THE ELECTORAL FOUNDATIONS OF POLARIZED POLITICS

The problem with polarization is not simply that political leaders and ordinary Americans alike are divided into opposite partisan camps on a broad range of national issues, but that these divisions lead to partisan intransigence and gridlock in Washington, rendering the national government incapable of addressing national challenges in any coherent or effective fashion. Partisan divisions in the public certainly contribute to the problem, but current electoral configurations and practices, combined with the Constitution's Madisonian architecture, make it especially acute by delivering a national government divided between a Democratic president and Republican House and Senate majority who owe their election to starkly divergent electoral coalitions (Jacobson 2013a). The foundations of polarized ideological conflict and legislative gridlock thus lie in various interacting features of the electoral process. Some of these features may be amenable to deliberate adjustment; others are clearly not. The most feasible policy changes are likely to have only modest marginal effects on political polarization, but they are at least worth contemplating for want of anything more effective. The challenge as I see it is to alter electoral incentives to make participation in cross-party coalitions more attractive and partisan posturing less so, because in my view, polarized ideological conflict and legislative gridlock will not diminish much until partisan warriors in Congress are punished – or anticipate being punished – rather than rewarded at the polls. Figuring out how to make this happen is no simple matter, because it requires offsetting the trends, practices, and institutional features that generated the problem in the first place, most of which are not amenable to calculated modification.

The polarizing trends are well known. Widening partisan and ideological divisions in Washington over the past four decades have coevolved with complementary changes in electoral politics in a mutually reinforcing spiral (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006; Sinclair 2006).