Excellent summary. I've been reading the book recently* and you highlight details which I had skimmed over -- I appreciate you digging into the notes).
The biggest question I have about the book, which I'll throw out now, is what is the best way to read it now. I think the claim of the title -- that political polarization is being driven by people moving to more polarized communities -- isn't particularly well supported. I don't have a good sense of exactly how much effect that has had, but I think it's clearly not the primary cause of polarization.
But the book doesn't reduce to that thesis. It's clearly a work of journalism, rather than political science. It is thematically rather than logically constructed and he throws in a bunch of stories about polarization which are fascinating to read now as a historical document of "here is what these trends, which are inescapable now, looked 10 years ago."
Is it more useful to focus on the ways in which the book makes an argument, and the strengths and weaknesses of it, or to explore the threads that connect the book to today -- even if those aren't central to the argument?
* Note to self: Finish reading The Big Sort and start working on a piece for section II.
My suspicion is that Bishop has found some true beliefs, but mostly by accident, so the best approach would be not to focus on his argument but on what independent support his conclusions may have. Which is to say, exactly what I didn't do.
3: hear, hear. I really, really appreciate Mossy actually fact-checking him, especially on something as obscure as the boardinghouse stuff.
I suppose it's unfair to blame him for the OP's synopsis, but I'm confused/annoyed by him treating the Powell memo as a "conspiracy theory" and then turning around and saying, essentially, "but party elites did perfectly recognize trends, foresee their direction, and exploit them with perfection." Oh, OK. That does seem a lot more plausible than a network of rich people all agreeing to spend their money towards the goal of becoming richer. I mean, that basically never happens except in conspiracy theories.
Great job! (Note to self: read the book.)
A few questions qua comments:
1. I have read that interstate migration has been in decline for a long time. How does that affect Bishop's thesis? (Really a question for anyone who is writing a piece, I guess.)
2. Is it really the case the rich people are Republicans and vice versa? What is "rich" in this context? I live in a "rich" state (MA) and my impression is that there are very few Republicans of any degree of wealth. While the state elects Republican governors now and then, it is largely an insurance policy against complete Democratic domination, rather than an affirmation of generalized "Republican" views. For that matter, Charlie Baker does not have very right-wing views.
3. It seems crystal clear that the "less partisan major parties" past was largely an illusion created by the existence of populist, racist Democrats in the South who (for complex political reasons, such as seniority) had a lot of power. Now they are populist, racist Republicans instead (and still have a lot of power, alas).
Notably, red counties come out looking poorer than blue, which is inconsistent with my general understanding that most Republican voters are richer than average;
I have the sense that I've seen clear answers for this question, but doing a quick search I mostly find things which are snarky and unconvincing or older and more tenative.
In short, rich people and poor people who live in poor states have very different voting preferences from each other. Rich people and poor people who live in rich states have much more similar voting preferences. Gelman et al. don't have any hard and fast explanation for this (they note that race explains about half of this disparity, but only half). However, their results do suggest that some of the conventional wisdom of American journalists on class, voting and geographic location stands in sore need of revisiting.
I think I've seen something more recent than that and I'll see if I can find it.
Thanks everyone for kind words.
5: Good questions all.
5.1: He analyzes everything at the county level, so intrastate migration will still work for him, but he argues later that 1965 was the watershed, with polarization increasing steadily since then, so if you're right that isn't good for him.
Uh oh, this means my deadline to finish reading it is approaching. Agree with NickS - thanks for the detailed criticism of the first section. I'm not familiar enough with JSTOR to do the same thing with mine (and, I'll admit, too lazy), but I'll try to keep that kind of thing in mind when I start my write-up. Honestly, I'm not enjoying this. I'll still do it, I have the free time and getting out of my comfort zone is good for me, but I probably won't join the next reading group unless the book is very different from this one. I haven't read book-length nonfiction in years and this is a reminder of why. I'm tempted to navel-gaze about this for a while, but I should save some comments for when it's my turn to write a piece.
Is it more useful to focus on the ways in which the book makes an argument, and the strengths and weaknesses of it, or to explore the threads that connect the book to today -- even if those aren't central to the argument?
Personally I'd say the second option. Mossy's post isn't the first sense I've had that as an argument, the book is weak. But has been kind of interesting as a bunch of snapshots of politics up to 2004, and things have changed in interesting ways since then. Horrifying, but interesting.
4: I didn't read the scholarly stuff as closely as Mossy, but agreed, the handling of the Powell memo bugged me too. Calling something a "conspiracy theory" is a good way to mock it and in some cases I'd agree, but in real life many things actually happen that could reasonably be described as a conspiracy.
6: Interesting. My own thinking about that was along the lines of the old adage, "figures lie and liars figure." Not that Bishop is setting out to be misleading, but that data can be sliced so many ways that it becomes meaningless.
First, this is a great summary. Thanks.
Second, I mostly had the same questions as Dave in 5.
5.1: I think what is happening is that more liberal (or at least more educated) people are fleeing the rural areas that form the Republican geographic base. And I think that's accelerating.
5.3: Yes. I think it is extremely disingenuous to not mention that when talking about a past where the parties were less divided.
Sunstein sees the rejection of the "right [of constituents] to instruct [representatives, on particular issues]" as an explicit example of the framers' realization that like-minded communities could produce extreme politics, a tendency that would be weakened by debate and understanding.
This is also very much stretching the point. The framers' thought, probably correctly, that people were stupid and took a great many steps to put a barrier or mediator between them and the actual government.
I have various thoughts on this, but based on the description, I do not like this book. Ignoring the Dixiecrats switch to Republican and looking at counties in a country in a country where a small number of counties have millions in population and the median county is barely a rounding error in the big counties is just pointless. I also think that part of the issue is the declining mobility of labor in the U.S. I don't think that's because of psychology or tribalism or whatever. I think it's because wages are too low for people to fund moves and take risks.
5
It seems crystal clear that the "less partisan major parties" past was largely an illusion created by the existence of populist, racist Democrats in the South who (for complex political reasons, such as seniority) had a lot of power.
What's the illusion here, exactly? 9 seems to be saying something similar but I don't get it. There really were a lot of populist, racist Southern Democrats and the parties really were less ideologically coherent until those people switched parties. The big sort isn't a blind hiding the Southern Strategy so much as interrelated with it.
If 5 and 9 are just trying to get at the same thing as 11, that makes sense, no argument here. I've thought something similar but I'm reserving judgement on whether he handles that issue well until I finish the book.
11: I don't like it either. The county population problem is central, as you say. AFAICR he does basically ignore race, which is a problem for the reasons you give, but also on his own terms white flight has to be a critical component of whatever reality he's describing. That said, the Southern switch can't be the whole story either: Bishop talks a lot about blue islands in the South, which certainly are a thing, and also pulls a lot of at least anecdotes from outside the South. (eg. CO, PNW.)
I was getting at the same thing in 9 and 11. I'm not disputing that at one time most of the worst racists in elective office were Democrats, but I don't think the end of that is evidence that politics are getting more divisive unless you define divisive as "dividing white people." It's showing that a certain type of division (race) was declining.
I don't think the end of that is evidence that politics are getting more divisive unless you define divisive as "dividing white people." It's showing that a certain type of division (race) was declining.
Tipping my hand a little bit one of the things that I think about while reading the book is the recent podcast with Ezra Klein and Lilliana Mason about Identity politics. They are explicitly discuss the changing nature of both racial and partisan politics. And, interestingly, the show begins with a brief summary of "how did we get here" which corresponds fairly closely with Bishop's story. They name-check many of the same turning points that he does.
So I don't think that a closer attention to (for lack of a better term) social justice concerns automatically pulls one aware from Bishop's narrative. It complicates it in some way, but they do seem to be using similar references.
I've never listened to a podcast in my life and I'm not about to start now, but when people argue that things are now divisive because the Democratic Party stopped letting white people in the south stop black people in the south from voting, I question the definition of "divisive."
You can argue that it has created a partisan divide that didn't exist before. I think that's easy to do, but I don't see how you do it as part of a "this is a process happening in both parties and not because of one." If you want to tell that story, you need to talk about an active, deliberate, choice on the part of the Republican Party to divide the electorate in terms of race. Which, per the summary, Bishop says is not what happened. I'm guessing Klein doesn't make that error, but I don't know.
people argue that things are now divisive because the Democratic Party stopped letting white people in the south stop black people in the south from voting
Yuck.
I don't know that it's the biggest factor, or that it has anything to do with this book, but certainly ONE of the big factors in how weird current US conversations about politics are is that people project back their current ideological understandings of the two parties into the past and simply don't understand how the party divide worked in this country from the 30s through (at least) the 70s. Congress was run primarily by a coalition of conservative southern Democrats and conservative mostly midwestern/western Republicans; they were opposed by liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans. Having the same party label combine different ideologies definitely allowed for some more fluidity than the current system -- sometimes, some conservative Democrats would vote for part of the New Deal, for example, since you had to align around a President. And it allowed for more bargains to be made. But that's very different than thinking that ideological divisions didn't exist, or, worse, that the country wasn't largely run by conservatives throughout the postwar era.
For example, here's one comment from Mason from the very beginning of the show.
[Mason]: The idea is that in the 50s when the parties had mixed cues people were voting almost randomly. It was not clear to the electorate what they were supposed to be doing . . . There was a 1960s report by Philip Converse who looked at the ideological constraint of the American public and found that most Americans had no constraint between their issue positions which means that you could hear one issue position from an average person and not be able to predict any of their other issue positions from knowing that one.
Googling I assume that she's referring to this paper. That doesn't speak to Moby's question of " If you want to tell that story, you need to talk about an active, deliberate, choice on the part of the Republican Party to divide the electorate in terms of race." But it is an example of them referencing the same basic story about the development of ideological polarization that Bishop does.
Googling I assume that she's referring to this paper.
From the wikipedia summary, this is interesting (emphasis mine):
In the second section, Converse shows that when Americans are asked explicitly to explain the terms "liberal" and "conservative," many struggle to link those terms to the political parties and to give meaningful reasons for those pairings. This suggests a lack of ideological understanding and again pushed against the notion of an ideological public. In the third section, Converse presents evidence that issue preferences in the public show low constraint, as seen in low correlations between issue pairs. This stands in contrast to relatively high constraint observed in the views of political elites. Finally, Converse shows that political attitudes are highly unstable in the mass public over time. On some issues, the public provides such inconsistent responses over two and four years that they appear to be responding almost as if at random. If ordinary people had idiosyncratic belief systems, he argues their views would be stable over time. The instability he observes is the final strike against the notion of an ideologically sophisticated public.
I would think that's less true now than it was in 1964 but maybe not, given all of the articles about the way in which, post-Trump, people have completely switched positions on the FBI or Russia, for example.
I don't think I'm doing anything like projecting back the current ideological understanding if that's what you're saying. I'm pointing out that much of the Democratic Party was only Democratic because Jim Crow was tolerated by the rest of the party.
No, I get it, I was agreeing with you.
I haven't finished this section because I was so annoyed about how hard he thought it was to live in Kentucky and that his wife is apparently the daughter of the only New Deal Democrat left in the state. Maybe the small town where he ran a newspaper was isolating and annoying, but that doesn't let you write off a whole state and just happen to move to Austin.
(But I'm also deliberately un-Sorted by his standards. I live on the very poor side of town and my neighbors are mostly black and Guatemalan-American. I don't know about their politics or who votes beyond that we all agree not to call the police for anything minor.)
I remember how the Black and Guatemalan would beat the Irish.
Anyway, all you coastal people should get up and move to Ohio or Pennsylvania before the 2020 election.
For Moby, btw, the contemporary DC segregation thing supposedly started after Santorum beat an incumbent in Pennsylvania with attack ads about his house in VA.
That's funny because Santorum was elected, moved his family to Virginia, and then billed the PA school district where he didn't live, but still owned a house for his kids' charter school costs.
That could probably use one more comma.
ISTR that sometime in the 2016 election someone here posted about urban/suburban partisan segregation occurring in a highly fractal fashion, even in small towns, and Heebie confirming this is visible in Heebieville.
I don't know. I know a couple of people in my neighborhood had Trump signs up in 2016. I didn't let my son trick or treat at them.
They didn't have their lights on anyway.
ISTR that sometime in the 2016 election someone here posted about urban/suburban partisan segregation occurring in a highly fractal fashion, even in small towns, and Heebie confirming this is visible in Heebieville.
Oh, I think I remember that. I'm thinking of a series of graphs for some number of different cities showing partisan leaning based on distance from city center.
Maybe that's wrong. But if anybody could find that I'd be happy; it's going to bug me until I can remember it.
The flag: at least it's not our worst national symbol.
move to Ohio or Pennsylvania before the 2020 election
I'm playing a long game here in North Carolina.
That would be in Fuquay-Varina, Bob.
12. Perhaps "illusion" was the wrong word, but the later posts that explain the dynamics based on each party being ideologically split internally get it more clear. You can see lots of members of both parties supporting a piece of legislation, which hardly ever happens these days, so its looks less partisan, but the "look" is an illusion. The parties in the 30's through 60's or 70's weren't "less partisan," their factions were selectively utterly partisan depending on the issue and the specific proposed law.
You can see lots of members of both parties supporting a piece of legislation, which hardly ever happens these days, so its looks less partisan, but the "look" is an illusion. The parties in the 30's through 60's or 70's weren't "less partisan," their factions were selectively utterly partisan depending on the issue and the specific proposed law.
Thinking about the question of the degree to which politics is or isn't "partisan" (sorry) I was reminded of this 1963 article that I stumbled across last year.
They have a saying in eastern Kentucky-- "Wait 'till the bushes grow green." It is a password, an admonition, and a desperate expression of hope among coal miners fighting for a lost propsperity. For in summer, when the bushes are green, a man can hide with a rifle, and in the rolling hills of Kentucky, a rifle has often had a persuasive effect on coal operators.
...
There are no picket lines in eastern Kentucky today. The miners have agreed to suspend open protests until the National Labor Relations Board rules on an injunction request by the mine operators this Monday. But the tension continues. Every week several mines are blown up, and just recently a coal operator's home in Hazard, Ky., was dynamited.
Rumors spread quickly and are embellished extensively in these small coal towns, adding to the atmosphere of distrust and fear. A new man in town is immediately suspected. For instance, during my visit I was widely thought to be a Communist, a Teamster organizer, a management spy, and a conspirator with the strikers.
Perhaps because of these rumors, or maybe because someone thought I knew too much, a sniper took a few rifle shots at me on a moonless night last week. Rolling into a ditch, I crawled to the safety of a tree. The incident was a good warning, and a powerful indication of the seriousness of the situation and the bitterness of the struggle.
That is a good reminder that even if politics were less clearly divided along ideological lines that doesn't imply a lack of conflict.
From this, a more general statement of what of what Moby's 9.3 et seq are talking about:
We will demonstrate that the rise of an authoritarian cleavage sheds light on several fundamentally important features of contemporary American politics. First, it helps explain why politics today seems so much more acrimonious than before, even as people have remained fairly moderate, albeit better sorted by party, in their preferences on the issues (Fiorina et al. 2004).12 The key point here is that Americans are now divided over things that conjure more visceral reactions.[...]Although I'd add that the political elites are sorting themselves too.
12 By sorted, we mean that people are aligning their policy preferences better with their party identification. For example, although opinions on abortion are not becoming more extreme, there is more distance between the average Republican and average Democrat because pro-lifers are increasingly identifying as Republicans and pro-choicers are increasingly identifying as Democrats.
5.2: Is it really the case the rich people are Republicans and vice versa? What is "rich" in this context? I live in a "rich" state (MA) and my impression is that there are very few Republicans of any degree of wealth.
This paper sheds some light, and confirms at congressional district level the state-level Gelman analysis quoted in 6:
rich and poor tend to be the farthest apart in their views in Republican-leaning districts, as well as districts that are highly religious, rural, and located in the south.Which is also consistent with Bishop, though the paper doesn't attempt to explain causation.
[...]
Citizens in liberal districts, whether rich or poor, tend to have views that are well to the left of the national average. Citizens in conservative districts, whether rich or poor, tend to have views that are to the right of the national average. While wealthy citizens are more conservative than poorer ones in all four district types, the wealthiest citizens in the most liberal districts hold views that are on average to the left of the poorest citizens in the most conservative districts.
poor citizens hold similar policy views regardless of a district's partisan leanings. It is wealthy citizens whose views vary: they hold similar views to the poor in Democratic contexts, but much more conservative views in Republican contexts.(Emphasis added.) Which is consistent with Bishop, given the rich can migrate more selectively; the author cites Bishop later.
in the most Democratic areas of the country, education is nearly twice as predictive of policy views - and income roughly half as predictive of policy views - as in the most Republican areas of the country.Which presumably goes far to explain the MA experience.
Getting a Master of Arts degree was certainly my key to riches.
39: Greater clarity:
Fiorina and Levendusky (2006) question the use of the term polarization to describe the phenomenon. Instead, they favor the term party sorting. By sorting, they mean that mass partisans are following what are now clearer elite cues to sort themselves into the "correct" party, which decreases intraparty heterogeneity and increases the difference between party adherents.
Many have observed over the past two decades that Democrats insist on fighting "on the issues" (Tomasky 2004). But it is perhaps better to conceive this approach as emphasizing the programmatic dimension of issues [appealing to non-authoritarians], while Republicans have done battle on their symbolic aspects [the reverse].Elegant, right? And when both parties do the same things it's not because Democrats are secretly Republicans but because Republicans don't have a plan, they're just pretending to have a plan until they can convince enough idiots to vote for them. And a politics of selling gestures to idiots leads entirely naturally to Trump.
Naturally. I think that brings to mind what is my main dispute with The Big Sort (as summarized so far here). I don't think it's a sort happening naturally, I think it's a deliberate choice by one party that started years ago, but most explicitly with Rove's 51% strategy. And I do think that leads to Trump, but just because of the policy of silly gestures, but because trying to govern from the middle of the 51% of the most right-wing voters in America is effectively excluding all of those people who made the cross-party interaction of the mushy middle work.
Yes. I feel kind of dumb actually, the real sort is the one in 42. We should be reading the authoritarianism book, which is describing exactly what 44 does.
Yes. I feel kind of dumb actually, the real sort is the one in 42. We should be reading the authoritarianism book, which is describing exactly what 44 does.
I'd be curious to hear more about that. From my perspective there are a bunch of different things happening simultaneously, and the fact that The Big Sort isn't very good about distinguishing between them makes the book more interesting because it points in the direction of additional work, without constraining the reading too much.
To pick a couple of examples, we can discussion how much any of the following are taking place: (1) greater ideological sorting of parties, (2) greater intensity of partisan feelings* (3) greater ideological sorting based on place, (4) greater decline in trust in political institutions **
If you think there's also a sorting based on authoritarian impulses I find that plausible but I'd argue that it should just be seen as one thread of this story not as the only driving explanation, and I'd be curious to hear the argument to the contrary.
* For example:
In US, 'Interpolitical' Marriage Increasingly Frowned Upon.
** This is mentioned in part II of The Big Sort and reminded me of some posts by Tim Burke (among others).
This looks interesting (will try to read later).
"Social sorting" is a concept used by Mason (2016) to explain the process by which individuals' social identities grow increasingly aligned with a partisan identity, reducing social crossâpressures on political behavior. Roccas and Brewer (2002) have found that individuals who feel fewer crossâpressures more strongly identify with their ingroups and are less tolerant of outgroups. Accordingly, we create "objective" and "subjective" measures of social sorting to help identify the mechanism by which individual partisans connect social sorting to partisanship in the CCES and a nonprobability Internet sample. As racial, religious, and ideological identities have cumulatively moved into greater alignment with Democratic and Republican identities in recent decades, American partisans have grown increasingly identified with their parties due to the psychological effects of identity alignment captured in objective and subjective sorting mechanisms. However, we find that this effect is more powerful among Republicans than among Democrats, due to the general social homogeneity of the Republican party. . . .
46: Book linked in 39. Of course there are many things going on (and the authors acknowledge as much), but this book is feeling like the most powerful single explanation. They say basically that since the 1960s* a series of issues** which trigger authoritarian responses have gained prominence; and at the same time the parties have changed their platforms such that the Republicans always come down on the authoritarian side (this mostly as a result of Republican campaign strategy).
*Though not all at once.
**Clustered basically under race, crime, gender, foreign policy.
Book linked in 39.
Thanks. I guess my question is this -- I'm probably not going to read any of it before I do my post on section II of The Big Sort so are you willing to summarize why you think it's an argument that should, effectively, replace whatever discussion we're having about The Big Sort (or, just, now that you've been thinking about it, how it changes your perspective on the book)?
They say basically that since the 1960s* a series of issues** which trigger authoritarian responses have gained prominence
That's an interesting list, in that both crime and foreign policy have been less important in the last couple of decades (with the (lead-related) drop in crime and the post cold-war international order). I'm not sure when I think the importance of race/gender has been highlighted. But I would add to the list that Religion seems much more politicized than it had been.
49: I'm not seriously proposing to replace Bishop (unless people want to) and anyway haven't finished the new book yet. I think I'll just post semi-tangential stuff and people can talk about whatever grabs them.
50: sounds good. In that case I'm just registering my interest in what you find.