The state capitol building in Jefferson City, Missouri. (photo by Kristina Singiser)
Political junkies of the highest order are probably already aware of the term
asymmetric polarization. Even the casual political observer might've caught wind of it, since it earned a shout-out from MSNBC host Chris Hayes smack dab in the middle of the network's Election Night 2012 coverage last November.
For those who think that sounds like it describes some type of medical condition, perhaps some explanation is in order. For the best and most readable primer on the subject I've seen, you need to look no further than Grist's David Roberts, who wrote an excellent piece (with an exquisite headline: "The left's gone left but the right's gone nuts") on the subject last July.
For those with a phobia about clicking links, here's the gist of it—over time, both political parties have deviated incrementally further from the ideological midpoint. That would be the polarization part, and virtually no one denies the existence of that gradual movement. However, there is another key component to the concept: The Republican Party has abandoned "the center" at a far faster clip than have Democrats. Therein lies the asymmetric part.
Studies have been done (this one by VoteView is probably the best known) that confirm this thesis. Most of the work on this topic, to this point, has focused on the phenomenon as it has developed in the United States Congress.
Until this week.
In an interesting piece released this week, political scientists Nolan McCarty and Boris Shor looked at the phenomenon of asymmetric polarization at the state legislative level. Here, we get 99 samples to test the hypothesis. And the findings, while not consistent, are very telling nevertheless.
Head below the fold with me for a deeper dive into the numbers. (And, yes, originally, the word "asymmetric" was misspelled. I need to contact Manhattan Beach Intermediate School to relinquish my 7th grade spelling bee trophy).
The beauty of the research done by Shor and McCarty is that, rather than being able to examine, at most, two bodies of government (the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate), we now can explore the prospects of asymmetric polarization in nearly a hundred different arenas. What's more: Instead of looking at one national body, we can look at 50 different state institutions, which allows us to factor in all the myriad idiosyncrasies that accompany politics at the regional and local level.
With that in mind, were there any hard conclusions to Shor and McCarty's work? The title alone gives hint to the ambivalence (the title is "Asymmetric Polarization in the State Legislatures? Yes and No"). And a more statistical glance at the numbers reveals a similar lack of uniformity. That said, it also shows that there is at least some statistically worthy evidence that the idea of a disproportionate race from the center does filter down to the state levels:
Looking across the states, Republicans on the whole are clearly polarizing faster than Democrats. In 57 of the 99 state legislative chambers, they are getting more conservative over time, while in 47 chambers Democrats are getting more liberal. In 26 chambers Democrats are actually getting more conservative (eg, depolarizing), while the converse is true in 20 chambers for Republicans where they are getting more liberal.
The deviation here could best be described as
relevant, if not necessarily remarkable. To put it in different terms, for every Republican state legislative caucus that has moved towards the center, nearly three have moved towards the ideological extreme. On the Democratic side, the ratio is not nearly as pronounced (sitting at roughly 1.8-to-1).
However, McCarty and Shor also noted that the movement was far from uniform, with a rather scattershot coalition of states and parties moving further from the center. Here is one example of such a disparate coalition, which would seem to yield no clear clues on first blush:
[I]n other states like Idaho, Mississippi, and California, it is Democrats who are largely responsible for the states’ recent polarization.
One would have to be awfully creative to draw many common political threads between that triumvirate of states. Idaho is largely white, and among the three or four most reliably Republican states in the Union. Mississippi has one of the highest concentrations of African-American voters in the nation, is wildly polarized politically, and has voted Republican consistently at the statewide level in the past several cycles. Meanwhile, California is both richly diverse, and reliably Democratic.
Therefore, finding a simple, and easy, solution to the polarization in those states being assymetric in the direction of the Democrats would seem to be difficult. But, on further analysis, it really isn't. It just so happens that they do not have the same reason for increasing polarization on the left.
Start with Idaho. The answer here, which is no fault of the authors, is the "polarization" is owed to the kind of error that comes from really, really small sample sizes.
Simply put, Idaho is a deeply red state that becomes almost absurdly so at the state legislative level. Republicans hold a ... wait for it ... 53-17 lead in the state House, and a 28-7 lead in the state Senate.
When one does polarization studies in the Congress, using something like a median DW-NOMINATE score (for example), there are always well over a hundred data points to use in the House, and at least three dozen to work with in the Senate (even in the Great Society years, Republicans managed to hold onto roughly those amounts). But, here, that simply isn't the case. A fairly big swing could be had simply by having one or two marginally conservative Democrats in the Idaho state Senate being replaced by comparably liberal Dems in Boise's small pocket of blue (and no, I'm not referring to the SmurfTurf at Boise State).
An even more stark example: How do you get a "median" Republican in the Hawaii state Senate? There's only one of them. It's this guy—Sam Slom—a Hawaiian birther, according to his Wikipedia profile. Upon his retirement (he is in his early 70s), should he be replaced by a comparably moderate Republican, does that mean that Hawaiian Republicans have somehow "depolarized"? Of course not.
Mississippi is a more complex story: A slow-motion seismic shift in the basic definition of what it means to be a Democrat that has given, in all probability, the illusion of an asymmetric polarization. It is a complex story that is shared by many states in the deep South.
Here, the crux of the dispute is, quite simply, race. White Southern Democrats, which have quite literally become an endangered species at the federal level, are also disappearing at the state legislative level.
Some of them are disappearing because they have become cannon fodder at the ballot box, especially in the past two or three election cycles, where tying the Democratic incumbent to Barack Obama has paid dividends in states where racially polarized voting has long been a grim reality.
Others, meanwhile, either in the name of ideological frustration or in the name of political expediency, have simply become Republicans. Take the aforementioned state of Mississippi. In only the last three years, a total of nine state legislators in Mississippi have switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. That number, as high as it is, is actually less than have occurred in neighboring states like Louisiana, which has seen thirteen such defections (though, in fairness, the most recent one was actually a deeply quirky African-American member of the lege).
What would this do to a study of polarization? Well, the answer is simple, really. Four or five legislative sessions ago, the Democratic coalitions in these states were a combination of urban African-American legislators (mixed in with a small handful of urban liberal Whites), and rural white legislators, who tended to be quite conservative. Now, by and large, those white legislators are gone (consider, for a moment, how many state legislative seats the Democrats have lost in the Deep South in the past four or five cycles).
So the polarization here is due far, far more to the existence of a wholly different legislative caucus, as opposed to some kind of marked political movement within a legislative caucus.
Finally, there is California. Here, the polarization is explained by the spoils of victory. As a native Californian, I can remember the days of the not-so-very distant past, when the Democratic majority in the California state legislature was at least somewhat imperiled. Heck, I was in college for that horrific (and mercifully brief) era of Republican rule in Sacramento.
Today, any fears of Republican legislative dominance in the California legislature is gone. Democrats have supermajorities in both the state Assembly and the state Senate, and the only question in the immediate future is whether those very valuable two-thirds majorities are in any immediate danger.
What this means, for the discussion of asymmetric polarization, is why this would make Democrats lean further to the left. And at the risk of sounding trite, here is your answer: because they no longer have to pretend to be centrist. There is less of a need to curry favor with "centrists" when you've got a 55-25 majority in the state Assembly. That same phenomenon has undoubtedly been the guiding force behind another state that McCarty and Shor identified as becoming more polarized on the right: Tennessee, where Republicans have racked up almost comically large majorities in the past two cycles.
There are also geographic considerations in play in cases like this, as well. Though the Independent Redistricting Commission here in California did a whale of a job in generating more competitive districts here than we have seen in decades, at the state and federal levels, there are still stark geographic differences in voting patterns in the state. "Swing" areas are few and far between, with Ventura County being perhaps the best example (as evidenced by close races there pretty much across the board in 2012). Several states share these clear lines of political demarcation, and they would also speak to polarization.
Sometimes, of course, those lines of political demarcation are done by the clever cartography of the redistricting process. This, too, has to be considered as a primary agent in any polarization (asymmetric or otherwise) that we see in politics at the state and federal level. Races to the ideological extreme are only going to grow more common on a district-by-district level when the political players involved are keeping a far more nervous eye on the primaries in the spring and summer, rather than the general election in November.
The study by McCarty and Shor is worth reading in full, and hopefully will open up even more discussion about the things that have generated the increasing dearth of political common ground. Unlike many who participate in this discussion, I don't say this in a Broder-esque mourning of the "sensible center." I say this as a political observer who wonders how this will shape politics in the years to come.
The race to seize the political balance of power, it appears, is becoming decreasingly about appealing to that long-coveted political center. Winning the party base, and working feverishly to expand the size and depth of that base, might be the key to victories for years to come.