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

CAS MarComm Author

01/26/2023 Added

13 Plays

Description

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

Searchable Transcript

Search:

[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.

The screen size you are trying to search captions on is too small!

You can always jump over to MediaHub and check it out there.

Comments

0 Comments

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

Description

Searchable Transcript

Comments icon comment

Related Channels

Comments