What if the notion that a large segment of the electorate is made up of moderates who hunger for centrist compromise is illusory? What if ordinary voters are, in many respects, even more extreme in their views than members of Congress?
Two political science graduate students at Berkeley, David E. Broockman and Douglas J. Ahler, have made a persuasive case that not only are there few voters who are actually centrist or moderate, but that many voters – and on some issues, a majority of voters – are further to the left or right than the congressmen and legislators who represent them.
The Broockman-Ahler argument, if it’s correct, undermines advocacy organizations, think tanks and commissions premised on the belief that moderates remain a powerful but untapped source of support in federal elections. Such organizations include Third Way, a pro-Democratic think tank, which contends that “In the eleven most competitive Senate races of 2014, moderates hold the key to Democratic wins”; the Centrist Project, which asserts that “Most Americans Are Moderates”; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget; the Bipartisan Policy Center; the Progressive Policy Institute; the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform; the Concord Coalition; No Labels; and the Campaign to Fix the Debt.
Political scientists have long debated how polarized ordinary voters are compared with political elites. In a paper completed earlier this month, “An Artificial Disconnect,” Broockman disputes in detail the work of scholars and activists who have sought to promote “an ambitious reform agenda” based on the “widely accepted empirical finding” that “voters reliably support more moderate policies than elites.” The mistake here, Broockman writes, is to “crucially rely on the assumption that voters’ preferences can be summarized on one dimension.”
Broockman explains the problem as follows:
A voter’s ideal policy is significantly more extreme than the legislator’s on each of two policies. However, when mapping their views to one dimension it is the legislator who appears extreme. Why? When asked whether he would like to nudge the policy status quo in a conservative or liberal direction, this voter gives inconsistent answers, answering in a liberal manner on one question and a conservative manner on a different question. “On average,” then, this voter is in the ‘middle’ of the liberal-conservative continuum.”
One voter might support liberal policies calling for much higher taxes on the rich and also support a conservative stand in opposition to same-sex marriage. When the two responses are averaged, though, he or she would be defined as a moderate.
Meanwhile, let’s say that our hypothetical voter’s congressman supports relatively conservative policies in both cases and reliably casts relatively conservative votes. Because of the legislator’s ideological consistency, he or she is estimated to be " ‘extreme’ on the continuum,” as Broockman puts it. But who is actually the extremist?
Earlier this year, to further strengthen their case, Broockman and Ahler designed and conducted an innovative online survey of 1,240 respondents recruited by Survey Sampling International. The survey asked voters not only whether they supported the Democratic, centrist or Republican positions on a range of issues, but also offered respondents the option of taking more extreme positions – further to the left or right — than most Democratic and Republican members of Congress would be willing to support.
In the case of taxes, for example, the survey offered respondents seven choices, of which four were “extreme.”
The extreme choices on taxes on the left are: to establish a maximum annual income, with all income over $1,000,000 per year taxed at a rate of 100 percent, and to decrease federal taxes on the poor and provide more services benefiting the middle class and the poor; or to increase federal income taxes on those making more than $250,000 per year to pre-1990s levels (more than 5 percent above current rates). Use the savings to significantly lower taxes and provide more services to those making less and to invest in infrastructure projects.
The extreme choices on taxes the survey offers on the right are: to move to a completely flat income tax system where all individuals pay the same percentage of their income in taxes, accomplished by decreasing government services; or to move to a flat consumption tax where all individuals pay the same percentage of their purchases in taxes, banning the income tax, even if this means the poor pay more in taxes than the rich. Significantly decrease government services in the process.
The results challenge those committed to the “moderate voter” thesis. The policies supported by a majority of respondents, 59 percent, were more extreme than the policies that “political elites typically support.” Of the 59 percent, 40 percent swung left, and 19 percent to the right. The distribution is shown in Figure 1.
When Broockman and Ahler performed the same analysis combining survey respondents’ responses to 12 survey questions, going beyond taxes – guns, abortion, immigration, Medicare, health, environment, Social Security, gay rights, labor unions, contraception and education – 49 percent of the respondents took more extreme stands than those taken by partisan elites, 30 percent to the left and 19 percent to the right. Figure 2 illustrates their analysis.
In a separate study, Ahler and Broockman sought to determine whether voters adopted extreme positions in surveys because there were no consequences, whereas in the real world of governing, these same voters might prefer their elected officials to take more moderate stands. This proved not to be the case: voters’ support for a politician who “adopts their previously expressed issue views, including their more extreme views, does not abate even when explicitly informed that an alternative politician is more moderate.”
Broockman and Ahler appear to be exercising influence in the debate over polarization and moderation.
I asked Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford who is the author of the book “Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America,” for his views on the Broockman paper. Fiorina wrote back: “I think everyone who has read his paper believes he really nailed that point.”
In an extended email exchange I conducted with Broockman, he pointed out that some of his and Ahler’s findings raise the question: Should elected officials cast votes reflecting the majority views of their constituents?
Many of the policies that garner widespread public support, like very draconian immigration policies or extremely generous redistributive policies, would have economic consequences that voters probably would not like. I think politicians are doing their job well in resisting some of these pressures from the public, and so would hesitate to praise any effort to force them to be more responsive to what the public is asking for on these issues in the short term.
I asked Broockman if a politician could more successfully represent constituents by casting each legislative vote to reflect majority opinion in his or her district. Broockman replied:
First, even if a politician took the median or most popular position on every issue, a) there would still be many people who disagree on each of these issues, and b) most individual voters would still disagree with that politician on many issues (because voters aren’t consistent enough across issues that there’s a mass of voters who have that “most popular position” on every issue themselves). It may be the case that such a politician would be more popular, but, as a result of these issues, probably not by all that much.
If voters are more extreme than the politicians who represent them, where does this leave us?
In an additional paper published in September, “How Ideological Moderation Conceals Support for Immoderate Policies: A New Perspective on the ‘Disconnect’ in American Politics,” Ahler and Broockman reach a pessimistic conclusion:
Because each citizen prefers a different mix of policies, there is no one mix a politician could adopt that would broadly satisfy citizens. Thus it is natural that many citizens appear frustrated with the choices they have in American elections; yet, given the relatively idiosyncratic nature of citizens’ own preference bundles, it is also unclear that there is dramatic room for improvement.
They continue:
Because each citizen’s pattern of views across issues appears unique, each citizen is likely to be “disconnected” from the positions their representatives take in his or her own way, a situation which the election of more moderates – or more of any other one particular kind of politician – could not broadly resolve.
In other words, Americans can look forward to a recurrence of public dissatisfaction for which there is no remedy and to intractable conflict among elites resulting in the inability of either side to enact a durable agenda.