In Dynamics of American Democracy, Eric M. Patashnik and Wendy J. Schiller have compiled an impressively comprehensive—and, at times, rather worrying—dive into the causes and consequences of the United States’ tandem rise in partisan competition and ideological polarization over the past several decades. In doing so, the editors have brought together contributions from a remarkable set of scholars. Indeed, the volume warrants close attention on the merits of the list of contributors alone.
But the volume includes much more than high-profile contributors: its wide variety of chapters are not only carefully written, but also cover considerable substantive breadth. In fact, among one of the volume’s best features is how it eschews traditional silos in research on partisan competition and polarization. Instead, rather than being a book on parties, legislatures, public opinion, racial politics, or gender politics, Dynamics of American Democracy joins each of these literatures together to better understand the deepest challenges that American governance faces today.
The volume is similarly pluralistic in the methodological approaches pursued by its contributors. As a result, it begins to address some important controversies associated with our understanding of polarization. For instance, although some extant research has argued that American politics is more polarized today than at any point since the Civil War, other research has called into question the comparability of ideological estimates over time. A considerable portion of this research leverages advances in measurement and scaling, which have contributed to political science research in innumerable ways. Still, in making prognostications about possible resolution or in suggesting possible reforms, one is sometimes left wondering precisely how today’s challenges may differ from those in previous eras of American governance.
By providing thick historical insight, both James Morone’s and Matt Grossman’s contributions add considerable nuance to this question at both the electorate and elite levels, right at the beginning of the volume. With respect to the electorate, Morone argues that although tribalism has characterized American politics many times before, today’s sort of tribalism differs from eras past. Whereas earlier voters often thought of themselves in terms of “in-group” or “tribe,” today’s tribalism lacks many of the cross-cutting cleavages that previously blunted the worst features of tribalist instinct. In fact, as he points out, although feuds between the Federalist and Democratic-Republican Parties sometimes deteriorated into physical violence between elected officials themselves, the parties at times appealed to some of the same constituencies while taking seemingly contradictory policy positions across different issues. Democratic-Republicans, for their part, were the party of “free speech” and vocally supported popular revolutions in other countries—revolutions that frightened the well-to-do leadership of the Federalist Party. At the same time, Federalists strongly supported the immigration of cheaper labor, whereas Democratic-Republicans vehemently opposed it. Such cross-cutting cleavages have vanished today, rendering contemporary tribal politics without a strong comparison in American history. Instead, politics in the United States faces a deep set of divisions based on overlapping identities.
By placing this account at the beginning of the volume, the editors nicely preface an important theme that runs through several chapters: namely, that the American public is deeply divided along more than ideological lines. As John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck show, for instance, Americans espouse fundamentally different attitudes about gender and its role in politics. Similarly, in their chapter on media engagement, Deborah Schildkraut, Jeffrey Berry, and James Glaser highlight major differences in affect between conservatives and liberals, underscoring how conservatives lean into disagreement and confrontation while liberals tend toward avoidance. Although the authors do not find differential trends in incivility according to the Twitter interactions they study, their findings again demonstrate that differences between left-leaning and right-leaning Americans extend far beyond policy positions. And as Kristin Kanthak underscores in her chapter, a natural outgrowth of these distinctions is negative partisanship: voters’ certainty that they are not well represented by the “other” party.
Given these seemingly deep-rooted conflicts within the electorate itself, the chapters dealing directly with the populace paint a worrying political picture—one that evidently will not be easily resolved through means such as institutional reforms. Here, although the volume does well to engage both mass- and elite-level politics, it also leaves room for more engagement between the two. Such questions arise as early as the first section, where the editors juxtapose Grossman’s historical account of twentieth-century policy making alongside Morone’s review of tribal politics throughout US history. Grossman describes a tacit agreement between Republicans and Democrats throughout the twentieth century by which governing proceeded by achieving moderately progressive ends via conservative means. That is, mid-century Republicans gradually acquiesced to leftward policy movements on the condition that such policy goals were met via marketized and private-sector–driven policies. Grossman’s depiction of policy making in Congress’s “textbook” era is a compelling one, but it suggests an important question that persists throughout the remainder of the book: Has Congress’s shift away from this arrangement resulted from intentional changes on the part of party elites, or have congressional parties merely responded to a public with an appetite for more conflictual politics?
Although these electorate-focused chapters seem to point to the latter possibility, chapters focused on political elites are decidedly divided. On the one hand, contributions from Frances Lee and from Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney Milkis indicate that elites benefit from the theater and branding associated with partisan competition, thereby creating incentives to accentuate “polarized” dynamics. In Congress, for example, Lee argues that tight competition over majority control incentivizes party leaders to emphasize divisions between the parties. In her chapter, she asserts that such dynamics render roll-call–based measures of preferences an unreliable source of true ideological information, because many votes are not policy altering, thereby providing opportunities for electoral positioning. With respect to the executive, Jacobs and Milkis underscore how today’s party conflict—and the consequent importance of centralized branding—has served to empower the president.
Other chapters on political elites, however, provide evidence that members of Congress and other elites are genuinely polarized—much like the voters who elected them. Nolan McCarty, for example, contends that partisan sorting has forced Congress into genuine, long-term gridlock, opening opportunities for state governments to pursue policy innovations instead. Here, it is the nationalization of America’s party system that presents the largest challenges to governance, because it hamstrings state party leaders from pursuing policy stances that are tailored to their states.
This internal tension regarding the “source” of US political dysfunction—elite-driven strategy versus deep-seated cultural division—perhaps explains the uncertainty of the findings in the “reforms” section. Indeed, if the United States is to address its challenges via institutional reforms, one must first identify the most fundamental causes of division. Can the creation of a final-five electoral system reorient politicians’ incentives away from our present “duopoly,” as Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter argue? Or are voters’ divisions so stark that coordinating around new parties may prove prohibitively difficult, as Lee Drutman, William Galston, and Tod Lindberg seem to find?
Expecting any single book to fully answer such fundamental questions, of course, is unreasonable. However, given how well the chapters raise such questions, this volume will undoubtedly serve as a survey text for both graduate and undergraduate courses on polarization and contemporary US politics. The accessibility of the writing also permits broader engagement outside universities, as does the book’s inclusion of contributors from several types of institutions.
