The Power of Partisanship, by Joshua J. Dyck and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz, is essential reading for students of politics who share James Madison’s hope that the American people would have sufficient knowledge to hold their elected officials accountable. Madison did not want political parties to be the vehicle through which voters filtered their views of policy and politicians because he feared they would be divisive forces in the new democracy. Instead, he envisioned a political system where multiple groups and sets of politicians would set forth policies designed to compete for support from voters, who would then consider the potential impact of those policies and subsequently make their choice. Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz have produced a rigorous and comprehensive twenty-first-century test of Madison’s expectations using a sophisticated theoretical approach and original survey and experimental data.
At the start of the book, the authors tackle the assumption that individual policy preferences underlie one’s choice of partisan affiliation. If those days ever existed, the authors argue, they are long gone now. Not only do most voters pick a partisan side but they also are rarely inclined to seek information outside partisan sources, and they ignore objective truths if they conflict with their party’s policies. In the authors’ words, “The power of partisanship ultimately makes partisans unable to respond to information not gained through partisan channels” (3). Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz go on to show, quite convincingly, that in multiple issue areas, voters do not express opinions held independently of their party affiliation. In turn, the twentieth-century sources that were counted on to give them the tools to assess their government—a nonpartisan media, for example—have been transformed into purveyors of frequently incorrect and partisan-slanted information. According to the authors, there is literally nowhere to turn in our current democracy to find the “truth,” and increasingly fewer voters are actually seeking out perspectives outside their party walls. Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz powerfully challenge rational choice theory—and the retrospective voter evaluation model, in particular—by suggesting that the core premise of the median information-processing voter no longer applies. Today, politicians do not have to produce policies that they believe voters will like because they can substitute policy output with rhetorical partisan messaging.
Where it gets trickier for the authors is in their discussion of the role that political parties play in providing cues to voters about government performance. The argument they want to make is that voters cannot hold parties accountable for policy, partly because they are so blinded by party loyalty and partly because they have few resources to accurately assess what constitutes government policy success. The authors claim that “party identification in the modern era serves as a misinformation shortcut more than an information shortcut” (116). But scholars such as Joseph Schumpeter, E. E. Schattschneider, and V. O. Key each argued that political parties would always seek to fill the informational vacuum and that the partisan system, when combined with regularly scheduled elections, would be the best that American democracy could achieve in terms of holding elected officials accountable for government performance. In other words, party messaging did not have to be accurate, but it did have to be clearly distinctive from the opposite party’s stance so that voters could make the simple choice of which party they preferred. The more distinct the parties, the better off the system would be. Without clear and competitive party competition, the forces of oppression would go unchecked, as they had in Europe before World War II or in the American South for the 100 years following the Civil War, as V. O. Key describes in his 1949 book Southern Politics in State and Nation.
The authors, however, challenge this depiction of the benefits of a strong two-party system. In chapter 2, they argue that negative partisanship has caused the general demonization of the opposite party and led voters to ignore how government performance affects their lives in favor of being on the winning team. Elected officials are fully aware of these effects, so they feel freer to reject compromise with their legislative colleagues in favor of a status quo filled with gridlock and brinkmanship. Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz use an original experimental design and survey data in chapter 3 to show that voters reject policies that they would otherwise support when they are endorsed or put forth by politicians from the other major party. Moreover, voters appear to punish elected officials who show an inclination to compromise with their opposite-party colleagues. The authors also include chapters that focus on how partisanship can condition the impact of interpersonal interactions on attitudes on racial equality, how partisanship can affect one’s willingness to take on risk, and how partisanship interacts with external factors such as crime rates to influence attitudes on gun control. The authors use a range of different methods to analyze these relationships and clearly lay out their findings, which produces a strong mix of normative inquiry with quantitative analysis. As such, this book can be a valuable teaching tool for both graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences.
The authors also caution the reader not to rely too heavily on independent voters to remedy the polarization problem, as they discuss in chapter 7. They do a very good job of surveying the key literature on what distinguishes a “true independent”—that is, a well-informed nonpartisan—from a “disinterested” voter who has a less-than-average interest in politics and is not persuaded by partisan messaging. The peril in relying on disinterested voters to moderate the worst of partisan tendencies is that they express higher levels of distrust in government and elected officials, and are less inclined to vote.
The Power of Partisanship is a rich and highly relevant work of political science, and like any piece of good scholarship, it answers important questions while producing new ones. One question I would like to see these authors explore is why, despite this clear lack of electoral accountability, American democratic government keeps chugging along in producing policy. David Mayhew in his 2005 book, Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigations, 1946–2002, and James Curry and Frances Lee in their 2020 book, The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era, make the case that Congress is actually quite productive. To say that Congress still passes legislation and creates new programs is not to say that all policies are beneficial to all voters, and we can even acknowledge that most voters are not well informed about who passed what and why or how a given policy benefits or hurts them. Why then does it matter if voters misplace their credit or blame? Can voters be trapped inside their own partisan restraints and still get a reasonably responsive government?
Dyck and Pearson-Merkowitz conclude their book by writing, “Today we live in a society that is everything Madison feared” (176). It might be more accurate to say that modern US society is more complex, diverse, and participatory than Madison anticipated. It is possible that the authors are setting the democratic bar too high, but they are very persuasive in demonstrating that the implications of setting it too low are risky indeed.
