So this includes interest groups you're probably familiar
[00:41:37.560]with, like the NHRA and ACP and maybe the Chamber of Commerce,
[00:41:41.480]but also organizations that you're not used to thinking
[00:41:43.760]of as interest groups, maybe like triple AA.
[00:41:46.120]So if you've got like that roadside
[00:41:47.600]assistance card where you are, what that pays for is lobbying
[00:41:51.600]to produce policies that make it easier to drive and lets easy
[00:41:55.600]to do things like take public transportation, bike or walk places.
[00:41:59.400]So, I mean, I have my card on me right now, so I'm not going to judge anyone.
[00:42:02.480]But just so you know what you're doing, what you're doing.
[00:42:05.760]And the AARP, similarly,
[00:42:07.760]when your parents or grandparents or maybe yourself are are paying
[00:42:11.960]for your AARP membership, what that's buying is advocacy
[00:42:15.960]for legislation, or at least not only on behalf of more elderly Americans.
[00:42:22.640]So organized interest groups.
[00:42:26.040]These are some of the most famous but they exist were hovering around 12
[00:42:29.080]or 13,000 now that are registering or having lobbying
[00:42:32.200]firms register on their behalf under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.
[00:42:35.240]That's roughly how many of there are.
[00:42:36.560]So some really. Like maybe you can name a couple, but there's like a bunch. Right.
[00:42:40.960]So they lobby on every conceivable issue.
[00:42:44.680]It's not just one thing or another.
[00:42:45.840]There's a strong tendency toward a few things.
[00:42:52.760]But I think health care,
[00:42:54.560]which is by far the most populous one, got cropped out of that image. So sorry.
[00:42:59.040]But there are a lot.
[00:42:59.640]But there are interest groups, many lobbying on basically every issue
[00:43:03.000]that you can think of in Congress.
[00:43:06.120]And they do so from a wide range of ideological positions.
[00:43:09.160]Those interest group bill positions
[00:43:10.760]that I start like initiated the data collection for my dissertation.
[00:43:14.600]We've now plugged into
[00:43:17.320]the same, not the same, but a similar algorithm has generated
[00:43:20.760]the GW nominee scores to estimate ideal point locations for interest groups.
[00:43:24.680]And what we find is that they operate on a similarly broad
[00:43:28.760]ideological spectrum as members of Congress.
[00:43:32.840]And in terms of raw numbers, at least,
[00:43:34.840]they tend to be relatively normally distributed.
[00:43:38.240]There's a kind of a bell curve.
[00:43:41.560]But something has been happening in Congress lately.
[00:43:44.880]Issues have become polarized.
[00:43:46.200]There's lots of ways of measuring polarization at the issue level.
[00:43:48.960]But the one that I have here is what's called a unity vote.
[00:43:51.680]It's when a majority of Democrats vote against a majority of Republicans and across
[00:43:57.440]almost every issue area, then their relative
[00:43:59.760]frequency of these unity votes has been increasing in recent decades
[00:44:03.560]some issue areas more than others.
[00:44:05.120]Each facet of this graph is a different issue area.
[00:44:09.200]So what we find is that the relative
[00:44:12.080]politicization of issues like we think of the slope of this line is
[00:44:17.440]associated with or incentivizes interest groups to start becoming more partizan.
[00:44:24.360]So what do they do? Well.
[00:44:28.360]There are lots of ways that interest groups might respond
[00:44:30.880]to incentives to become more partizan.
[00:44:32.440]But the one that we're focused on in
[00:44:33.760]this book is what we call off core position picking.
[00:44:37.480]Every interest group has a core interest that is causing that group to cohere.
[00:44:42.280]The reason that group exists,
[00:44:44.040]four groups have started taking positions on issues outside of that area.
[00:44:47.920]So in this case, here's
[00:44:48.880]an example of the Sierra Club opposing an anti-gay marriage amendment.
[00:44:52.240]It's possible that LGBTQ plus
[00:44:54.840]people have like our famously better stewards of the environment.
[00:44:58.240]And I just don't know it.
[00:44:59.920]But I think it's fair to say that the Sierra Club was not founded
[00:45:03.880]to advocate on those issues.
[00:45:05.840]And yet now it is interesting.
[00:45:08.720]It's happening on the right also.
[00:45:10.520]So here is the the Family Research Council, a famous conservative
[00:45:14.280]like traditional family and like anti LGBT interest group
[00:45:18.360]blocking a tax raising plan.
[00:45:19.920]People get confused about which plan B this is.
[00:45:21.960]This is a tax scheme. Just to be clear.
[00:45:24.880]But there are lots of other examples of this.
[00:45:26.480]So the NRA taking positions on tax and abortion bills,
[00:45:30.080]various liberal interest groups taking positions on all of each other's bills.
[00:45:33.560]Argument is that this is no accident because in fact, it's becoming.
[00:45:38.040]Much more common and more recent Congresses.
[00:45:40.360]The diversity of the set of issues that individual interest groups are taking
[00:45:43.600]positions on has exploded.
[00:45:46.880]In more recent years.
[00:45:52.640]So why does this matter?
[00:45:54.840]So let's go back to the top.
[00:45:56.800]We have an increasing degree of zero sum party competition
[00:46:00.720]where if I flipped just a few seats in the most recent Congress, Republicans
[00:46:06.360]gain regain control of the House by flipping 18 seats out of 435.
[00:46:11.480]Democrats themselves with eight seats.
[00:46:13.120]So really was the net of ten that was sufficient to do it.
[00:46:16.640]So now the parties are locked in this much more frequent
[00:46:20.840]turnover of party control than they were in the past.
[00:46:24.360]In order to succeed at zero sum party competition, they're engaging in party
[00:46:28.080]in like brand differentiation, trying to make their party
[00:46:31.360]look better than the other party.
[00:46:33.480]Through messaging and painful amendments.
[00:46:37.680]When you are locked in this party
[00:46:40.000]competition, then you have to make decisions when you're deciding
[00:46:43.040]which interest groups you want to talk to.
[00:46:45.720]If you if you're a Republican and you are seen meeting
[00:46:48.680]with a liberal advocacy group, you're not doing your part
[00:46:51.200]to differentiate your party's brand from the other.
[00:46:53.120]And Democrats, similarly, when they meet with a conservative
[00:46:55.800]interest group, now they may decide or have a policy.
[00:46:58.200]Individuals are doing that anyway, but it tends to make them
[00:47:01.520]not as popular among their partizans.
[00:47:05.080]So to respond to this, groups are taking this off court position.
[00:47:07.600]Taking what I didn't show you before
[00:47:08.960]is that the off court positions that groups take are
[00:47:11.240]almost are significantly more aligned with one of the two major parties
[00:47:15.880]and the same major parties position on that issue.
[00:47:20.640]So even groups that are in these highly politicized issue areas
[00:47:23.600]for their core interests when they take off core positions,
[00:47:26.720]are highlighting the most partizan areas for signal loyalty to that party.
[00:47:31.080]When you signal loyalty to one party through this awkward position taken,
[00:47:34.680]you get less access to the other because they say, Oh, you're
[00:47:38.120]just a conservative interest group or you're just a liberal interest group.
[00:47:40.760]Why would I talk to you?
[00:47:43.520]Which means that
[00:47:44.800]the group has preferred access or preferential access to only one
[00:47:48.560]and only one party, which means that they have a pretty big stake.
[00:47:51.880]Their influence of that group, the ability to pursue their own objectives,
[00:47:54.960]is dependent on the continued power of the party to which they're aligned.
[00:48:00.760]Which means that they do things like an increasing share of groups
[00:48:04.000]are giving campaign contributions to members of one and only one party.
[00:48:08.640]One and only one party is getting the information
[00:48:10.600]that those groups have to share about what are the consequences
[00:48:13.120]of different policy options that members of Congress face.
[00:48:15.640]It's kind of a bad or bad equilibrium.
[00:48:18.840]And unfortunately, because the group is now depending on one party for influence,
[00:48:23.120]they get swept up in this pattern of zero sum party competition, too.
[00:48:28.200]And around and around it goes.
[00:48:31.040]So thank you for your attention.
[00:48:32.960]That's what I've got for this.
[00:48:34.920]I would love to take your questions and I look forward to
[00:48:38.400]the discussion. So thank you.
[00:48:48.920]Thanks. I'm going off of this.
[00:48:52.080]Are there any or many interest groups like major interest groups
[00:48:56.680]that are truly nonpartisan?
[00:48:58.200]And when there are groups that say they are.
[00:49:02.120]Should we trust them?
[00:49:04.080]So it's not a matter of trust.
[00:49:05.480]No one here is doing anything like conspiratorial or nefarious,
[00:49:08.720]as far as I know. Right.
[00:49:10.360]What's scary about this is that even groups that are just trying
[00:49:13.200]to, like, do what they've always done are going to get trapped in this.
[00:49:16.360]That's the part of it that's like genuinely kind of concerning.
[00:49:21.280]Are there any bipartisan groups?
[00:49:23.360]Well, you could find groups that give relatively equal percentages
[00:49:27.240]of, say, of their campaign contributions to both parties.
[00:49:30.640]The way that those groups think about it, though, is that they exist
[00:49:35.920]not for the purpose of the party, but they sort of get swept up in it.
[00:49:39.680]This is what I would think if I were an interest group
[00:49:41.840]in this situation. All right.
[00:49:44.400]So the the strategic response or the incentivized response here
[00:49:48.680]to engage in this this loop of party competition
[00:49:53.240]is running against most interest groups like Preferred Outcome,
[00:49:58.360]where they just get to like
[00:49:59.360]stay parochial and lobby on the stuff that they want to lobby on. Yeah.
[00:50:13.240]Thank you for a really interesting talk.
[00:50:15.360]Thank you. I have not looked at the dysfunction
[00:50:18.800]of our national politics in this way before.
[00:50:21.120]And so I really appreciated
[00:50:23.200]that as someone who, you know, lived abroad and saw different
[00:50:28.720]parliamentary systems, right, where there is a much broader
[00:50:33.160]spectrum of possible parties that one could vote for or see
[00:50:37.880]kind of attempt to enact their positions in the legislative body.
[00:50:42.800]I wonder, like I what I hear the word polarization here, it makes it seem like,
[00:50:47.640]wow, there's this, you know, huge difference between two major polls.
[00:50:51.800]And, you know, when I look
[00:50:53.120]at national politics, it seems to me like the narcissism of small differences.
[00:50:56.920]You know, it's like the Overton Window is between like, you know,
[00:50:59.800]right and center right in the U.S.
[00:51:01.400]right now. And so, you know, you'll disagree with that.
[00:51:03.800]That's that's my kind of, you know, stake.
[00:51:05.840]But I but it does seem like at least economically. Right.
[00:51:09.680]You know, that there is less
[00:51:12.040]less of a broad possibility than in other political systems.
[00:51:15.800]Do you do any work on like the difference
[00:51:19.600]across potential political positions?
[00:51:23.600]These are the kind of the level of polarization across time.
[00:51:27.080]Like did we used to have a broader spectrum of possibilities? Is that true?
[00:51:31.920]Does that now affect the level of polarization we have?
[00:51:36.160]So how has your your
[00:51:39.160]research intersected at all with the how this maps on to a much
[00:51:43.720]broader possibility for a political position, taking
[00:51:47.960]on a full spectrum of left or right?
[00:51:50.000]Yeah, actually. So if if you don't mind, I'm going to actually use
[00:51:53.920]that question to talk
[00:51:55.000]about another piece of ongoing work that I'm doing with the same team.
[00:52:01.600]So so the question if I can sort of synthesize
[00:52:04.920]is, is the fact that we have a two party system
[00:52:09.040]sort of limiting the range of feasible political outcomes
[00:52:13.000]and what would happen if we adopted a parliamentary system
[00:52:16.680]or a proportional or some other system
[00:52:18.520]that permitted more parties to attain power and or at least to enough
[00:52:22.840]to advance their issues and get their stuff on the agenda.
[00:52:27.320]So what the what being stuck in a two party system does
[00:52:30.960]is it flattens all conflict between like the average member
[00:52:34.200]of those two parties. So if from one's perspective,
[00:52:37.760]the two parties are not that far from each other.
[00:52:39.600]I have a funny story to tell about that also that I'm gonna try to loop back to
[00:52:44.080]there. Like, if you don't see yourself represented
[00:52:47.920]among the two parties, then then you're kind of out of luck. Right.
[00:52:53.400]But it's not really an accident that we have a two party system.
[00:52:56.400]It's most directly a product of the set of electoral institutions that we have.
[00:53:00.240]For example, the fact that
[00:53:04.840]someone's going to point out somewhere where they're doing like PR
[00:53:07.240]at the local level.
[00:53:08.200]But most of our elections are elected elections to single member districts,
[00:53:12.280]meaning that only one person can win the district at a time,
[00:53:15.240]which drives you toward having two alternatives,
[00:53:17.880]because having a third alternative is going to spoil one of those two people.
[00:53:22.000]So assuming that we are stuck
[00:53:25.120]with the set of electoral institutions that we have,
[00:53:27.520]that's actually not a safe assumption.
[00:53:28.920]There are lots of organizations that are working to encourage the US
[00:53:32.080]to experiment with more pluralistic electoral institutions.
[00:53:37.920]What is what are we losing
[00:53:39.560]by not having the broader range of views organized and able to attain power?
[00:53:44.800]So this is where I'm going to do like a little bit of a plug for the
[00:53:47.400]for work with the same author.
[00:53:48.400]So with Croston and Furness and
[00:53:51.800]and Kevin McAllister, who's Emmerich's?
[00:53:55.120]We are. We have.
[00:54:00.200]I say we. Kevin's work is in a sort of multi-dimensional ideal point estimation,
[00:54:05.280]which means like if you
[00:54:09.000]allow there to be
[00:54:11.120]not just a single left right dimension, but like all kinds of different
[00:54:14.000]dimensions, how would you identify them and what could they be given?
[00:54:17.280]They are still working with individual roll call votes.
[00:54:19.680]So this is like extremely preliminary work.
[00:54:22.080]We don't even believe it yet.
[00:54:23.200]So take this with the most aggressive a grain of salt you can possibly imagine.
[00:54:28.360]But when we pair our interest group data with through this new method,
[00:54:33.520]we find that there are five dimensions even under the currently compressed
[00:54:38.160]two party structure.
[00:54:39.520]And those dimensions, if I can remember, properly correspond roughly. You have to.
[00:54:43.280]It's like the House and the Senate are distinct dimensions from each other.
[00:54:45.760]It's kind of interesting to think about.
[00:54:47.720]But then there's a dimension that's unlike agricultural subsidies
[00:54:51.680]being important here, a dimension on like development versus conservation
[00:54:57.360]and a dimension on privacy versus tech stuff. Right.
[00:55:00.920]So this is even in the.
[00:55:03.520]And so, like my coauthors,
[00:55:04.760]if they're watching, are going to be horrified
[00:55:06.280]that I'm talking about a paper that we are still actively
[00:55:08.640]in the process of writing. Sorry, guys.
[00:55:12.080]Yes. So if those results hold
[00:55:15.400]right, what that says is that even in our current
[00:55:17.320]two party system where a lot of conflict is suppressed,
[00:55:19.920]we can observe the dimensionality of roll call voting behavior and interest group
[00:55:23.480]position patterns,
[00:55:24.480]which kind of raises some interesting questions,
[00:55:26.520]like if we got rid of the two party system tomorrow, for example,
[00:55:29.560]we adopted something like a nationwide PR system that would allow lots
[00:55:32.840]of small parties to get elected to office and then join coalitions.
[00:55:36.600]There could be some really interest, like there could be
[00:55:38.040]a lot more movement on things and you could see coalitions of that.
[00:55:42.680]You would not expect
[00:55:43.720]to find common ground around maybe one of these other dimensions
[00:55:47.040]other than the classic left right dimension.
[00:55:48.840]So it's possible
[00:55:50.040]and there's even trace evidence that it exists under our current system,
[00:55:53.400]but is actively being not actively in the sense of like conspiratorial
[00:55:58.200]but just is being suppressed by the fact that our electoral institutions
[00:56:02.280]incentivize us toward a two party system.
[00:56:09.280]I have a question from museum.
[00:56:13.440]Of the three squad types that you describe.
[00:56:16.800]Which one do you think is the wave of the future
[00:56:20.160]and what will that spell for American democracy?
[00:56:25.160]Wow. I feel like there is.
[00:56:26.560]I feel like the stakes of this question are a lot higher than they appear.
[00:56:31.560]Okay. Well, so here is a.
[00:56:35.960]What I'll say has been interesting about the squad, and I think it's true
[00:56:41.120]to a certain extent among the entire squad, if you will, also.
[00:56:45.320]So the fact that they have like
[00:56:47.960]they are not the only relatively new freshmen like members of Congress,
[00:56:52.200]which means that they have hit the ground running in a way that's really effective.
[00:56:56.320]Now, some of that has they've encountered controversy.
[00:56:59.680]Some of them like it's I there was talk
[00:57:02.880]I haven't got caught up to the news yet on whether like Ilhan Omar
[00:57:07.240]has been stripped of her committees by the new Republican majority.
[00:57:11.560]Someone shouted out if she does.
[00:57:14.080]But like so there is they're
[00:57:15.840]kind of playing a because they're playing such an outsized role.
[00:57:20.200]That means they're getting outside attention
[00:57:21.720]and the potential for outside outsized resentment from other members.
[00:57:24.960]That would be atypical to be directed at freshmen or near freshmen. Now,
[00:57:31.440]but in each of their cases, there is
[00:57:34.000]you can tell that there is a logic at work.
[00:57:36.080]There is a strategy being employed for specific goals
[00:57:38.760]that makes sense when you consider their policy positions on things.
[00:57:41.640]So whether you disagree with those positions or not,
[00:57:44.720]the fact that there is a strategy and they're implementing it suggests to me
[00:57:47.880]that they will continue to learn if they stick around Congress for longer.
[00:57:51.360]And and we'll see how their goals and strategies evolve.
[00:57:55.360]There's good evidence here.
[00:57:56.880]I'm thinking of work by Bernard and Sulkin that members of Congress adopt
[00:58:02.000]different legislative styles and then change those styles
[00:58:04.560]over time as new opportunities become available for them.
[00:58:07.600]So I would expect that the squad and the anti squad alike
[00:58:10.480]would engage in that sort of strategic thinking and shift over time.
[00:58:18.240]Interest groups take off core positions,
[00:58:20.480]does it lower their own effectiveness level with passing legislation?
[00:58:25.160]That is a great question.
[00:58:26.200]That's actually the chapter of the book
[00:58:27.840]that we haven't written yet that I am the most excited to do.
[00:58:32.000]So my suspicion, I should say this is now pure speculation.
[00:58:36.320]We haven't looked at the data in this way at all.
[00:58:38.360]My suspicion, though, is. Yes.
[00:58:40.040]So conditional. Yes. Right.
[00:58:42.360]So if you're a member of a party coalition, you're really aligned
[00:58:45.680]with one of the parties. You're taking lots of off court positions.
[00:58:49.160]Does it mean the same thing when you support a bill now, or do people
[00:58:52.160]sort of write it off as like, oh, this person, this group is a Democratic
[00:58:55.880]oriented group, they're going to sign on to the big Democratic bills.
[00:58:59.440]So in a sense, if you think of the where the influence of lobbyists come from
[00:59:04.200]as the information they're able to inject into the legislative process,
[00:59:07.440]then the positions by themselves of groups
[00:59:10.360]engaging in off court position taking is less informative.
[00:59:13.760]You're learning less about the bill when someone's taking a totally off
[00:59:17.520]core position on that bill that they're taking
[00:59:20.040]just because they're part of a party coalition that's doing it.
[00:59:23.680]So does that mean that they're less influential or less effective?
[00:59:26.720]It's hard to say, right, because interest groups are strategic also.
[00:59:29.440]So they're responding to the incentives that allow them to counterfactual.
[00:59:32.200]There is that they don't align with either of the parties
[00:59:34.520]and then they can't get anything done.
[00:59:36.280]Right. So it's hard to say, like,
[00:59:37.800]are they more effective than they otherwise would be?
[00:59:39.640]But what I will say is that if that sort of bit
[00:59:42.960]of speculation is correct is that it changes what makes groups
[00:59:47.280]influential and potentially useful to the legislative process.
[00:59:50.720]And and to the extent that the information that they have is less valuable
[00:59:53.600]and less useful to members, then then we're kind of like
[00:59:56.960]not taking as good advantage of the fact that there is like thousands of people
[01:00:01.360]whose job and only goal is to get members of Congress to listen to them.
[01:00:22.560]So going back to what you
[01:00:24.120]were talking about with the different groups within Congress,
[01:00:28.400]do you think that that sort of rule where the most effective legislators
[01:00:33.960]have to be more moderate in what they're proposing will continue
[01:00:36.920]even as they become more polarized within the House?
[01:00:39.920]That's a great question. Right.
[01:00:41.040]So to what extent is the that third strategy where you target
[01:00:45.360]extreme strategies close with moderate proposals,
[01:00:47.200]to what extent is that dependent on not having fully polarized yet?
[01:00:51.280]So it's it's interesting to think about.
[01:00:54.000]So the the short answer is that at the end of the day,
[01:00:58.360]the reason why that strategy is effective
[01:01:02.320]is that the the moderate, like
[01:01:05.000]the most moderate members of Congress, are the most moderate members of Congress.
[01:01:08.640]And so one way to think about how polarized is Congress is like
[01:01:12.120]how close are the most moderate members of each party to each other?
[01:01:16.400]It used to be the case that the two parties
[01:01:17.840]overlapped by GW dominate now laid out, and it's not particularly close.
[01:01:22.440]And yet it still remains the case, at least so far,
[01:01:24.920]despite the level of polarization that we have
[01:01:27.920]that you have to moderate in order to appeal to those swing voters.
[01:01:32.480]Now, there are exceptions to this.
[01:01:34.720]Ted Cruz, for example, scores really highly of this legislative effectiveness
[01:01:38.520]score, not because his proposals are necessarily moderate.
[01:01:43.840]By anyone's definition of moderate,
[01:01:46.720]though I'm sure he would he would frame his own bills
[01:01:49.800]as like common sense solutions to real problems facing Americans.
[01:01:54.800]It's there's sort of some work from both and Wiseman and their coauthor,
[01:02:00.080]I think mascots that that suggests that there's kind of like a second
[01:02:04.720]dimension of bill content at work here that's that sort of maps onto
[01:02:08.560]like how good is the bill at what it's trying to do.
[01:02:12.320]So even if you're more extreme, you might have incentives to write better
[01:02:15.120]versions of the bills, whereas if you're a more moderate lawmaker,
[01:02:17.800]maybe you can afford to be a little bit more general.
[01:02:20.760]So what I think the polarization does
[01:02:23.600]is it creates more incentives to try alternative strategies to attract votes.
[01:02:28.320]And that can be right in some sense.
[01:02:30.160]Better bills, better versions of the same bill.
[01:02:33.200]Or it can be having other things to offer your colleagues
[01:02:36.840]in in exchange for getting their support on a tough vote.
[01:02:44.400]Well, thank you so much for coming in tonight.
[01:02:48.320]All right. Thank you all.
[01:02:53.760]I hope to see you all next month
[01:02:55.840]for the last lecture before a panel discussion February 21st with Dr.
[01:03:00.840]Margaret Jacobs on the common ground part of polarization
[01:03:05.080]and in search of reconciliation on America's stolen lands.
[01:03:08.720]Thank you so much. And thank you again to Dr.
[01:03:10.800]Laura and thank you all.

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Making Polarization Work for You: A Politician's Survival Guide

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