PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Political polarization among Americans has grown rapidly in the last 40 years — more than in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia or Germany — a phenomenon possibly due to increased racial division, the rise of partisan cable news and changes in the composition of the Democratic and Republican parties. That’s according to new research co-authored by Jesse Shapiro, a professor of political economy at Brown University. The study, conducted alongside Stanford University economists Levi Boxell and Matthew Gentzkow, was released on Monday, Jan. 20, as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. In the study, Shapiro and colleagues present the first ever multi-nation evidence on long-term trends in “affective polarization” — a phenomenon in which citizens feel more negatively toward other political parties than toward their own. They found that in the U.S., affective polarization has increased more dramatically since the late 1970s than in the eight other countries they examined — the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden. “A lot of analysis on polarization is focused on the U.S., so we thought it could be interesting to put the U.S. in context and see whether it is part of a global trend or whether it looks more exceptional,” Shapiro said. “We found that the trend in the U.S. is indeed exceptional.” Using data from four decades of public opinion surveys conducted in the nine countries, the researchers used a so-called “feeling thermometer” to rate attitudes on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 reflected no negative feelings toward other parties. They found that in 1978, the average American rated the members of their own political party 27 points higher than members of the other major party. By 2016, Americans were rating their own party 45.9 points higher than the other party, on average. In other words, negative feelings toward members of the other party compared to one’s own party increased by an average of 4.8 points per decade. The researchers found that polarization had also risen in Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland in the last 40 years, but to a lesser extent. In the U.K., Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden, polarization decreased. Why has the U.S. become so much more polarized? Shapiro said it may be partly because, since the 1970s, major political parties have become increasingly aligned with certain ideologies, races and religious identities. For example, Republicans are now more likely to be religious, while Democrats are more likely to be secular. “There’s evidence that within the U.S., the two major political parties have become more homogeneous in certain ways, including ideologically and socially,” Shapiro said. “So when you identify with a certain party and you’re looking across the aisle, the people you’re looking at are more different from you than they were a few decades ago.” That “party sorting” seems to be less pronounced in some of the other countries included in the study, Shapiro said — but it has perhaps played a role in deepening divisions in Canada. Another explanation for the increase in polarization — one that also seems relatively unique to the U.S., according to Shapiro — is the rise of 24-hour partisan cable news. Shapiro noted that in the countries where political polarization has fallen in the last four decades, public broadcasting received more public funding than it did in the U.S. The trio argue that the data speak against the rise of the internet as a major cause of political polarization because all nine countries have seen a pronounced rise in internet use, but not all of them have seen a rise in polarization. The conclusion is consistent with other studies they have conducted, including one in 2018 that cast doubt on the hypothesized role of the web in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and another in 2017 that concluded greater internet use among Americans is not associated with faster growth in polarization. Shapiro said that understanding the root causes of political polarization, both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, could help politicians and citizens alike understand how the phenomenon may be driving their decisions and preferences — and it could ultimately reveal strategies for bridging divides. “There are good reasons to think that when people in different political camps cease to respect each other, it’s harder to make political compromises and create good public policy,” Shapiro said. “There’s also some evidence that a person’s political identity can influence their behavior — what they buy, where they live, who they hire. If we can understand what’s driving partisan divides, we may be able to take steps to reduce them.”
Last week I wrote a post discussing what I thought were the issues which will decide the 2020 presidential election in the United States. Increasing political polarization is, however, a problem facing liberal democracies around the world and to a large degree the United States, and Trump himself, is just an example of what is happening in many countries including the U.K., where I was born, Spain, where I live and lately in places like Chile, Bolivia and Colombia as well as several countries in Central Europe which I wrote about in another post a few weeks ago. In my view this polarization goes well beyond the old labels of left and right and have to do with fundamental disagreements about the nature of civil society, the role of government, and the responsibilities of every citizen and even what it means to be a citizen. Clearly one cause of this polarization is economic as not everyone has benefited from the last 20-30 years of globalization, economic integration and automation equally.
Economists will tell us that eventually the economy will improve and more jobs will be created but lately, much automation has replaced or displaced labor rather than enhancing its productivity. As well documented by Oxford’s Carl Benedikt Frey in The Technology Trap, it took approximately 3 generations – in what was called Engels pause – for real prosperity to be felt by the working class during the industrial revolution. In many parts of the world including the United States, the benefits of automation and digitalization as well as global economic integration are seen most clearly in specific cities and hubs leaving secondary towns and cities far behind as well as the countryside. This economic inequality and the drying up of middle class manufacturing jobs is, in my view , one of the causes of polarization as well as the root cause of the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and the rise of populism in many parts of the world. Another reason for the level of political polarization around the world is that not everyone actually votes except for a handful of countries in which it is obligatory such as Australia. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), voter turnout in 2019 was 57% in the United Staes, 69% In the United Kingdom and just 47 and 49% in Columbia and Chile. In Spain it only reached 76% even as the country had to vote a second time in the same year in an attempt to resolve the situation.  The thing is that 25 – 40% of people do not vote, then often the tone of political discourse gets sharper and even, as it is in my country, quite nasty. This is because the debate is no longer about convincing anyone about anything but getting a politician’s natural allies – the ones who agree with them anyway – out to vote. The third thing driving this polarization is the way this sharper political discourse generates feedback loops and echo chambers within the digital and social media space. Essentially, people who agree with one another go to the same media outlets in which their views are re-enforced and where they can trade even more outrageous stories about their political opponents on social media. These stories in the 2016 election were often planted by Russian hackers (trolls) working for the Russian government and then fed into the news feeds on Facebook and other platforms causing people to firmly believe what is essentially fake news. What makes the problem even more acute in the United States is that the current President is a pathological liar. According to the Washington Post, Donald Trump has made 13,435 false or misleading claims in the first 993 days in office and they actually track how many times he lies every day. This includes his press conferences, speeches and, of course, on his twitter account where he does his best to feed the disinformation bubble around his core supporters while decrying the traditional media outlets like the Post and the New York Times as being outlets of fake news. Part of the story is a deliberate political strategy of mixing truth with so much other noise that normal people tune out and just go with what they believed in the first place. Psychologists have actually measured the impact of information which goes against what we believe and in most cases people not only do not change their minds but hold on to their beliefs even tighter and discredit the source. The motto of the Post is Democracy dies in Darkness and while it is part of the problem, the media is also a key to the solution. perhaps the key challenges for the news media in the digital age is how to tell the truth when it can be difficult to determine, may take time to check, and when there is less money available for quality journalism. |
What are the causes of political polarization
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