Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme Faster?
He concludes that, contra the image where the Right stays in the same place and the Left moves, both Republicans and Democrats have “changed a lot” since 2008. He wisely avoids speculating on whether one party has moved further or faster than the other. I’m less wise, so I’ve been trying to look into this question. My conclusion is: man, people really have strong emotions on this. I think a lot of the disagreement happens because this is more than one question. You can operationalize it a couple different ways:
I think these subquestions are easier to get clear answers on and will hopefully start less of a fight, starting with… Which Party’s Policy Positions Have Changed More In Their Preferred Direction Since Some Starting Year?Before we get to data, we can think about this based on first principles. Which party has changed more since (let’s say) 1900 - the conservative party, or the progressive party? It’s got to be the progressive party, right? Isn’t that what “conservative” and “progressive” mean? That is, suppose that in 1900, conservatives want to preserve the status quo, and liberals want to make “social progress” in some direction. By 1950, there’s been some social progress. Conservatives either want to go back to 1900, or perhaps maintain the 1950 status quo. Liberals want to make even more social progress. By 2000, there’s been even more social progress, and so on. A conservative could make the following argument: “From the perspective of 1900, we’ve stayed in the same place, and the liberals have gotten more extreme. That is, we’ve consistently supported the same values as in 1900. But the liberals have gone from believing in 1900 values, to more extreme 1950s values, to even more extreme 2000s values that were totally unthinkable to anyone in 1900. For example, in 1900, maybe the conservatives wanted sodomy to be punishable with a prison sentence, and liberals wanted “only” a monetary fine. By 2000, conservatives still want a prison sentence, and liberals think gay marriage should be legal. So conservatives have stayed in exactly the same place, and liberals have gone completely off the rails.” So on a first principles argument, it seems kind of obvious that by this definition Democrats will “get more extreme” over time in a way Republicans don’t. Might this argument fail because the literal meanings of “conservative” and “progressive” don’t correspond to their real-world use? Consider eg school vouchers, where Democrats are trying to preserve the status quo (public schools) and Republicans are proposing a bold new reform they think would work better. If there are enough cases like this, Republicans aren’t really more “conservative” than Democrats, and the argument would fail. So the first-principles case looks pretty strong. What about real data? Here’s Pew, with ten questions that I have no particular reason to believe they cherry-picked: I don’t love some of these phrasings, but it doesn’t matter so much if the questions are loaded as long as they’re consistent across years. When you average all of these out, Democrats have gotten 22 points more likely to support the liberal side of an issue, and Republicans have gotten 0 points more likely to support the conservative (technically 0.1, but the graphs don’t have enough significant figures to make that meaningful). This corresponds pretty exactly to the Wright/Musk meme where the conservatives stay in the same place as the liberals get more and more extreme. Conclusion: Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?An earlier draft of this post (visible to subscribers only) didn’t have this section. Lots of commenters objected that this was what they meant by the question “which party has gotten more extreme?” and asked me to include it. I do so under duress: I think this is a dumb question. A corollary of the Median Voter Theorem says that both parties should be the same distance from the average voter. On the other hand, the Median Voter Theorem just says where you have to be in order to win. If you are dumb and bad and want to fail, you can be anywhere! You can be on the moon! So, who’s winning? Here’s 538: Voters are a tiny bit more likely to describe the Republicans as “extreme” than the Democrats, 54-49. Probably it’s not worth worrying about the tiny differences between this and 538; I assume it’s within the margin of error, or pretty close. But if we insisted on doing that, we could note that the incumbent party always has a disadvantage, voters are angry at high inflation, and so they’re leaning a bit Republican to punish Biden even though the Democratic platform is slightly closer to the median voter. Conclusion: Which Party Is More Ideologically Pure?Most people who think the Republicans have extremified more than the Democrats point to DW-NOMINATE. This is a really cool political science tool that purports to be able to measure how partisan various members of Congress (and anyone who you can correlate with members of Congress) are. The idea is: you know those attack adds which say things like “Joe Schmoe is a dangerously extreme Democrat, he votes with Nancy Pelosi 97% of the time”? These encode an important truth: you can figure out how far right or left someone is by observing how often their vote correlates with other people’s. If we don’t want to use Nancy in particular as a lodestar, we can just correlate how often every member of Congress votes with every other member of Congress and do a dimensional analysis on the result. This finds that the pattern is usually explicable by one dimension, which correlates with our traditional left-right axis. NOMINATE starts by ranking legislators on this axis. That is, legislators form two natural clusters that tend to vote together; the more often you vote the same way as members of the left-wing cluster, the more left-wing you are. How would you compare two different sessions of Congress? NOMINATE cleverly uses “bridge legislators” - politicians who serve multiple terms. To a first approximation, if Dianne Feinstein has been in Congress for two hundred years, and Abraham Lincoln was always to Feinstein’s right, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was always to Feinstein’s left, then we know that Lincoln must be right of Ocasio-Cortez. The actual model is more complicated and allows Feinstein to change her views over the years, but this is the basic idea. I am skeptical. Taking the top graph at face value, the Democratic Party in 2020 (median ideology score: - 0.37) is further right than the Democratic Party in 1880 (-0.41). The Democratic Party of 1880 didn’t have opinions on most modern issues. But they explicitly supported racial segregation and a ban on Chinese immigrants. Implicitly, they opposed all modern welfare programs, all income taxes, any minimum wage, gay marriage, and transgender people. And DW-NOMINATE wants us to believe they were further left than modern Democrats? Realistically the “bridge legislator” method doesn’t work over long periods; the errors add up and you get nonsense. Clearly the 1880 vs. 2020 data is nonsense. Is the 1980 vs. 2020 data that people use to argue Republicans have extremified faster also nonsense? I’m not sure. I would prefer to avoid the over-time function, since I feel like that’s a separate question which we found a clear answer to above, and treat it as a measure of how ideologically “pure” the parties are at any given time. This is more or less its designed use case, it should be good at that, and it says the answer is that Republicans are purer than Democrats. That is, the algorithm identifying something as a right-wing issue is better at predicting Republicans will vote for it, than the algorithm identifying something as a left-wing issue is at predicting Democrats. This is slightly fraught, because some Congressional votes are fake - for example, the Democrats might demand an extreme gun control bill that they don’t expect to pass, just so that they can say in campaign ads that such-and-such a Republican voted against gun control. Depending on how parties deploy and respond to fake votes, this could influence DW-NOMINATE a bit. I still think it’s probably accurate. What about ordinary voters (as opposed to Congressmen?) Pew gives us this graph: Looks pretty similar to me. Conclusion: Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals?I may not be as wise as Matt Yglesias, but I am wise enough not to declare one side the winner without an ironclad dataset to back me up. I can’t think of a sufficiently good one that doesn’t feel cherry-picked. Conclusion: ConclusionsI think the Wright/Musk meme is clearly about the changing-policy-positions-since-some-starting-time question, and that it’s right to point to the Democrats as the main driver there. With other interpretations, especially the ideological purity interpretation, you could point to the Republicans. I find the changing-policy-positions one most important - all of this stuff about who votes more consistently in Congress and who endorses more conspiracy theories seems less directly important than what policies we have. If you woke up tomorrow and the Republicans were openly pushing for a literal Handmaid’s Tale theocracy, and the Democrats were just talking about the same boring small policy changes as always, it feels like it would be fair to say “Wtf, the Republicans have gotten much more extreme and I don’t like it”, even if a political scientist’s model finds that Congressional Democrats’ votes cluster slightly more tightly than Congressional Republicans’ votes or whatever. I think this is the basic point Wright and Musk are trying to make, and it’s a good one. I’ll leave the last word to my survey respondents: On the same Tumblr survey mentioned above, I just asked people to tell me which party they thought had gotten more extreme more quickly. Among Republicans, the numbers were the exact same, only in the opposite direction. I don’t really know what I expected here. (Please don’t post comments with “How is this not obvious when [outgroup] has done [worst and craziest thing the outgroup has done], and [ingroup] is just doing [most moderate thing ingroup has done, framed to sound extra innocuous]!”, or I’ll delete them.) You’re a free subscriber to Astral Codex Ten. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. |
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