Notes on Partisanship

25 Jun

Manipulating the Median Voter Theorem

It is commonly touted that elites are far more partisan than the rank and file. One would have thought that in accordance with the median voter theorem, a simple majority voting model for single dimension issue space proposed by Duncan Black and later popularized by Anthony Downs, the elites would be under pressure to have public ideological profiles that appeal to the median voter.

This seemingly ‘irrational’ behavior of the elites can be explained in a variety of ways—average voter, which includes only the people who do vote, is on average more partisan than an average eligible voter, an average ‘voter’ chooses a candidate based on vague personality and party cues rather than specific issue position cues (to which they are largely unaware), voter’s issue positions are incestuously linked to the positions outlined by the candidates that they ‘like’, and the fact that elites gerrymander the multi-dimensional issue space so that the salient issue(s) on which an average voter votes are ones on which they have positions similar to the ‘median voter’.

Party and Partisanship

While the overall impact of parties has waned over the years, the party ‘line’ exercises more control on candidate’s professed positions. In this world of continuous media coverage, there is increasing pressure to present a consistent party approved stance. At the other end, there is a strong self-selection process, precedent, and certainly fear of how each ‘off-message’ comments would be interpreted in media, that is driving an assembly line in which generally only candidates who profess abiding faith in party ideology succeed in the primaries.

There is a certainly an increasing gap between the message, the voting record, and the candidate opinion, and a deliberately cultivated one. The partisanship is held together by ‘partisan money’, and custom order research produced by think tanks to justify and corroborate any policy initiative that they are asked to.

Media and Partisanship

Horse Race format of covering policy

The other aspect of media’s impact on partisanship has been driven by how it covers political issues – be it immigration or Iraq. The much-decried horse-race coverage, which was once a preserve of election coverage, has now entered the policy domain. A large number of articles in newspapers give an insider view of politicking and impact of a policy decision on the party rather than on say the nation. Now while covering a news story journalists go from politician to politician seeking quotes which they then use to provide worthless hack analysis in words of politicians. Nowhere do journalists stop and question the policy stances independently aside from what the ‘other side’ chose to point out. By doing this, they do two things – they first of all fail to provide substantive useful information to their readers, and secondly by weaving in partisan cues give readers automatic pointers to devalue certain information.

Partisan Identities: Using anger and satire

The rise of humorous “fake” news shows satirizing politics – most prominently “The Daily Show” by John Stewart – over the past decade has been widely seen as an unmitigated positive by a lot of self-identified ‘liberals’. What ‘liberals’, cozy in the success of a liberal comedy show, fail to realize is the pernicious aspect of satire – it delegitimizes opposing viewpoints without proper analysis. It is only time before right-wing ‘news’ channels come up with their liberal baiting satire shows.

The other prominent way to delegitimize opposing opinion is through self-righteous anger. This is, of course, most prominently done by right-wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

While Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone” is a stylized partisan lynching of liberals, Stewart’s satire is the vicious intelligent kind that ridicules the ‘idiots’. The shows use every rhetorical (and editing) trick to not only defeat the opposing party but do so in the most vicious incendiary manner that entertains the partisan viewers.

Both anger and satire are explicit identity building and reaffirmation rituals. What we see when straw man ‘guests’ get grilled on these shows is identify reaffirmation for the viewers – these people in the opposition are actually immoral, corrupt idiots.

Perhaps something of much more concern is the rise of entire partisan news channels. While there wasn’t much ‘news’ on the ‘news channels’ to begin with, and the ‘news’ coverage continues to cede territory to celebrity coverage, whatever shriveled carcass was left is now being preyed upon by explicit partisan coverage. There are no longer undisputed facts—there are now Republican facts and Democratic facts. And of course, both bear little resemblance to actual facts.