Nancy Rosenblum posted an article based on her recent book, “On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship,” which she describes as her “analysis of antipartyism and attempt at rehabilitation.” Following up at Cato Unbound is Brink Lindsey, who writes that “under present circumstances at least, partisan zeal ought to be attacked rather than defended.”

I’ll summarize what Rosenblum and Lindsey have to say and then give my reaction (much of which is based on data from our Red State, Blue State book).

Rosenblum writes:

Partisanship needs a moment of appreciation. We recognize “partisan” as invective; the barb comes out of improbable mouths, a virtual reflex. While party activists battle one another each claiming they are on side of the angels, critics demonize them all and praise independents as their undisputed moral superiors. . . . One third of survey respondents agree with the proposition “The truth is we probably don’t need political parties in America anymore,” and a third of voters prefers that “candidates run as individuals without party labels.” . . .

As Lindsey puts it:

Nancy Rosenblum makes a convincing case that American political independents don’t deserve their good press. In particular, she cites findings from the political science literature that independents tend to be less interested in politics, less informed about the issues, and less likely to participate in the process than are their partisan fellow citizens. And by virtue of their “none of the above” political identity, they are “weightless” and “atomized,” free-riding off the agenda-setting and coalition-building efforts of partisans that give political life its substance.

Partisans are biased–even about factual issues

As Rosenblum argues, citizens have good moral and political reasons to affiliate with parties: one voter does not count for much, but as part of a larger group we can make our voices heard. Unfortunately, as Lindsey points out, partisans differ on matters of fact as well as opinions and values. Here are a couple more examples:

– Views on the economy. A survey was conducted in 1988, at the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term, asking various questions about the government and economic conditions, including, “Would you say that compared to 1980, inflation has gotten better, stayed about the same, or gotten worse?” Amazingly, over half of the self-identified strong Democrats in the survey said that inflation had gotten worse and only 8% thought it had gotten much better, even though the actual inflation rate dropped from 13% to 4% during Reagan’s eight years in office. Political scientist Larry Bartels studied this and other examples of bias in retrospective evaluations.

– Climate change and college education. Reporter Brandon Keim found this interesting nugget from a Pew survey:

Over the last year and a half, the number of Americans who believe the Earth is warming has dropped. The decline is especially precipitous among Republicans: in January 2007, 62 percent accepted global warming, compared to just 49 percent now. . . . The confounding part: among college-educated poll respondents, 19 percent of Republicans believe that human activities are causing global warming, compared to 75 percent of Democrats. But take that college education away and Republican believers rise to 31 percent while Democrats drop to 52 percent.

At first this seems weird: you might think that college grads are more likely to go with the scientific consensus on global warming, or you might think that college grads would be more skeptical, but it seems funny that it would go one way for Democrats and the other for Republicans.

But looked at another way, it makes perfect sense. Among college grads, there is a big partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans. Among non-graduates, the differences are smaller. This is completely consistent with research that shows that people with more education are on average more politically polarized. Basically, higher educated Democrats are more partisan Democrats, and higher educated Republicans are more partisan Republicans. On average, educated people are more tuned in to politics and more likely to align their views with their political attitudes. From this perspective, it’s really not about the scientific community at all, it’s just a special case of the general phenomenon of elites being more politically polarized.

(The discussion of this point on my blog is fascinating: most of the commenters consider the differences between less-educated and more-educated people to be effects of a college education, whereas I–along with most other political scientists, I would guess–think of education more as a demographic variable, with the distinction between educated and less educated voters being a comparison of different sorts of people rather than an effect of education.)

Attitudes on different issues are less predictable than you might think

On the other hand, things aren’t quite as bad as Lindsey implies. For example, he writes, “There’s no epistemologically sound reason why one’s opinion about, say, the effects of gun control should predict one’s opinion about whether humans have contributed to climate change or how well Mexican immigrants are assimilating — these things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Yet the fact is that views on these and a host of other matters are indeed highly correlated with each other.”

Is that true? The short answer is that I don’t know. But the fuller answer is that I suspect the correlations on these views are pretty low. I say this because one thing I do know is that the correlations between attitudes on different issues are surprisingly low.

Sociologist Delia Baldassarri and I looked at this a couple of years ago in an analysis of decades of survey responses from the National Election Study. Correlations between pairs of issues are pretty low, typically around 0.2. These correlations have increased in the past few decades, but slowly–only about 0.02 per decade.

Although Americans have become increasingly polarized in their impressions of the Democratic and Republican parties, each person maintains a mix of attitudes within himself or herself. For instance, 40% of Americans in a 2004 survey were self-declared Republicans, but only 23% identified themselves as both Republican and conservative. Almost half of Republicans do not describe themselves as being ideologically conservative. If we also consider issue preferences, the constraint of people’s political preferences looks even weaker. Only 6% of respondents are Republicans who think of themselves as conservatives, oppose abortion, and have conservative views on affirmative action and health policy. Fully 85% of self-declared Republicans are nonconservative or take a nonconservative stand on at least one of these three traditional issues.

A similar picture emerges if we look at Democrats. In this case, of the 49% self-declared Democrats in the sample, only 36% call themselves liberals. Overall, almost 90% of Democrats are nonliberal or have nonliberal views on abortion, affirmative action, or health policy. These numbers should not be surprising, given that in general, the correlation between party identification or ideology and opinion on political issues is low. Knowing somebody’s political identification increases our chances of guessing his or her issue preferences, but not by much. This supports the notion of journalists such as David Brooks that red and blue America are cultural constructs more than bundles of issue positions.

The preceding analyses consider five positions (party, ideology, and three issues): if each were determined by a simple coin flip, there would be about 3% of the population (more precisely, 1 in 32), in each of the pure categories; instead, we see about 6% for each: more than would be expected by pure randomness, but far less than if attitudes on the different positions were perfectly correlated.

The picture does not change if we look at correlations among issue preferences alone. For example, consider opinions on health insurance and abortion. Overall, 46% of respondents favored government support for health insurance. Among the people who supported abortion, 51% supported government health insurance. Similarly, 55% of respondents support abortion. Among those supporting health insurance, 62% were also in favor of abortion.

The following graph, based on the research of political scientists Joseph Bafumi and Michael Herron, summarizes voters’ ideological positions on a number of issues:

House members and senators’ positions are estimated based on their votes in Congress. Voters’ positions are estimated based on some survey questions where people were asked their views on a number of issues that had also been voted on in Congress. As you can see, elected representatives are generally more extreme than voters.

Congressmembers are more ideological–more partisanly-consistent in their views–than most voters. When you see this graph, it should be no surprise–after all, congressmembers are professional Democrats and Republicans in a way that few voters are. On the other hand, we also know that to be elected to Congress you need to get a plurality of votes in your district, and there’s evidence that moderation is helpful in this respect.

Given all this evidence of voters’ lack of issue coherence, how is it that Lindsey assumes that views on gun control, climate change, and immigration are so highly correlated? This comes back to another thing that Baldassarri found, which is that attitudes on issues are more highly correlated among politically active Americans–the kind of people, I assume, whom Lindsey, Rosenblum, and I are more likely to meet and talk with about politics.

As the times change, so do our prescriptions

It helps to put concerns about partisanship in recent historical context. In this case I’ll take a slightly shorter view than Rosenblum and just look at the past forty years. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, political scientists and journalists such as David Broder started writing books with titles such as The Party’s Over, worrying about the diminished importance of political organizations in American life, and expressing concern with a more shallow mass-media presentation of politics in books such as Joe McGinness’s The Selling of the President, written about Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign.

Why were the increased importance of the media and decreased importance of political parties viewed as such a bad thing? For one thing, political scientists and journalists were more likely to be Democrats than Republicans–as was true of the country as a whole at that time. But Americans continued to vote Republican in presidential elections. Theories of divided government and balancing aside, this would be disturbing to someone who saw the Democrats as the natural majority party, hence the concern about the decline of party influence.

Fast forward to the late 1990s and beyond. Political scientists and journalists are now bemoaning the increase in political polarization. Why was partisanship considered such a bad thing? Again, political scientists and journalists are more likely to be Democrats. They noticed that many Americans agree with the Democrats more than Republicans on specific issues but nonetheless were voting for Republicans. What was going on? Partisanship was a possible culprit: with more Americans identifying with the conservative than the liberal label, perhaps they were voting Republican out of an ideological consistency that is not actually in accordance with their issue positions.

As former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay put it in 2006, “The common lament over the recent rise in political partisanship is often nothing more than a veiled complaint instead about the recent rise of political conservatism.” Now that the Democrats are in power, perhaps it is their turn to champion party loyalty.

Arguments for or against partisanship have to be evaluated on their own terms, and Rosenblum’s argument in particular is part of a longer tradition among political science to show respect for and understanding of the participants at all levels of the political process. I will say, though, that a call for a return to partisanship may find a more receptive audience among liberal opinion leaders now than in, say, 2001 or 2005. The current period of unified Democratic control of the federal government has put a new spin on debates about polarization and partisanship.

Summary

Rosenblum does us all a useful service by placing partisanship and, especially, criticisms of partisanship, in historical perspective. And, while I respect Lindsey’s concerns about the systematic errors that partisans make–djvergences that in some cases are even larger among more educated voters, which, as Lindsey says, undermine both clear thinking and moral integrity–I think that some of these worries may be overstated. For better or worse, most voters remain near the political center. We may have more to fear from the partisanship of politicians than from the partisanship of voters.

I definitely agree with Rosenblum that political scientists (and political journalists, too) should take partisanship seriously: whether or not bipartisan agreement is desirable, partisanship among politicians and voters is certainly the norm and is worthy of study. And I definitely agree with Linsdey that partisanship is more ideological than it used to be, but that these ideologies are imperfect fits for the majority of voters. This is one reason why voters can show strong preferences for one party over the other while still expressing a desire for bipartisan governance.