It is not unusual for academics to disagree. But it is unusual for scholars as prominent as Alan Abramowitz and Morris Fiorina to publish books offering such divergent perspectives on the same phenomenon within one year of each other. Each begins with the rise of partisan polarization among political elites in contemporary American politics. In particular, each points to the U.S. Congress, where the center has largely disappeared and a homogenously liberal Democratic Party now stands opposed to a homogenously conservative Republican Party. Taking stock of these developments, Fiorina's Disconnect posits that “in America today there is a disconnect between an unrepresentative political class and the citizenry it purports to represent” (p. xx). He contrasts elite polarization with an American public that remains predominantly moderate, pragmatic, and open to compromise. Contra Fiorina, the central argument of Abramowitz's The Disappearing Center is that “there is no disconnect between the political elite and the American people. Polarization in Washington reflects polarization within the public, especially within the politically engaged segment of the public” (p. x).
Abramowitz rests his case largely upon the “engaged public” (p. 4). Although he points to a growing correspondence between partisan and ideological identities since the 1970s, his account focuses on the subset of Americans who vote, who follow the news, and who care about government and politics. He cautions against the traditional characterizations of the American public as nonideological and uninformed, noting the “vast differences in political interest, knowledge, and activity among the public” (p. 16) and an upward trend since the 1980s in the public's political interest across several survey indicators. The engaged and disengaged publics are markedly different in their policy preferences and political evaluations. Drawing on recent data from the American National Election Study (ANES) and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, Abramowitz presents striking figures that show the disengaged citizenry bunched around the middle of the ideological spectrum but the engaged electorate divided into a bimodal distribution (pp. 42, 55): “The least interested, informed, and politically active Americans [are] clustered around the center” (p. 41). He gives the engaged public special weight in his evaluation of American representation because “they are not a small, fringe group” (p. 37) and “most closely reflect the ideals of democratic citizenship” (p. x). The party polarization in Washington thus takes on democratic legitimacy, in that it “reflects the views of their parties' electoral bases: Republicans reflect the views of their party's conservative electoral base, and Democrats reflect the views of their party's liberal electoral base” (p. 157).
In Fiorina's account, the party polarization of political elites stands at odds with the American public. Examining longitudinal data from Gallup polls, the ANES, and the General Social Survey, Fiorina finds no evidence of party polarization in the electorate as a whole. The percentage of Americans classifying themselves as moderates has remained largely unchanged. Instead of polarization—in which the ideological poles gain at the expense of the center—self-identified moderates continue to outnumber both liberals and conservatives, with Gallup polls even showing an increased share of moderates since the 1970s (p. 13). Examining opinion on particular policy issues over time shows “a nonideological public moving rightward on some issues, leftward on others, and not moving much at all on still others” (p. 20), instead of widening divisions between two distinct camps.
Although Fiorina concurs with Abramowitz that engaged citizens are more polarized than their disengaged counterparts (p. 24), he regards the “political class” as a small, unrepresentative slice of the American people, estimating its share at around 15% (p. 42). Furthermore, the controversial social issues that fuel so much political activism—for example, abortion and gay rights—are “simply not considered very important by the American public” (p. 28). Fiorina also rejects the inference that the engaged public has grown substantially. Despite rising education levels and improved communication technologies, “Americans are no better informed than they were a generation ago” (p. 37). The increases in engagement that have occurred, such as in giving money and displaying bumper stickers, “may only reflect an increase in mobilizing activity by the parties” (p. 45).
The fundamental disagreement between Abramowitz and Fiorina thus centers on their assessment of the engaged electorate. For Abramowitz, these are the people who are best informed about public affairs, who contribute the most to American public life, and it is only natural that they would have significant influence over the course of public affairs. For Fiorina, however, the political class is a self-selected, biased subgroup whose influence distorts politics and policymaking. He views their outsized role as, in part, an unanticipated consequence of institutional reforms. As the American system of government was opened up to wider participation—through various sunshine reforms, primary elections, and a proliferation of advocacy groups—politics began to attract more activists motivated by narrow issues and ideological agendas, as opposed to the pragmatists drawn to politics during periods characterized by more closed, party machine–dominated processes: “When the doors to the political system were opened wider, less representative people walked through them” (p. 87).
Notably, the two books offer starkly different interpretations of the increased partisanship in public evaluations of the president. Abramowitz emphasizes the long-term trend: “[T]he difference between the percentage of Democratic identifiers and Republican identifiers approving of the president's performance was 36 points for Richard Nixon in 1972, 42 points for Jimmy Carter in 1980, 52 points for Ronald Reagan in 1988, 55 points for George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Bill Clinton in 1996, and 71 points for George W. Bush in 2004” (p. 46). He views these patterns as the result of an extended process of “partisan-ideological polarization” (p. 44) in which the electorate's ideological differences became better expressed in the political system and political conflict correspondingly intensified. Fiorina, by contrast, interprets the party-polarized responses to presidents as evidence that presidents are taking positions farther from the median voter: “If the president moves from a position near the center of the entire electorate to one at the center of his base, he has moved closer to most of his own party and consequently his approval ratings among his own party rise. At the same time, he has moved away from everyone in the other party so their approval of him falls” (p. 57). In short, Fiorina views polarization as a result of political leadership choices, Abramowitz as a reflection of divergence in the electorate itself.
Notably, the trend has continued under President Barack Obama. Despite Obama's stylistic differences with his predecessors and repeated promises to transcend Washington partisanship, public evaluations of his performance are the most polarized for any first-term president in Gallup polling history. The escalating partisan divergence in presidential evaluations over time points toward systemic changes beyond individual leadership choices. On the other hand, the much more limited party polarization in Americans' views on issues, as opposed to their views of political figures, suggests that the changes cannot be understood simply by reference to ideology.
The substantial differences between the authors' “big picture” interpretations should not obscure the considerable overlaps between them. Most prominently, both books discuss the sorting processes that have given rise to more ideologically coherent political parties. Abramowitz focuses on partisan realignment among white conservatives in the South and blue-collar (especially Catholic) conservatives in the North, as well as the emergence of gender, marriage, and religious commitment gaps. Fiorina emphasizes black migration to the North, which made the Democratic Party more northern and liberal, and the population growth and migrants that augmented Republican ranks throughout the Sunbelt. He also examines the evangelical reaction and the secular response, noting that the “contemporary relationship between church-going habits and presidential vote actually emerged quite suddenly between the 1988 and 1992 elections” (p. 115). In addition, both books characterize contemporary electoral campaigns as primarily about mobilizing core constituencies, rather than appealing to swing voters. They both conclude that gerrymandering played little role in congressional polarization. Both are skeptical about any easy reforms that would reverse these trends. And both reflect back on the famous 1951 American Political Science Association report “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System” by warning political scientists to “be careful what you wish for, lest it come true” (Abramowitz pp. ix–x; see also Fiorina pp. xv–xvii, 159–160).
With both books drawing on many of the same data sources, it is clear that the principal differences between them are interpretive. But the disagreements are not merely semantic or superficial. Together they provide a productive debate about contemporary political representation in the United States. Each is provocative, engaging, easy to read, perfectly appropriate for use in undergraduate courses, and capable of reaching an audience beyond political science.
Still, in reading two such books that take for granted an extraordinary intensity of elite polarization in American politics, I wonder if the use of roll-call votes to measure congressional polarization has led to an exaggerated view. Looking instead to the policies pursued by the two parties when they are in power suggests more centrism than extremism. Even during the years of unified Republican control under President George W. Bush, legislation on hot-button issues generally hewed close to mainstream opinion—for example, limiting federal recognition of gay marriage but not interfering with state policies to the contrary, and banning only some late-term abortion procedures. When the Democrats subsequently came back to power, with supermajority control of the Senate after 2008, they did not roll back the Republican policies that they had so vigorously opposed. The 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit, created to great outcry among Democrats, was only marginally tweaked during the landmark health care reform of 2010. President Bush's highly contentious antiterrorism domestic surveillance programs were retroactively validated by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 2007. At this writing, a Democratic Congress is likely to extend the controversial 2001 Bush tax cuts for all but the highest income taxpayers (and it is possible that even those may be preserved). President Bush's auto and banking bailouts were continued under Obama.
Such continuities suggest that a considerable share of the polarization in Washington voting and rhetoric may be engineered for political communication and voter mobilization. During an era of remarkably tight two-party competition, the party out of power continually impeaches the performance of the party in power in a bid for increased public support. But in the end, the two parties may not disagree nearly so profoundly as they seem to now.
