In
November of 2003 I posted a lengthy piece refuting a similar claim made
on Daily Kos that had the adult-children in the Dean Campaign breathless. I'll reproduce that article below, with a few edits. The bottom line is
that it's not enough to feel secure that the strategy, repeatedly promoted by the "petulant wing of the Democrat Party," wouldn't win elections, or even a nomination (a fact
that I accurately predicted back in 2003). The point is that win or lose the strategy is simply bad for the country. Which is to say, in no uncertain terms, that it's pretty much boneheadedly anti-American, or even anti-democracy, for that matter, since it's probably not good for any country. With good reason Christopher Hitchens calls these folks "domestic masochists."
Centrifugal Politics
by Demosophist
November
17, 2003
Marc Danziger, on the weblog Winds of Change, posted recently about
an essay on the
Daily Kos, by Chris Bowers that's been grabbing a lot of attention. The
thesis outlined by Bowers has really been around for quite awhile, and I
encountered it recently in some discussions with people at The Center for Voting and Democracy. It
represents what I think is one of the central mythologies of a political
orientation that I've been calling "little democracy."
"Little" because of its tendency to train a microscope on aspects our
own system of governance while consistently missing the broader picture.
Chris's version of this political folklore is the most elaborate I've seen in
awhile, so I figured I'd take the opportunity to deal with some of his
arguments in detail, and then broaden the discussion by looking at some
relevant data I happen to have as a result of earlier research. I'm also
interested in addressing a question that Chris does not raise: whether such a
political program is good for the country, regardless of whether it happens to
be good for the Democratic Party.
Chris' essay, with the unabashed
title From
Dean to Jackson: How to Revitalize the Democratic Party (and save the country
in the process!) is divided into four parts: 1. The apparent problem,
2. The real problem; 3. The solution, from Dean; and 4. To Jackson. Since the
crux of the matter really rests on Part 2, and since I think you could label
the entire essay "The Apparent Problem and Solution," I'm going to
focus, in this first section, almost exclusively on "The Real
Problem."
Is the "real problem" the real problem?
First, I'll just comment briefly on
some statements from the essay that I think are wildly off the mark. In general
Chris seems to be proposing a counter to what he feels has been a successful
strategy for Republicans. At the point we enter the essay he is beginning to
build a circumstantial case for what he feels was the DLC's confusion, their
mistaken focus on the "apparent" problem:
While supporting increasingly freer trade policies may
have resulted in some significant campaign contributions from Wall Street, once
such policies were enacted they have helped to significantly reduce to size of
organized labor.
The problem with this observation
is that free trade policies aren't just a ploy of the wealthy to obtain more
wealth, or for conservative politicians to get more campaign contributions.
They're a way for everyone to obtain more wealth, at least in the
minds and hearts of people who believe in Comparative Trade Advantage. There
are certainly distributional issues raised by changing the mix of competitive
industries to meet trade demands, but these ought to be addressed without undermining
the overall advantage of trade to consumers, as much as possible. The DLC, in other words, supports these
policies because they are, on balance, good for the country. I could probably just chalk this error up to
general ignorance were it not for his assumption that the decline of unions is
a result of our trade policies. The principle reason organized labor has
declined in influence is that when the AFL and CIO merged in the 1950s
individual unions became less competitive with one another, and this made the
overall union movement less willing to meet the individual needs and demands of
their clients: the workers. The start of decline in union density in the US, as
S.M. Lipset has observed, can be dated precisely to the formation of the
AFL/CIO which was supposed to fix labor's problems by making it more
competitive with management and owners. It did the opposite.
Next Chris moves on, in his
exegesis of the DLC's woes, to its anti-drug policy:
Increasing enforcement of the War on Drugs may have made
a Democratic nominee look tough on crime to swing voters, but it has also
resulted in increasing voter disenfranchisement for drug-related felony
convictions among African Americans to over 10% (from less than 2% in 1978).
This is another example of a popularly
held myth. The outlook fails to recognize a fairly simple fact: that a
reduction in crime rates primarily benefits the minority community. Were this fact slightly more obvious to
minority voters they might actually begin to change their voting patterns
sharply, but at the moment it simply makes some of them less likely to vote at
all. While Chris may be correct that the War on Drugs reduced the size of the
voting block slightly, that effect is small in comparison to the impact of
having treated this constituency with less respect than it deserves. Until this
kind of condescension is corrected (also exemplified in Dean's notorious
"confederate flagged pickup" statement) the party is less likely to
be nationally competitive.
Next, Chris raises the issue of
Christian fundamentalism.
During this same period of time, pro-Republican
organizations and demographic groups greatly increased in size and in level or
organization. The Christian Coalition, an organization that did not exist
during the 1970's, arose to become the most powerful activist organization in
the country....
The principle reason for the high
appeal of religious organizations is precisely opposite of the reason for the
decline of unions. The sectarian nature of religion in the US compels the sects
to compete with one another for members and contributors, which sharpens their
ability to meet the self-identified needs of their members. (See research by
Eli Berman for examples of what constitute "benefits" of membership
in a religious community.) The
countries with a unified church tradition (the analog of the unification of the
labor unions under the umbrella of the AFL/CIO) have church membership and
attendance rates that are but a fraction of those in the US. The point is that
the resource was there long before it was tapped by the Christian Coalition.
They didn't create it; they simply organized it.
The flaw in all of this reasoning
is that it assumes Republicans did something deliberate to increase their vote
and support base, when what actually happened is that the electorate was simply
returning to the ideological consensus it has held since the Founding. This return is documented in polling data
from Gallup and from the National Election Survey, as well as the World Values
Survey sponsored by the University of Michigan. It is, in a word, non-controversial among political sociologists.
The "cure" that is
recommended in Part 3 of his essay, therefore really has little chance of
success because it manages to misidentify the "actual problem." And Bowers compounds this error by assuming
that only campaign organization matters. The remedy ought to have something to do with the social problems that
have been the traditional focus of the Democrats, but Bowers offers something
quite different:
Although his [Dean's] activist organization probably
makes him unbeatable in the primaries, win or lose what Dean has revealed is
just the tip of the iceberg. Already, almost $10M has been raised online by
Democratic candidates other than Dean (Bush hasn't even raised $1.5M online
yet), and either activist groups such as MoveOn and even the Democratic Party
itself have raised another several million online. If Dean becomes the nominees
(sic), I have no reason to doubt that dean (sic) will come close to $100M in
online donations--maybe even more. Further, if he becomes the nominee, his new
organization could potentially garner him over one billion hours in volunteer
help.
He offers a method of organizing a
political movement, as though the effectiveness of the policies the party
recommends have no relation to its political success. I can understand that you
don't even have an opportunity to propose policies unless you can win office,
but that's hardly a good reason for the failure to consider whether what you're
proposing is seen as effective. Whatever organizational innovations Dean has
implemented could be, and probably will be, cloned by his opponents, who also
have a dedicated grassroots.
Bowers' view is that progressives
need to radicalize and polarize their politics in order to energize their base
and appeal to voters and supporters. A term that is frequently used in relation
to this dynamic is "centrifugal," in the sense that the payoffs in
the electoral system impel opposing factions toward the ideological fringe. The
opposite dynamic is a centripetal system, which impels opposing factions toward
the center. While any experienced
political fundraiser could tell you that a "fight rap" is a lot more
likely to get a check than an appeal to cooperation, that's not the real issue.
The real issues are twofold:
1. Does centrifugal politics win
elections?
2. Is centrifugal politics good for the country?
Does centrifugal politics win?
"Little democracy" has
been arguing for some time that item 1 is true, and they've pointed to examples
where non-centrist candidates have won and centrist candidates have lost. But,
as a general rule this sort of analysis simply ignores what the opposition is
doing. In other words, it doesn't look at electoral contests or races as the
unit of analysis, so doesn't accurately represent elections. Without
considering the ideology of a winner's opponent you have no way of knowing
whether his ideological stance was a help or a hindrance. If, instead of
looking at winning or losing candidates, we look at races where the
candidates are paired appropriately, what we find is that there is an
interesting relationship between the ideology of the district and the
ideological distance between candidates. To illustrate this complexity
lets look briefly at the 1996 congressional election, the one originally cited
by Rob Richey at the Center for Voting and
Democracy, as an example proving that polarizing politics works:
In Table I, below, the columns represent
the partisan bias of the congressional district (low, medium and high)
without regard to whether the district is conservative or "liberal."
The rows represent the ideological distance between candidates (closer
or farther apart). Races have been omitted if an ideological ranking was
unavailable for one of the two major candidates, or if the election was
uncontested. The top number in each cell represents the average dollar amount
spent in that grouping of districts by the combined candidates, while the
bottom number is the number of districts in that cell category. The top number is, therefore, one measure
of the competitiveness of the district.
For instance, in general the closer
the candidates are to one another the more the combined expenditures. (The numbers under "Total" in the
far right column.) The average combined
expenditures for the candidates who were ideologically closest to one
another is $1,030,000. In contrast, the average combined expenditures for the
candidates who were ideologically farthest from each other was only
$873,000. Likewise, the most money was spent, on average, in districts that
were less ideologically polarized ($1,375,000). However, if we look at the effect of both variables, the
category of races that had the highest combined expenditures were those where
the candidates where the farthest apart ideologically, but who were
competing in the least biased districts. It is these races that best
exemplify Chris Bowers' thesis, which is that money follows centrifugal politics. We'll return to these special-category
districts later.
Table I:
|
Distance Between Candidates
|
I. Low Bias
|
II. Medium Bias
|
III. High Bias
|
Total
|
|
I. Closer
|
$1,364K (43)
|
$713K (23)
|
$723K (23)
|
$1,030K (89)
|
|
II. Middling
|
$1,338K (40)
|
$1,006K (31)
|
$562K (25)
|
$1,029K (96)
|
|
III. Farther
|
$1,473K (20)
|
$912K (28)
|
$588K (46)
|
$873K (94)
|
|
Total
|
$1,375K (103)
|
$892K (82)
|
$614K (94)
|
$977K (279)
|
Before that, lets look at the
effect of district polarization on campaign spending, controlling for candidate
distance. Looking at the 94 districts
that have the highest partisan bias (Column III), one would normally expect to
see the opposite of a centrifugal pattern, and that's exactly what we find. A
Democratic candidate running in a highly Republican district (or visa versa)
simply has to get as close as he can to his rival in order to have a chance.
Within Column III the highest combined expenditures occur in those 23 races
where the candidates are closest in terms of their ideology (Row I), an
indication that only these races are remotely competitive.
Next, what this table tells us
about districts with the lowest partisan bias (in Column I, the largest
category with 103 districts) is that more money is spent there than in any
of the three categories we looked at in Column III, where polarization was the
highest. On average, over twice as much is spent in Column I races ($1,375,000)
as in Column III races ($614,000). This, in itself, suggests an overall
centripetal pattern where "moderate" districts are more competitive,
and therefore attract more contributions. But that alone doesn't tell us
whether candidates are impelled toward the center, because there's also the
matter of how partisan the candidates are.
So far we've considered districts
"polarized" if they have a high partisan bias, either toward
Democrats or Republicans. But that's
actually only one kind of polarization. While it addresses the issue of how polarized a district is relative to
a national mean it's still possible that a so-called "moderate"
district might be composed of two highly partisan camps, feuding like the
Hatfields and the McCoys. Calling such
districts "moderate" simply because they're evenly matched, and
therefore have a mean close to the national mean, would be a misnomer. Chris Bowers' assumptions presume that
there are a lot of these "Hatfield/McCoy" districts. One way to suss this out would be to look at
the statistical variance of voter ideology within the district. Even if we had this statistic, however, we'd
still have to answer the question "compared to what?" As an alternative, we can simply look at the
frequency pattern: comparing the number of districts across columns and rows.
If the 103 "least
polarized" (least biased) districts were, in fact, Hatfield/McCoy
constituencies one would expect, ironically, to see the most highly charged
ideological races, simply because candidates would have to appeal to a highly
partisan constituency to maintain voter turnout and contributions. Bowers'
conjecture is that the latter represents the true state of politics in the US,
and that there is a pool of highly ideological contributors (and ultimately
voters) who haven't been tapped for support by Democrats. We can gain at least
a little purchase on the truth of this conjecture by observing (as previously
noted) that within these low-bias or evenly matched districts the most
money is spent where the distance between candidates is the greatest.
In fact more money was spent in these races, on average, than anywhere else in
the country ($1,473,000). It is this "special category" of races that
correspond to the national scenario envisioned by the proponents of the Bowers
thesis. At this point it looks like
Bowers' contention has some merit.
If Chris Bowers is correct, the
candidates who distinguish themselves ideologically in these districts are
rewarded with more campaign funds. But because of the nature of fundraising
it's nearly impossible to untangle whether or not contributors are inspired by
an attraction to the ideology of their candidate, or by a repulsion
from the ideology of the opponent. Either way, I suppose it's the same from
Bowers' point of view, since whether or not the prescription actually cures the
patient is largely irrelevant. But notice that this situation of partisan
balance and highly ideological candidates (the Hatfield/McCoy constituency) is
typical of the smallest number of races (only 20) in the entire country.
At best Bowers' strategy would work
for some sections of the country, but these collectively represent much less
than 10% of the national electorate (only 20 out of nearly 300 races). Even
within the category of the least biased (and therefore most competitive)
districts, these highly charged races are only 20% of the total. And since this
is the target at which the Dean campaign is currently aiming it's not entirely
surprising that they believe this group is more typical of voters than may
actually be the case. One tends to look
for the car keys where the light is brightest.
Chris, of course, might argue that
this pattern is to be expected, since it was virtually dictated by the DLC
centripetal strategy. But remember, we are looking here not at the Presidential
race, but at congressional races. If Bowers' general thesis has any merit
whatsoever, we ought to see some reflection of it in this table, especially
since the Bowers thesis itself usually cites congressional races as their
primary evidence for the strategy's potential effectiveness.
The kind of "cross-sum"
analysis we've been conducting so far using Table I. can be thought of as a
very rudimentary form of statistical regression. A somewhat more direct argument can be mounted by running a
multiple regression using the 279 competitive districts in this study, with vote
margin as the dependent variable. This
gives us a direct measure of the impact of various influences on the outcome of
the race. I've done this for the 1996
election utilizing a number of standard explanatory variables in addition to
candidate ideology. These variables include incumbency, spending, district
liberalism, candidate experience and the percent of money obtained from PACs
(which is a surrogate for the percent obtained from individuals, but with a
coefficient of opposite sign). What I found was that candidate liberalism had
the least impact of all variables, except for the % of contributions
from PACs for Democrats. These are precisely the two variables that Chris
proposes are critical to "saving the country." Adopting the Bowers strategy would be
equivalent to stepping up to the plate to face Mariano Riviera in the 9th
inning swinging a matchstick!
The "bottom line" is that
voters simply don't pay much attention to how extreme the candidates are,
unless they start to sound shrill. For their purposes the rough approximation
provided by party affiliation is enough. They're far more likely to cast their
vote for the more experienced candidate or the candidate closest to their party
affiliation, or the candidate who is already in office (if there is one). I
should add that the money spent on campaigns is also important, but no more
than district ideology or incumbency.
So, we've looked carefully at the
impact of ideology on campaign spending (and therefore indirectly on
contributions); and we've also looked at the impact of candidate ideology on
votes. There is some evidence to suggest that more radical candidate ideology
influences contributions, but only in a small number of districts, and there is
no evidence that even this advantage is carried over to the voters. So
ultimately there is little evidence that a "centrifugal" strategy
would work nationally, either to obtain a congressional majority or to elect a
President. It's just bad politics. And I think we're about to get an object
lesson in just how bad it is, provided by the Dean campaign.
Is centrifugal politics good for the nation?
The political scientist Mattei
Dogan has written a great deal on this topic of partisanship and how it impacts
political regimes. He observes:
Among open party systems, the most fundamental
distinction involves the degree to which power is centrifugalized (polarizing)
or centripetalized (centring). In the context of this distinction, we can
better understand the two-party/multiparty contrast. I believe that the
survival of presidentialism is promoted by an open centripetal party system and
undermined by one that is centrifugal or closed (emphasis added).
Centripetal forces arise when
different parties compete mainly for centre votes; that is, the support of
regular, mainstream voters who think of themselves as 'independents', willing
to support candidates of any party or even willing to split their tickets, as
current interests, policy issues or political personalities suggest. By
contrast, centrifugal forces prevail when more extreme positions are taken by
parties seeking to attract the support of non-voters. This typically involves
proposing dramatic, populist, costly and controversial policies likely to win
the support of apathetic or alienated citizens who normally cannot or will not
vote.
Unfortunately, most
presidentialist regimes [though not the United States] have developed
centrifugal party systems, thereby creating self-destructive spirals based on
circular causation. -- (Dogan, Comparing Nations, p. 89)
In general what Dogan and most
political scientists who study this phenomenon have to say follows Madisonian
logic pretty closely. As one ought to expect, factionalism is bad and
cooperation good. The success of the American political system, which is one of
the very few successful presidentialist systems in the world, is largely due to
the capacity for "crosscutting alliances" to undermine the factional
and divisive distinctions between voting blocks. So, in answer to the two
issues raised by Chris Bowers' "little democracy" conjecture:
1. Centrifugal politics does not
win national elections in the US, nor does it win a large number of local
congressional elections; and
2. Centrifugal politics is probably
not good for the country.
If the Democrats have come to
believe the opposite for some reason, I submit that this puts them even farther
from the main stream of American politics than they were before the
Dean candidacy.