Political myth of the week: What appeals to me is a politician's best strategy
As the format for In Tenure Veritas meanders its way around the ever-shifting landscape of things I do and do not want to bother devoting my time to addressing on a leisurely Saturday morning, I think this might be a thing I do. I considered it when I was writing The Unmutual Political Blog, but I kept getting distracted with the politics of the day/week. If the whole point here is to not do that, then maybe I'll go back to that idea.
Myths of the week. Maybe this will stick around, and to some degree, these will be related to current happenings... 'cuz, but bird's eye view here. Just not pigeons. Right? Let's call this a pigeon-free zone.
So I'll start with this. An oldie, but a goodie. What appeals to you, or me, or whomever, is not necessarily good political strategy. There is an old line-- good policy makes good politics. Translation: when politicians do what they think is right, they will be rewarded by the political system. Conscientiously pursuing the best policies will be rewarded by voters, and blah, blah, blah. Democracy!
Right?
And from any given voter's perspective, flip that notion around. Appeal to what I think is right, and you, Mr. or Mrs. Politician, will be rewarded! Just do the right thing, and democracy will reward the politician who does the right thing!
I won't, yet again, belabor the DDRRDDRR nature of presidential elections as an empirical observation, but think about how you might try to reconcile that with the GPMGP thesis. Isn't it amazing that whoever is right just happens to be almost perfectly predicted by such a simple pattern? Why, it's almost enough to make a skeptic believe that GPMGP is a problematic thesis, at the empirical level. Almost...
Today, you can hear shades of GPMGP from politicians across the partisan and ideological ranges in the US. Think about it. It isn't uniform, but it is common. And it has become more common. Why? Polarization.
Yeah, polarization again. Why am I writing about it? 'Cuz I'm a political scientist who studies parties and Congress. I am contractually obligated to talk about it. I even wrote a book about it... [Yet another shameless plug...] Incremental Polarization: A Unified Spatial Theory of Legislative Elections, Parties & Roll Call Voting. It's, like, a real book, 'n stuff.
Anyway, remember when there were centrists? That depends on how old you are, or at least, how long you have been paying attention to politics. Centrism is an electoral boon. Period. This is consistent, and replicated. Science is all about replication, and science is a method, and political science is the application of the scientific method to the study of politics. Yes, it works. Anyway, centrists do better in elections, ceteris paribus. However, since that's intuitive, you never heard them running around the country, rambling about GPMGP. They didn't need to do so.
However, as the parties have moved apart, what has happened? Most Democratic politicians today are unified in their policy preferences, just as most Republican politicians are unified in their policy preferences. What divides them, to some extent, is their willingness to make electoral compromises.
GPMGP. If you believe that your non-centrist policies are good, then you have incentives to convince yourself that they will serve your electoral/political goals too! Otherwise, you have a tradeoff to make, and life gets complicated. Isn't it so much easier when life isn't complicated? Hence, you can hear political debates within parties over the extent to which compromises should be made. One faction within the party takes the political science-backed argument that adopting a more centrist position is electorally helpful, while the opposing side argues some variation of GPMGP, even when they agree in terms of their underlying preferences!
Then, from the voter's perspective, you need to keep your perspective. Are you actually a centrist? If so, then yeah, appealing to you is electorally beneficial. But, if not, then from your perspective, GPMGP doesn't work because what you consider to be "good policy," given your ideological perspective is not electorally beneficial. Sorry, but it just isn't. From Canes-Wrone, Brady & Cogan's 2002 APSR piece and Ansolabehere, Snyder & Stewart's 2001 AJPS analysis to everything since... no. Centrism wins more votes, and extremism hurts at the polls. Deal. Your positions are electoral losers, regardless of how much "good" you think they would do because too many people in the country disagree with you.
And remember that centrism is defined by the country in which the election is held.
In the abstract, this isn't that difficult to understand. Where it gets tricky is in the application. After all, one of the most pernicious fallacies is for people to assume that they are normal. By the way we live, we tend not to interact with those who are especially different from ourselves, and that reinforces misconceptions about the country. You can get the impression, if you live siloed in a very conservative church-going community, that everyone is like that, except for a few weirdos in San Francisco. You can get the impression, if you live siloed in academia, that everyone is like that, except for a few weirdos 100 miles from any urban center.
Your perception of how weird you are will depend not merely on how actually weird you are, but on how siloed you are, and how strong an effort you make to overcome that and recognize that there is a thing called "objective reality" out there, and people who disagree with you, and that you are just living a life in which you don't deal with them.
How aware people are of that will vary. More to the point, though, how much you factor that into your assessment of political strategy will vary. Even if you are aware, in some sense, that you have siloed yourself into a life in which you generally don't deal with a certain type of person... 'cuz... do you keep in mind how many of them there are, in an objective sense, when trying to figure out how practical any given political strategy is?
That's hard. It pits a distorted sense of reality against your hopes.
People suck at that. And that creates a perverse feedback loop with the parties because the people who suck most at that are often the ones who vote in primaries. Is that what drives parties to the extremes? It ain't that simple, but feedback loops are real. And distorted feedback loops are dangerous.
What is critical, and difficult for people to remember, though, is this. Think of a statistical distribution. Bell curve. What is the probability that you are at the exact center? Basically, zero. What is the probability that any random observation is near the center? The bigger the range, the higher the probability. However, higher levels of political engagement come with bigger distances from the center, and that throws things off.
GPMGP? Um... Centrism makes good politics. That's a replicated result. Does centrism make good policy? There is precisely zero evidence of that. If you are a centrist, then what you will think is good policy will happen to make good politics, but that's just coincidence. For everyone else, it is vital to recognize the tradeoffs.
Whether we are dealing with policy platforms in campaigns, tactics related to things like impeachment, or whatever, what appeals to you is not necessarily good politics, unless you happen to be the center of the universe. Are you? Probably not.
Enough of the GPMGP nonsense.
Myths of the week. Maybe this will stick around, and to some degree, these will be related to current happenings... 'cuz, but bird's eye view here. Just not pigeons. Right? Let's call this a pigeon-free zone.
So I'll start with this. An oldie, but a goodie. What appeals to you, or me, or whomever, is not necessarily good political strategy. There is an old line-- good policy makes good politics. Translation: when politicians do what they think is right, they will be rewarded by the political system. Conscientiously pursuing the best policies will be rewarded by voters, and blah, blah, blah. Democracy!
Right?
And from any given voter's perspective, flip that notion around. Appeal to what I think is right, and you, Mr. or Mrs. Politician, will be rewarded! Just do the right thing, and democracy will reward the politician who does the right thing!
I won't, yet again, belabor the DDRRDDRR nature of presidential elections as an empirical observation, but think about how you might try to reconcile that with the GPMGP thesis. Isn't it amazing that whoever is right just happens to be almost perfectly predicted by such a simple pattern? Why, it's almost enough to make a skeptic believe that GPMGP is a problematic thesis, at the empirical level. Almost...
Today, you can hear shades of GPMGP from politicians across the partisan and ideological ranges in the US. Think about it. It isn't uniform, but it is common. And it has become more common. Why? Polarization.
Yeah, polarization again. Why am I writing about it? 'Cuz I'm a political scientist who studies parties and Congress. I am contractually obligated to talk about it. I even wrote a book about it... [Yet another shameless plug...] Incremental Polarization: A Unified Spatial Theory of Legislative Elections, Parties & Roll Call Voting. It's, like, a real book, 'n stuff.
Anyway, remember when there were centrists? That depends on how old you are, or at least, how long you have been paying attention to politics. Centrism is an electoral boon. Period. This is consistent, and replicated. Science is all about replication, and science is a method, and political science is the application of the scientific method to the study of politics. Yes, it works. Anyway, centrists do better in elections, ceteris paribus. However, since that's intuitive, you never heard them running around the country, rambling about GPMGP. They didn't need to do so.
However, as the parties have moved apart, what has happened? Most Democratic politicians today are unified in their policy preferences, just as most Republican politicians are unified in their policy preferences. What divides them, to some extent, is their willingness to make electoral compromises.
GPMGP. If you believe that your non-centrist policies are good, then you have incentives to convince yourself that they will serve your electoral/political goals too! Otherwise, you have a tradeoff to make, and life gets complicated. Isn't it so much easier when life isn't complicated? Hence, you can hear political debates within parties over the extent to which compromises should be made. One faction within the party takes the political science-backed argument that adopting a more centrist position is electorally helpful, while the opposing side argues some variation of GPMGP, even when they agree in terms of their underlying preferences!
Then, from the voter's perspective, you need to keep your perspective. Are you actually a centrist? If so, then yeah, appealing to you is electorally beneficial. But, if not, then from your perspective, GPMGP doesn't work because what you consider to be "good policy," given your ideological perspective is not electorally beneficial. Sorry, but it just isn't. From Canes-Wrone, Brady & Cogan's 2002 APSR piece and Ansolabehere, Snyder & Stewart's 2001 AJPS analysis to everything since... no. Centrism wins more votes, and extremism hurts at the polls. Deal. Your positions are electoral losers, regardless of how much "good" you think they would do because too many people in the country disagree with you.
And remember that centrism is defined by the country in which the election is held.
In the abstract, this isn't that difficult to understand. Where it gets tricky is in the application. After all, one of the most pernicious fallacies is for people to assume that they are normal. By the way we live, we tend not to interact with those who are especially different from ourselves, and that reinforces misconceptions about the country. You can get the impression, if you live siloed in a very conservative church-going community, that everyone is like that, except for a few weirdos in San Francisco. You can get the impression, if you live siloed in academia, that everyone is like that, except for a few weirdos 100 miles from any urban center.
Your perception of how weird you are will depend not merely on how actually weird you are, but on how siloed you are, and how strong an effort you make to overcome that and recognize that there is a thing called "objective reality" out there, and people who disagree with you, and that you are just living a life in which you don't deal with them.
How aware people are of that will vary. More to the point, though, how much you factor that into your assessment of political strategy will vary. Even if you are aware, in some sense, that you have siloed yourself into a life in which you generally don't deal with a certain type of person... 'cuz... do you keep in mind how many of them there are, in an objective sense, when trying to figure out how practical any given political strategy is?
That's hard. It pits a distorted sense of reality against your hopes.
People suck at that. And that creates a perverse feedback loop with the parties because the people who suck most at that are often the ones who vote in primaries. Is that what drives parties to the extremes? It ain't that simple, but feedback loops are real. And distorted feedback loops are dangerous.
What is critical, and difficult for people to remember, though, is this. Think of a statistical distribution. Bell curve. What is the probability that you are at the exact center? Basically, zero. What is the probability that any random observation is near the center? The bigger the range, the higher the probability. However, higher levels of political engagement come with bigger distances from the center, and that throws things off.
GPMGP? Um... Centrism makes good politics. That's a replicated result. Does centrism make good policy? There is precisely zero evidence of that. If you are a centrist, then what you will think is good policy will happen to make good politics, but that's just coincidence. For everyone else, it is vital to recognize the tradeoffs.
Whether we are dealing with policy platforms in campaigns, tactics related to things like impeachment, or whatever, what appeals to you is not necessarily good politics, unless you happen to be the center of the universe. Are you? Probably not.
Enough of the GPMGP nonsense.
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