The Ten Causes of America’s Political Dysfunction
[This post was crossposted from RighteousMind.com]
Here is my most complete talk on the causes of America’s rising political polarization and dysfunction. It’s more pessimistic than my prior talks. I was invited to speak in November at the NYU Law School, at a session hosted by professor Rick Pildes. Pildes wrote a superb law review article in 2011 on the causes of our dysfunction, from an “institutionalist” perspective, looking at Congress and electoral processes: Why the Center Does Not Hold: The Causes of Hyperpolarized Democracy in America
When I first read it, I thought Pildes’s account of the history was enlightening, but I thought he was too negative about the chances for real reform. But I re-read his paper while preparing for this talk, and realized he was right — and prophetic. He predicted that Obama would soon start bypassing congress and implementing policy by regulatory fiat; he predicted that one or both parties would soon start cutting back on the filibuster, unilaterally.
In this talk I integrate moral psychology with recent American history to explain the TEN reasons why America has been getting more polarized — at the elite level AND at the mass (public) level. My talk runs from minute 2 to minute 46, and then there’s commentary from Pildes, then open discussion.
Here is the list of 10 causes that I showed in the video:
1) Party realignment and purification, 1964-1992
2) Mass sorting of lib vs. con voters into the purified parties, by 1990s
3) Generational changing of the guard, from Greatest Gen to Baby Boomers, 1990s
4) Changes in Congress, 1995—death of friendships
5) Media fractionation and polarization, since 1980s
6) Residential homogeneity, urban v. rural, 1990s
7) Increasing role of money, negative advertising, 2000s
8) End of the cold war, loss of a common enemy, 1989
9) Increasing immigration and racial diversity, 1990s
10) Increasing education, since 1970s (more educated citizens are more partisan and opinionated about politics)
I show how these 10 trends interact with the moral psychology I presented in The Righteous Mind to produce the strong and steady rise in polarization that we’ve seen since the 1990s. Note that most of these trends cannot be reversed. Morality binds and blinds, and for these 10 reasons, morality been binding us ever more tightly in the last 10-20 years. “Affective partisan polarization” — the degree to which we hold negative views of the other team — has been rising steadily, and there is no end in sight.
Stefan Schubert 9 years ago
I greatly admire your work, but I’m a bit critical of the above list of factors.
This is a so-called one-sided multiple-factor explanation: it says that there are lots of different factors which affected some quantity (in this case, political polarization) and that all of them affected this quantity in the same direction (in this case, all of them increased it).
In general, I’m skeptical of such explanations. With some notable exceptions (see below), the factors leading to an increase or decrease in the quantity we’re interested in will on average be probabilistically independent of each other (for instance, it would seem that the ending of the cold war did not make residential homogenization more, or less, likely). This means that (given that a priori, the probability that any individual factor of relevance for the quantity in question would increase it is the same as the probability that it would decrease it, namely .5) the probability that all of the ten factors most relevant for the quantity at hand would increase it, and none decrease it, would be .5^10, which is a very small number indeed.
On the other hand, we would expect a multiple-factor explanation to exhibit precisely such a one-sided pattern on the hypothesis of confirmation bias, which prevents you from seeing the factors which played in the opposite direction. This means that one-sided multiple factor-explanations are, in general, strong evidence of confirmation bias (or some related bias).
Now against this, one could argue that the factors you are listing are indeed all positively dependent on each other, so that the probability that they all would end up on the list of the ten most relevant factors is far larger than .5^10. I comment on this objection in the below blog post, where I criticize a one-sided multiple-factor explanation which Jared Diamond put forward in his Guns, Germs and Steel:
“In this particular case, some of the factors Diamond lists presumably are positively dependent on each other. Now suppose that someone argues that all of the factors are in fact strongly positively dependent on each other, so that it is not very surprising that they all co-occur. This only pushes the problem back, however, because now we want an explanation of a) what the common cause of all of these dependencies is (it being very improbable that they all would correlate in the absence of such a common cause) and b) how it could be that this common cause increases the probability of the hypothesis via eight independent mechanisms, and doesn’t decrease it via any mechanism.”
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kpj/multiple_factor_explanations_should_not_appear/
I also explain my argument in more detail there.
My best guess is that you have left out some factors which actually decreased, rather than increased, political polarization. It would be interesting to hear your view on that.
It should be said that there are some cases where this sort of one-sided multiple factor explanations are not suspicious, namely some explanations having to do with intentional actions, and some evolutionary explanations:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/14/how-likely-are-multifactorial-trends/#comment-184135
It seems to me that political polarization doesn’t fall under any of these categories, which means that one-sided multiple-factor explanations of them are indeed suspicious.
Stefan Schubert, Philosophy@London School of Economics