America’s political dysfunction is a popular academic topic for obvious reasons. Few if any are happy with the current state of politics in the United States. And few would dispute the contention that polarization among U.S. elected officials has increased, resulting in policy stalemates in many states and the federal government. But political scientists disagree about such matters as whether polarization is an elite or mass phenomenon, the relative weight of various causal factors, and the effect that polarization has had on policymaking. Polarized Politics contributes usefully to all of these questions and is most distinctive in two ways. First, it emphasizes to a greater degree the relation between polarization and the growing trend of U.S. income inequality, and second, it analyzes racial, ethnic, religious, age, and ideological divisions more closely than previous volumes about political polarization.
The chapters by William Crotty, Walter Dean Burnham, and Thomas Ferguson explore the link to inequality most extensively. Crotty sets this thesis out very clearly in the first chapter, in which he argues that polarization is a “product” of “economic self-interest in the US system taken to extremes.” The American political system “maximizes the resources of wealth in shaping policy outcomes” due to “a policy-making structure that is porous, open to influence at innumerable stages and makes actions in the interests of a mass public extraordinarily difficult” (p.2).
Crotty’s point about the system’s porousness is nicely explored in the chapter entitled “Structural Sources of Political Polarization” by Gerald Pomper and Marc Weiner. They systematically consider the way that various constitutional features contribute to polarization, arguing that the dispersion of political power in the American design has enabled policy obstruction as the major political parties have become more ideologically distinct. In addition, well-intended political reforms that were supposed to fix the problem of special-interest influence ended up creating primary and campaign finance systems that have been captured by intense partisans and political groups with resources. Political parties have evolved from umbrella organizations to “new, more nationalized, more ideologically parties,” explains Arthur Paulson in Chapter 4 (p. 85). Like Tom Mann and Norman Ornstein, Paulson argues that when “parliamentary-style parties” operate in a separation-of-powers system, the result is divided government and gridlock.
Burnham and Ferguson also pursue the relationship between the political system’s various defects and rising economic inequality. The title tells the tale for Burnham: “Voter Turnout and the Path to Plutocracy.” For those of us who have followed Burnham’s work over the years, this piece has many familiar characteristics: state and national turnout data divided by historical periods and erudition that spills generously beyond the confines of the topic at hand. In the end, his bottom line is that “interested elites and their allies have frequently gamed the machinery of elections for more than century now, and they continue to do so”—hard to argue with that.
Ferguson, as he has consistently done throughout his career, focuses on money and politics. His chapter, entitled “Big Money, Mass Media and the Polarization of Congress,” describes the unvirtuous cycle among money, media attention, and political influence. In a summary chart entitled “The Spectrum of Money,” he summarizes eight ways that money drives U.S. politics and then dismisses alternative explanations of polarization as marginal at best. Ferguson dwells at great length on how money advances Republican economic interests but says very little about money influences on the Democrats—for example, how Wall Street campaign contributions might have influenced Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s policies toward bank regulations.
The remaining chapters pursue a different line of questioning: They trace the level of polarization along demographic, ideological, and religious lines. In almost all cases, the conclusion is that partisan polarization either exceeds or incorporates these other divisions. Lyman Kellstadt and James Guth conclude that the ties between major religious groups and the political parties have changed over time, highlighted by the movement of evangelicals and to some extent traditionalists within other religious groups toward the Republicans, while modernists and secularists have moved toward the Democrats. Barbara Burell traces the emergence and causes of the gender gap that favors the Democrats, but also suggests that the conservative female candidates in 2010 may have signaled some shift in party stereotyping. The chapters by Crotty and John Garcia recount how African Americans and Latinos became core elements of the Democratic Party. Crotty’s chapter is more historical, while Garcia summarizes the accumulated public opinion scholarship about Latinos. Garcia sticks closely to the facts but does highlight the tension that the Republican Party faces between its short-term electoral incentives to exploit nativist fears about immigration and its long-term opportunity to get Latinos to vote more conservatively.
Some demographic polarizations have been more muted than we might have expected. As Paul Brewer and Shawn Fettig explain, attitudes towards gays in the military have tended to converge even as the partisan divide over gay marriage has not. Their statistical models attribute this to ideology more than partisanship per se. In her chapter “Aging Policy: A Partisan Paradox,” Christine Day observes that age has not divided generations over commitments to senior entitlements like Social Security and Medicare as much as one might have expected. Rather, the partisan divide over the size of government and the deficit is what matters in the entitlement debate. Moreover, the most powerful senior interest group, the AARP, is not a polarizing force. Thomas Marshall similarly points out that health-care policy has become more polarized since 1996 because it became wrapped up in the larger liberal—conservative issue over the size of government, rather than between those with health care and those without.
In general, many of the authors in the Polarized Politics volume do a thorough job of locating their topics in the broader context of both history and the political science literature, demonstrating pretty convincingly that the origins of our current dissatisfaction have been in the making for some time. Many of the graphs illustrate these long-term trends particularly well. The statistical treatment is not highly technical, and so the volume can be used for both upper-division undergraduate and graduate classes. Because it leans left in its critique of inequality, it might not work for all campuses.
It is hard to take issue with a strong volume that has so many diverse issues and viewpoints, but I will raise two issues. First, it seems to me that the chapters that focus on inequality overlook the complicity of the Democratic Party in the trend toward inequality. The repeal of Glass-Steagall, after all, occurred during Clinton’s presidency and with his blessing. Related to this, the United States is not so much governed by a single plutocracy as it is by a competitive two-party plutocracy, with lawyers and wealthy liberal individuals on one side versus big business, doctors, and wealthy conservative individuals on the other. Secondly, while the Pomper and Crotty essays touch on political reform efforts, I would have liked to see more about how polarization has changed U.S. political institutions and how future reforms might address the problems the volume so ably identifies. Nonetheless, the authors have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of where we are today and how we got there.
