David Brady: Okay my name is David Brady and I am Deputy Director of the Hoover Institution and as you can see co-editor and co-author of this book "Red And Blue Nation?: Characteristics And Causes of America's Polarized Politics." So this project, joint project between Hoover Institution and Brookings Institution, it's okay for me to say Hoover first here because when we did it at Brookings they said Brookings first there so. No I am just kidding. Pietro came to me and talked about you know, why not we cooperate on a study of polarization, so that we get both perspectives on it and see if we can raise some funding to do it. So essentially Pietro raised the money and the Hoover Institution related in the project, but mainly it was his work. Probably wonder what I am doing here I will show him that later. Now the idea of this book as you have heard about this issue of polarization and the Red and the Blue Nation has been prominent for quite some time in American politics and much is attributed to it. Not much good, bad for the country, causes bad public policy, so the issue was was from a scholarly perspective, there is something more to this polarize was there anything really there in polarization or was it a lot of media hype and short terms stories that didn't make much sense. So the way we approached it was, we want to know first of all what is polarization, what would it mean and there is really three levels that we could talk about. First of all with the polarization is polarization at the government level where we can pretty well measure how Congress votes and so the question there is you know, how often do the Democrats oppose the Republicans on everything, is there any overlap where some Democrats go with some Republicans and at that level it appeared clear that there was, in the United States, polarization relative to at least the immediate post World War II period. That is if you start with the post World War II period and you think about the Johnson presidency, not the Johnson presidency, sorry but if you think about the Eisenhower presidency with Rayburn and Johnson cooperating in that kind of sprit that didn't seem to be present in the present circumstances. It's nice by the way if you teach them for the undergraduates to be able to look at the audience and mention, Dwight Eisenhower and Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson and people know what the hell you are talking about. Undergraduates they have no idea who any of those people are. And then the second part was the elites and by the elites we mean the party activists. And fortunately we have had some survey research done on party elites literarily back into the probably 1948-52 era. And it turns out that at least on those two levels, the party elites and the governing elite, the members of Congress et cetera they are polarized relative to this post World War II period. So at least at those two levels there was polarization and the real question then comes to the third level is where is the public in this. Where is the American public, are they polarized because if they are polarized then American politics becomes really pretty straightforward to study because if the publics is polarized on whatever set of issues they are, one group here and one group there then it's perfectly clear why the elites would be polarized and why congress would be polarized because they are reflecting public opinion. And whatever solution, if you thought polarization was bad how it would work itself out or what remarks you would make about how to reform it would be pretty difficult, would be different from the second scenario which I am now about to present. And in a sense the whole project would not have been possible without my colleague Morris Fiorina's work called Culture War in which Mo argues and you will hear from him in a just a minute so I won't talk about it. But if the public is not polarized, imagine a world in which the public is pretty much in the center but the elites and the government, Congress at least are polarized then that's an entirely different ball game because then you have to ask the question why is it that the public isn't polarized but the government is and the elites are. And then, you know, pick your own favorite explanation. It could be primaries, low turnout primaries that drive the Democrats to the left and Republicans to the right. It could be the effect of money, it could be so the there could be all sorts of effects and in that case, the solution, if you thought polarization was bad, would be to reform the institutions with open primaries to get more centrist candidates. But at any rate and the solutions would also be different. So the fundamental question of all of this issue of Red and Blue Nation is how do those three components fit together? How is it that the elite, Congressional, Congressmen and Congresswomen how they vote and the American public. So the key question is some sense is where is the public, are they as polarized as the elites. And to that question we turn to my colleague Morris Fiorina. When he finishes and I am about to put his when he finishes Pietro Nivola from Brookings will come forward. Pietro heads the Government Division at the Brookings Institution. And he is going to talk about what we found in the first volume and then we will open it up for questions. So just one second. Okay. This is it, okay and then you want, there you go.
Morris Fiorina: Thank you David, thank you all for coming today. The after the 2000 election of extending through the 2004 election you will all remember the narrative that was used to explain these elections that America was now engaged in a culture war. A deep divide, the reason for the polarization at the governmental levels that David had talked about was the fact that the population had divided into two large camps. One, moral traditionalists, the other basically secular humanists in modern terminology. And you remember the map, they are in numerous versions of this map. And the interpretation was that the god fearing states of the south and the Midwest were now all readied against the godless libertine states of the north east and the west coast and the old socialist states of the upper Midwest. There are a few people like New Mexicans and the who screwed up in the 2000 elections but by 2004 they have gotten with the program and the map was really neat by 2004. Now it was obvious, as somebody who is a political scientist who spent most of his life studying public opinion data in the American elections but there wasn't much to this narrative that empirically the data just didn't support this. And what we did in the first book Culture War was to simply amass data that showed that the American public was still largely centrist, largely pragmatic, not ideological, even on what you call hot button issues like abortion and so forth, that was still the case and not much had changed and well we just to clarify terms here. What do you mean by polarization is when the middle disappears and everybody goes to the extremes. So if you look at, I used to call these zones, but one of my students this year told me they always called these the bubble gum slides in their class. So whatever you like. On the one on the left there is 33 blues, 34 grays and 33 Rs - reds, call them Democrats, independents or Republicans, or liberals, moderates, conservatives whatever you want. It's an even distribution. Now by two we have polarization. Everything is either blue or red, it's liberal or conservative, or Democratic or Republican so it's ideological points of polarization. Now we knew the data didn't support that. In fact much of the data goes the opposite direction. American attitudes and views of it converging in recent years are not diverging. Just and here is an example from Gallup data that we didn't find these, originally we find the 1970s data after we wrote the book. Gallup simply asked people, do you call yourself a liberal, a moderate or a conservative, do you consider yourself and liberals are on the bottom. These are conservatives right here and these are moderates and this is the average in the 1970s surveys over here. This is I am having trouble here with technology. This is the 1990s surveys and the 2000 surveys. And what you are seeing is liberals are down a little. Conservatives are just about the same, moderates are up. There are actually more moderates, or more Americans considering themselves moderates nowadays than they did back in the Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford et cetera days of 1970s. So contrary to polarization we have actually less polarization on this ideological question. What we do have is what I call sorting. And this is the paper we did for the first volume here. By sorting what we mean is this, over here we have the same number in the two urns of liberals, moderates, conservatives or Democrats, independents, and Republicans but they are sorted differently. And the one on the left here is probably the hard to see. About two-thirds of the blues are Democrats. That is liberal Democrats, about two thirds of the Rs are Republicans, that is conservative Republicans but some Democrats are conservatives, some Republicans are liberals. Over hear we have a much higher proportion of blue, of liberal Democrats and much higher proportion of conservative Republicans although the larger margins are the same. Blues, reds and grays are the same and that's what's happened. The parties have gotten better sorted out. That the Democrats have gotten rid of a lot of their Conservatives mostly in the south who have had this large scale realignment, now probably it has now probably it has gotten rid of a large part of their liberal wing. The Republican Party in the north east is just about wiped out, after this last election. So while we have roughly the same numbers, of partisans, the same numbers of ideologues, the distorting into the parties have become cleaner now there is - and what we did in this paper was to investigate that in the TL and a lot of this is based on the thesis work of one of our students Matt Levendusky who is going to publish a book next year on looking at this in great detail. What we found is we moved the categories of issues, the parties today remained best sorted on new deal issues that is contrary to Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? The argument about cultural issues. You still can tell a Democrat and a Republican apart better by knowing their views on taxes, social security, healthcare etcetera that aren't cultural issues. Now we have that's increasing, over time that is not decreasing, it's actually increasing. The party are better sorted on these social welfare state issues. Racial issues the parties have now become better sorted as the southern conservatives have gone to Republican Party. Cultural issues, they are also better sorted on things like abortion so forth, well they are surprisingly, I will show you some things little later. Defensive foreign policy issues, there was absolutely no partisan sorting until 2004. And so, that is you couldn't tell a Democratic and a Republican apart on any kind of foreign policy or defense issues until 2004 on average. Now the question remains is that going to be a permanent development or is that something is going to go away once the Bush administration passes the scene, once Iraq war is over. We found numerous individual issue patterns, some place it kind of been better sorted on some issues, worse sorted on others. One party is sorting on one issue, need - the other party not on others. But the point I really want to emphasize is how limited the storting still is. That is it's by no means a perfect sorting. This is a graph that was just put out by the Pew Foundation a couple of weeks ago. They have been asking over the last 20 years, a set of questions. 40 questions in all on American's political and social attitudes and this is the average difference on those 40 questions between people who call themselves Democrats and people who call themselves Republicans over the 40 years. As you can see, it's going up from 10 percent to 14 percent in a 20 year period. So that's how much partisan sorting there has been overtime on all of these issues. Now granted if that sorting was 55 Democratic, 40 Republicans it's always on the opposite side of 50 percent, that is politically significant but a lot of this when you look at the individual data, you know, Republicans are in favor of the death penalty 75 percent and Democrats only 60 percent while Republicans are opposed to gay marriage or supported gay marriage in only 15 percent and Democrats in 30 percent. So lot of these issues, they are on the same sides of majority point even though they differ somewhat. It is still the case as David mentioned that ordinary Democrats and Republicans are far less sorted than politically elites. These are New York Times delegate surveys that have been doing since 1980. Where they compare the views of delegates to the Republican and Democratic National nominated conventions with the views of people out in the population, Democrats and Republicans who are in this survey at the same time. And notice how and this is the 2004 surveys. Notice how the delegates to the conventions on the general question of act of government, they are about as far apart you can get. This is like 85 percent of Republicans saying no and there are only 15 percent of Democrats saying no. Whereas it identifies only 13 percent apart, some issues yes, some issues no. They are pragmatic, you know, they don't have a blighted point of view. And even if you look at the issues at the fine party conflict today, the Bush tax cuts, abortion, Patriot Act type of things, diplomacy, working through the UN, gay marriage, gay relationships. You still see the ordinary identifies are half or less as separated as the delegates. So the closer you get down to the grass roots the less polarization you find. The polarization is strong, it's noticeable at the upper levels, it washes out as you go down. This is perhaps I think one of the most striking ones. You know, when you think of the Democratic National Party you think of NARAL and Kate Michaelman etcetera. And if you think of Republicans you think of James Dobson who focused on the family. This is the views on the abortion question in 2004 national elections that the political scientist run. The countries divided roughly into one third Democrats, one third Republics and one third independents. Then it goes up, when Republicans won in 2004 and up a level on the Republican side. At this last election, went up a little more in the Democratic side. It's basically, one third, one third, one third. Well in each party it's about half and half about half the people say I am a strong Democrat or strong Republican and the other half say well sort of a not so strong Democrat or Republican. So this is the one sixth of the population that puts itself in the strong Democratic category. And one sixth of population puts itself in the strong Republican category. And where do they where do their abortion views fall? Well the strong Democrats 10 percent say it should never be permitted and the other quarter says only in cases of rape, incest or when the women's life is in danger. So that's 33 percent of Democrats, one third of strong Democrats in the country out of step with their National Party saying they are essentially pro-life. In Republicans it's even more striking, among strong Republicans, the party of James Dobson et cetera you have nearly a quarter of Republicans saying always should be legal. You have about 18 percent all of that just saying any time there is a clear need. So basically you have about 40 percent of the Republican Party, the strong Republicans the base saying yeah, pro choice, by and large. There is nothing more liberal than the party advocates. So partisan sorting has occurred but it's not nearly as strong at the grassroots levels as it is at the elite level, even on what you call defining issues at the National Party level, it's not that impressive. Now in the last election, there have been columns written called "Revenge of the moderates" and "The middle strikes back" and so forth. About 38 percent people in the exit polls where Democrats, about a quarter independents, third Republicans, are nearly half were moderates, self identified moderates. In the next election where the turn out is going to increase from about 40 percent in the last election to about 60 percent in the Presidential Election, the increase is going to come, we know this from 40 years of voting data, the increase is going to come right here for the most part among the independents, moderates will certainly be barring some earth changing event, well and over the majority of electorate in the next election. So the electorate itself is still basically centrist, basically pragmatic and would choose those kinds of alternatives if the parties were to offer them. Now, that's been the problem. Now basically we we tend to get wide variety of liberal Democrats and Southern social Conservatives at the heads of the ticket. Now had the people who drew those maps have to look at races other than the Presidential race, they would have drawn different conclusions. This is the Red-Blue map drawn according to gubernatorial voting rather than Presidential voting. And you see there, this is after 2006 where there are 26 States now. They have a governor at the party office at from the way the they voted for President last time. Even after 2004, there were 22 States like that. So you have you have Blue Governors in Red States like lot of yeah, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, out here. You have Red Governors in Blue States like Massachusetts and California. That depending on the choices they get on the ballots, people are voting different, very different ways. It's not just all Red, Blue or liberal Democrat or liberal Republican. It's the choices they are offered. You go on to the legislative level, this is party controlled. There is the Democratic or Republican party's control of the entire State, the Governorship or both Houses of the Legislature. Half the States have some form of divided control. People have given one or one level to one party, well two levels to one party and one level to another party. Here is not that many, only a minority where the Democrats have full control and Republicans have full control. So the conclusion is despite the partisan sorting is going on, this is basically still a purple country for the most part. This it's just a different shades of purple running from reddish purple to bluish purple. But there aren't really that many states in which the right Republican or the right Democrat could win from the other party if they simply can manage to get nominated.
Pietro Nivola: I am Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution. And I am going to try to give you a summary of sort of the basic findings of the project that go a little bit beyond what Professor Fiorina just discussed. This is the first volume well, there are going to be two volumes to this project. This is volume one which looks at the causes and characteristics, as the subtitle says. Volume two will will be considering the consequences or the implications of of partisan polarization and what if anything ought to be done about it. So that one will be called the subtitle, the consequences and correction of America's polarized politics. These are the and for those of you who brought the book, I don't need to do this, but the the contents are these essays each of whom there is an essay, that I wrote with a colleague Bill Galston followed by Professor Fiorina's essay with discussion by various other experts in this field and the third chapter is Professor Brady's on the history comparing polarization today with what it was like in the past. Fourth chapter deals with the question of religion in the role of religion in polarizing, supposedly polarizing the US and that was written by my colleague E.J. Dionne at Brookings. The fifth one is by Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania who wrote a very interesting piece on what the media has been up to. Sixth is the question of Gerrymandering. This was written by my colleague Thomas Mann and it's very it's quite an interesting paper because it finds that actually Gerrymandering does not turn out to be quite as big a deal in the course of this polarization problem as is widely suspected. Now I just want to quickly mention that without these three foundations we couldn't have done this project. So we are very grateful to them. Now this was sort of the first question we tried to address. How divided are we? And I guess, the answer we sort of came, the conclusion we came to was that the notion that there is a great culture war going on in the US as Mo Fiorina just said, is really pretty bogus and not at all what is actually going on. However, our politics had become considerably more partisan for the reasons that he discussed, the sorting of people into the two into Democrats and Republicans who vote more consistently, especially in Presidential elections for one party or the other. And they are more partisan, I think, than they were a generation ago. The partisan, the partisan differences have gotten more sharp than they were on certain issues and I would say primarily on foreign policy questions. I we, in the second volume of the book we get into a much more on this, so you will have to wait until that comes out which is in December but we will be back here talking about that, but to give you just some idea of what of how deep the cleavages have been on foreign policy especially in the after you know, with the Iraq war and so on or after September 11, we found one of the papers in the second volume finds, for example, that 63 percent of Republicans strongly agree with the notion that under some conditions war is necessary to obtain justice, whereas only half that number of Democrats feel that way. Here is another example that's in the second, in the second book. When asked, would you approve the use of US military troops even to just destroy a terrorist camp such as we did, you know, we have been doing in Afghanistan, barely a half - more than half of Democrats said yes, 57 percent. 95 percent of Republicans strongly say yes. Now that's a considerable gap between the partisans on issues of that sort. Now here is the question that Professor Brady touched on at the beginning. How much of this phenomenon is at the - strictly at the elite level, that is the active part, the really active partisans, the delegates to the national conventions, the politicians, the media or whatever. The opinion leaders in society and how much of it is actually coming up, welling up from the public, from the electorate at large. And I think we all came to a consensus that it's mainly a top down process driven by the political class. But several of those, several of us felt that at least on certain types of issues, it is also a bottom up process, percolating from the electorate probably because of a lot of the sorting process that Fiorina was describing. So that some of the polarization really is here by popular demand, if I can put it that way. Now is today's polarization unique by historical standards. Professor Brady argues in his paper that if you go back far enough in time, the polarization that you see today especially in the Congress looks more like what it was through most of American history than what it was like in the 1950s where it was really more of an exception to the norm, in the sense that there was much more bipartisanship especially on questions of foreign policy during that period. In Dionne's paper about religion you know, he tries to figure out, okay, how much of the partisan divide has to do with religious issues and also with the tendency of religious voters to swing toward the Republicans and less religious voters to go to down price and indeed he finds that observant religious voters, people, meaning people who go to church at least once a week have indeed been congregating in the Republican Party and have driven the party to the right at least on certain value questions particularly, issues such as abortion, same sex marriage and certain types of social issues or wedge issues. Secularists are populating the Democratic party's base and in fact they drive their party to the left on such issues, strongly pro-choice for example and so on. But overall religion is not as important yet as traditional factors such as class, income raise which are really still the dominant determinants of voter preferences. So as Mo Fiorina said earlier, the new deal issues are still very much alive and well in the electorate. Does the do the mass media contribute to polarized politics. Professor Mutz's answer to this is that it's pretty likely that they are contributing in at least these four ways by segmenting audiences into ideological echo chambers, which by which he means, you know, the development for example, internet blogs that had particular partisan niches and the development of cable television, talk radio, these types of changes have had the effect of segmenting the voters into groups that just sort of listen to one another rather than to a sort of more mainstream points of view. There has been a tendency according to her to siphon off the independent moderate voters that are the least politically engaged in any case. These voters tend to migrate to sort of entertainment outlets and therefore are sort of taken out of the game and they and they tend to participate less in elections and in the political process that internally has a polarizing effect. She thinks that the horse race effect, the tendency of the media to cover the question of who is ahead and who is behind and who is the winner and who is the loser tends to de-legitimate the loser and in some kind of complicated way that she she suspects that that may have a polarizing influence as well. She also thinks that television has had an adverse impact because of the instability that's that's sort of portrayed through in your face types of programs, pugnacious, truculent exchanges between people on television has had an effect. On the question of gerrymandering, yes. The process of drawing Congressional districts in ways that sort of secure or lock down, certain number of Congressional districts as to make them completely noncompetitive tends to entrench arch partisans in the House of Representatives but we estimated that really only somewhere between 10 to 30 maximum 30 percent of the non-competitive Congressional districts can be really explained through gerrymandering, the rest of it really has to do with the migration of voters into districts, migrations of there own choice. Having nothing to do with how district lines have been drawn. So on the margin there is now question that gerrymandering is part of the problem, if we considered it a problem, but its is not the - it's not the main cause of noncompetitive Congressional districts and therefore of polarizing the house. Now what are some deeper causes of partisan polarization? There are lots of them but, we talk up at some length about three. One of course is the party realignment in the south, when the Democrats lost their conservative southern base they became a much more liberal party and as the Republicans locked down the south and in the sunbelt and that became their base they became a more orthodox party as well, especially as they lost some of their moderate base in the parts of northeast for example, in New England and so on and that went on, that continued, has continued in recent elections. There was basically a wipe out of Republican moderates in New England in the 2006 mid term elections. The end of the Cold War played a part because, of course, the parties tended to pull together a lot more in the face of this big external threat, the Soviet Union and when that external threat sort of began to wane, the party's could afford to pull apart. Also partisan divergence has developed over certain types of wedge issues. If you look at for example the difference between Republican and Democratic party platforms on the question of abortion, really they were pretty indistinguishable roughly until the late 1970s after which you could really begin to see clear differences between the party platforms on a question like that and as I said earlier on foreign policy the Democrats and Republicans began to diverge a great deal. Now just to give you a quick preview of where we are headed in the second volume, so what how much difference does all this make for policy and politics? In our preliminary answer we haven't our papers are still in manuscript form so we are not. We haven't engraved them in stone quite yet. But our sense is that that there that we can conclude the following things, first of all, polarized political parties in the Congress, for example, have brought less legislative grid-lock than is commonly assumed. As a matter of fact there has been a great deal of important legislation that's been that's been enacted despite all the polarization. And it's been enacted either because one party was very disciplined and managed to ram through what it wanted or because there has actually been a fair amount of bipartisan cooperation on other key pieces of legislation and I can give you examples of that later. But but the polarized situation, especially in the Congress, has complicated essentially four essentially tasks or three essential tasks. One is that there really is no headway being made in terms of tackling the nation's long range fiscal predicament which is what's going to happen as the baby boomers retire and the welfare state begins to get really crushed by the weight of Medicare spending and various entitlement programs. The problem of sustaining this kind of spending and how to keep the books balanced in the face of that. Secondly as we have seen especially in the past six months it's going to become increasingly difficult to sustain a dependable and forceful and reliable foreign policy when the two parties are so much at odds. It used to be, the old saying was you know, politics had to stop at the water's edge when it came to foreign affairs. That's clearly no longer the case. And finally we suspect that there is a potential risk here to the independents and even the health of at least some of the basic institutions of government particularly the judiciary where the process of confirming federal judges has become so contentious and acrimonious because of partisan counter station over that, that there are there really are some dangers there and finally I think it is arguably the case that if you have too much sort of partisan polemics in Washington the voters, they don't necessarily get to discuss this, as a matter of fact they often, in some ways the intensity of the partisan contest sends more voters to the polls. They turn out more but in terms of their sense of trust in government, governmental institutions that maybe eroding because of in part because of the intensity of the partisan warfare. So with that, I will shut up.
