Much of the research in political behavior, rooted in canonical scholarship during the 1950s and 1960s, frets that the American public does not know enough and cares too little about politics to hold representatives accountable. Since the late 1970s, however, apathy has morphed into hyperpolarization. The foundational struggle over what it means to be an American, the mobilization of base supporters who scorn compromise, and rancorous tribalism with Democrats and Republicans viewing each other as an existential threat to the country have fractured the nation. Into the fray steps Joshua Zingher, whose book Political Choice in a Polarized America seeks to explain these developments. His core argument is unequivocal: mass polarization is a consequence of elite-level trends in partisanship.
This conclusion may be straightforward, but its rendering challenges the conceptual framework of The American Voter (1960), the study that has guided much of the research on political behavior since the earliest iterations of the American National Election Study (ANES). Voting decisions in the United States, Philip Converse and coauthors (1960) argued, have little connection to issues, let alone ideology; rather, political choice is determined by partisan loyalties that emerge from family ties and group identities. Zingher acknowledges that the Michigan model was a “brilliant” explanation of post–World War II politics, but he denies that partisanship and voting are “time invariant.” The weakness of the Michigan model, and much of the current public opinion literature, is “its failure to take context into account” (p. 209). “Most of the canonical studies of political behavior were written at a time when elite polarization was at an all-time low,” Zingher argues. Scholars of public opinion and political behavior “need to update [their] ideas” to take account of elites who divide sharply on issues and signal their stark differences to the public (p. 206).
Relying principally on time-series analysis from the ANES and the General Social Survey (GSS), the book demonstrates that since the 1970s political elites have increasingly signaled significant differences on economic and social issues. Moreover, most voters have responded to these cues: party identification and voting choices are now closely connected to worldviews and policy positions. Zingher does not argue that voters meet Converse’s standard for a “belief system”: “a configuration of ideas and attitudes in which the elements are bound together by some form of constraint or functional independence” (p. 27). An important contribution of this work is that it shows that consequential issue positions need not be so structured. The public derives their positions on important policy matters from any number of potential pathways, including partisanship.
Zingher thus counterposes the positions of scholars, still beholden to the Michigan model, who acknowledge angry tribalism but doubt that Democrats’ and Republicans’ dislike for each other stems from ideological conflict. Critics might rejoin that partisanship subsumes core values and policy orientations. However, drawing on methodological innovations over the past decade, Zingher shows that partisanship at one point in time does not perfectly predict partisanship or voting choices downstream: knowledge about an individual’s general policy orientation on social and economic issues adds a significant amount of predictive value. Most centrally to his argument, Zingher reveals considerable evidence that, as elite polarization increases, so too does the predictive power of issue orientation on the mass public’s political choices. These conclusions are further validated by the set of findings linking political sophistication with those patterns. Although those most knowledgeable and educated are more likely to respond to elite signals, Zingher shows that even the least sophisticated voters have become more responsive to the remade partisan context of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Political Choice in a Polarized America is an important achievement. As scholars of American political development, we especially value Zingher’s careful attention to changes over time that have reconstituted political behavior in the United States. He is not the first public opinion scholar to take account of how dramatic changes wrought by what historians call the “long sixties” changed the American voter. Indeed, Norman Nie, Sidney Verba and John Petrocik in The Changing American Voter (1976) detected the rise of a more programmatic partisanship very early in the game. Let us hope that Zingher’s systematic test of these developments encourages more scholars of mass behavior to probe the belief systems at the root of America’s discontents, further testing his argument that polarization is more than visceral contempt and personality cults.
Being development scholars, we do have some questions about the context that Zingher portrays. First, we wonder whether the claim that elite polarization begets mass polarization needs to be so one-way. We would suggest that the transformation of partisanship has been neither top-down nor bottom-up but rather a complex mixture of the two. Indeed, Zingher devotes chapter 6 to the recursive relationship between changing policy orientations and updated partisan attachments, acknowledging that politics is interactive; presumably, context works in the same way. Moreover, the measures Zingher uses to assess elite-level polarization are unlikely to be divorced from mass politics. Consider the use of DW-Nominate scores to measure elite polarization. These scores emerge from votes taken in a legislature—votes that, given the issue orientation of contemporary voters, are probably responsive to constituent preferences, especially those who are engaged and sophisticated and thus are also likely to be the most ideologically extreme. In taking the policy positions of the average American seriously, Zingher gives us an image of an electorate that is not incapable of democratic politics. But in attributing position sorting solely to elites, he risks stripping the public—particularly those most likely to receive attention from elites—of any agency.
The reciprocal relationship between elites and the mass public also raises the question as to who the elites are in a polarized America. Zingher mentions the importance of the movement politics of the sixties and especially the civil rights and Christian Right insurgencies in changing the partisan landscape. Adding specificity to this observation, we would note how social activists deliberately changed elite behavior by weakening party organizations. On the Left, activists pushed for the McGovern Fraser reforms, which shifted power away from party bosses and elites. During the 1980s and 1990s, conservative evangelicals and other right-wing activists inspired by the Reagan Revolution began to transform the GOP into a movement party with a fervent commitment to traditional values. All in all, elections no longer turn on candidates’ abilities to reach out to the mythical median voter but on mobilizing the party’s most fervent base supporters. In the years since, both liberal and conservative movement activists have pulled the parties away from the center, energizing grassroots bases, shattering areas of postwar consensus, and fueling ideological polarization and legislative stalemate. The role of social activists in shaping contemporary partisanship—as “policy demanders” (Kathleen Bawn et al., “A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 10, 2012)—must be considered in seeking an answer to Zingher’s million-dollar question: “What can stop [the] seeming inexorable march toward greater and greater levels of polarization” (p. 210).
Elites certainly tap into this activism in signaling partisan battles to the mass public. Our work, for instance, calls attention to the growth of executive-centered partisanship, which has shifted policy making from the parties to the presidency on both sides of the aisle. Note that there is some observational equivalence between changing partisanship and the rise of presidential partisanship. As Zingher observes, over time, more and more Americans correctly place the Democrat Party to the ideological “left” of the Republican party (figure 3.7, p. 82). We see the exact same trend when participants surveyed in the ANES are asked to position Democratic and Republican candidates running for the presidency. In fact, Americans were slightly more able to do this earlier in the time series, when images of the “Democratic Party” and “Republican Party” were perhaps more influenced by local context. Like other political elites, presidents since the 1980s have become much clearer in the signals they send to the electorate. However, establishing the president as the repository of partisan responsibility aggravates Manichean party conflict. As Juan Linz (“The Perils of Presidentialism,” Journal of Democracy 1, 1990) pointed out more than three decades ago, “presidentialism” weakens collective responsibility and forges a polarizing winner-take-all politics.
These observations are not meant as a criticism of Zingher’s important study; rather they are offered in the spirit of continuing a critical dialogue. We owe a debt of gratitude to his demonstration that citizens’ political choices are informed by core values. Our hope is that this exchange sheds new light on the causes and consequences of a polarized America, as well as potential remedies for the darker side of harsh party conflict. Throughout Political Choice in a Polarized America, elite polarization is lamented for its failure to govern responsibly. Nevertheless, if we take account of how the “gatekeepers” of party politics have been marginalized by executive aggrandizement and activists, we might discover where the work of political reform and reimagination of institutions may begin.
