American Democracy in the Balance: From Partisanship to Gerrymandering with Dr. Laurel Harbridge-Yong

Is the spirit of bipartisanship gasping its last breath? Today's conversation with Dr. Laurel Harbridge-Yong, Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and an authority on the subject, might just surprise you. We’ll journey into the heart of American politics, exploring the ramifications of polarization, the push and pull of primary voters, and the strategic game of redistricting.

We’ll dissect how our elected representatives navigate the tricky path between appeasing primary voters and general electorates, and delve into the concept of the primary premium, particularly in safe seats. Drawing from Dr. Harbridge-Yong's research, we examine the seismic shifts within the Republican and Democratic parties and the disparities between them. Also on our agenda is the controversial practice of gerrymandering - an exercise that shapes our districts, our representation, and potentially strains our democracy.

As we navigate through these complex themes, our final port of call is the state of American democracy itself. We’ll grapple with the explanations for the rise of polarization, the role of money in politics, and the shifting perception of democratic norms. Is it all doom and gloom, or do glimmers of hope persist? Join us as we embark on this provocative exploration of American politics, with an ending that will leave you optimistic about the future of our democracy.

Recommended:
Is Bipartisanship Dead - Laurel Harbridge-Yong
Rejecting Compromise - Sarah E. Anderson, Daniel M. Butler, & Laurel Harbridge-Yong

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Transcript

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 0:00

You know, I think there are certainly elements where I have some hope. You know, I do think that a large number of our elected officials at state, local and federal levels, and even in both parties, do want to be good civil servants and kind of work on behalf of constituents and care about democracy and democratic norms. But I think that what worries me the most right now and I kind of alluded to this before is not that parties care strongly about kind of differences in tax policy or health care policy or how we engage with Russia, China or other countries, but it's that election integrity, fairness and the rule of law have become such partisan questions.

Shawn: 0:52

Welcome to Deep Dive with me, s C Fettig. We in the United States are inundated with narratives about our broken politics. Here's one Partisanship within the electorate and political elites is at an all-time high, obstructing our ability to pass meaningful legislation and confront some of the most critical issues facing the country. That Republicans and Democrats have staked out immovable policy positions so diametrically opposed to each other that there's no longer any room for compromise. Any policy positions outside of those held within our own partisan tent are seen as existential threats and compromise is viewed as disloyal. Here's another Redistricting has been so consumed by gerrymandering that there is no longer any room for competition in our elections, and it allows politicians to manufacture majorities, in fact super majorities, in state legislatures and in the United States House that aren't representative of their actual vote share. This in turn leads to tyranny of the minority. Parties that haven't won a majority of votes are passing extremely consequential legislation and policy that runs counter to majority preference. Here's another the primary voter in both parties is becoming both more extreme and more influential in our American politics, and the demands of the primary voter produce extreme general election candidates in both parties, but particularly the Republican party, and this in turn leads to implementation of policies that are further and further away from the preferences of the majority of the electorate, and it's creating chaos in our public policy, both domestic and foreign. Here's still another. These things taken together feed into increased polarization within our electorate, creating enemies of our neighbors and promoting violence in our political and social lives and, ultimately, is killing our American democracy.

Shawn: 2:52

I, as much as anyone else, have been overwhelmed by these narratives over the past decade or so, and it all seems plausible that gerrymandering is undermining democracy and fueling authoritarianism, that partisanship and polarization are creating unbridgeable divides between two parties that each represent roughly half the country and full disclosure. I've bought into it, but I'm open to the fact that maybe I'm just caught up in a story that facially makes sense, seems completely reasonable, but isn't necessarily supported by evidence or research. So today I'm talking to Dr Laurel Harbridge-Yong, associate professor of political science at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on partisan conflict and polarization and the state of bipartisanship in American politics. Our conversation today, aimed at helping to understand the true influence of these things on our politics and our democracy, is informed by her research and her two most recent books In 2015,. her book i Bipartisanship, ead Policy Agreement and Agenda Setting in the House of Representatives and in 202, ejecting Compromise: Legislators' Fear of Primary Voters. With coauthors Sarah E Anderson and Daniel M Butler.

Shawn: 4:06

If you like this episode or any episode, give it a like on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. And, as always, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments, please feel free to email deepdivewithshawn a gmail. com. Let's do a deep dive, d H Y. hanks for being here. How are you?

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 4:31

I'm doing well. Thank you, appreciate the invitation.

Shawn: 4:34

Absolutely. I'm excited to have you here. So we're going to talk about three concepts that I think are directly impacting the tone of our politics and our governing these days. So bipartisanship, polarization, redistricting, and I couldn't imagine somebody more appropriate to have that conversation with. So I'm excited to have you here. Thank you so much. So let's start with bipartisanship. I mean we can. These things are all somewhat interrelated and as much as they are, we can talk about that, but to me it seems like we're living through a time in which bipartisanship is a dirty word or something that we shouldn't be striving for, at least in our politics, and this seems to stand in contrast to our historical understanding of bipartisanship as something that we should strive for, that it's a moderating and unifying influence on our politics and the legislative process. But it seems like today that legislators and politicians in pursuit of bipartisanship are more often than not vilified from within their own party and increasingly targeted in their primary by more quote unquote party purists. So, drawing directly from the title of your book, is bipartisanship dead?

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 5:48

So I think the question of the book makes it seem like there's an easy answer, but unfortunately it's not so simple. So I guess a couple of thoughts here. So first I can give you kind of a snapshot of where I think bipartisanship is at now and then I can kind of give my perspective on maybe what's changed and what hasn't changed over time. So first, I think we still see a mix of bipartisanship and partisanship within the legislative process. So, as I found in my research for my book, bipartisanship really persists for the most part from the 1970s up through more recent decades in the early stages of the legislative process. So the bills that member sponsor and other members join on as co-sponsors still continue to have bipartisan coalitions at roughly the same rates now as they did in the past. There's been a little bit of a decline, but nothing that looks like that kind of plummeting of bipartisanship. When it comes to roll call votes, there's also research, both from by own work as well as research by Jim Curry and Francis Lee, that finds that among the bills that become law, those still continue to be bipartisan for the most part. So most of the bills that are enacted into law have significant bipartisan support in at least one chamber. So even as polarization is grown, the parties, or the majority party in particular, has not become more successful at pushing through a partisan agenda. So things like the Trump tax cut or the Affordable Care Act, which passed on pretty much party lines, those are the exception, not the rule. So most legislation is still bipartisan. So basically we end up with this kind of book ending that they're still bipartisanship early in the legislative process and there's still a fair amount of bipartisanship at the very end point.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 7:32

But partisanship is much more common at kind of that middle stage of the kind of the votes that members take. And part of this is because votes are not just taken to pass bills. Votes are also taken for messaging purposes. So it's a chance for the parties to take a vote on something that they know might be dead on arrival in the other chamber, especially during divided government right now. So the House the Republicans might take votes on something that they know isn't going to pass in the Senate or be signed by the president, but they're going to take it anyway so that they can kind of have talking points to their base and those will look like very partisan votes.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 8:11

Likewise, with amendment votes and other things. They're designed to kind of point out differences between the two sides, and part of that is a response to the kind of era that we're in that you mentioned, this kind of pressure from the primary electorate, pressure from the base and the party activists who really care about party purity, and I do think that the creation of safe seats over time is contributing to this. But I also kind of want to caution against saying that the kind of old era was this kind of golden era of bipartisanship, because if we look back, so in the 1950s the American Political Science Association put together a report that's still cited widely today that actually criticized the amount of bipartisanship that was occurring at that point in time. So they basically said that the parties were tweedledy and tweedledum. There wasn't really any difference between the two parties.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 9:05

Voters didn't have much choice when they elected a particular party to the majority.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 9:10

It wasn't clear what they were going to pursue as an agenda and how it would be different than what the other party would pursue.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 9:15

And so really there was a criticism of kind of bipartisanship and they said we really should have more programmatic parties, parties that have a clear platform, that have party discipline, to try to enact that platform and then voters get a choice and I think the part of kind of this ideal version of democracy that they envisioned, you know we can cycle back to in terms of how redistricting and gerrymandering might limit how much voters have a choice to kind of say, you know, we like what this party did in power or not. But I think from the kind of their perspective, I think there's some value to it. There is some some value to thinking about kind of party differences and choices and over time obviously there's there's been a mix of bipartisanship and partisanship and what parties have pursued. But I think we do have this shift that particularly the roll call voting that members take has become increasingly partisan, in large part because members are responding to their primary electorate.

Shawn: 10:08

So I think this is fascinating because I think to some degree, what you're saying runs counter to whatever the dominant narrative is right and, of course, what maybe doesn't get enough attention is the number of mundane pieces of legislation that pass through Congress that are bipartisan, largely bipartisan. There's a handful of components to this, but I'm thinking about this in the context of state versus federal legislating and if there's a difference there. And then I think about this in the context of the narrative about partisanship and if it's maybe receiving a bit more attention than given what bipartisanship truly looks like it actually deserves, or if there's something about certain types of bills that lend themselves to more partisanship and others that lend lend themselves to bipartisanship, and that all of this is just kind of muddying the narrative.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 10:59

Yeah. So I think you're certainly right that it's kind of a complex picture of figuring out what's the story and what's the kind of data behind it. So I think, in terms of state versus federal, one thing to think about is in places that have one party as a super majority, so that is, one party holds the vast majority of seats it's going to be a lot easier for them to pass things on a one party book. So if you think about things needing a majority to pass which is the case in most legislatures if one party has a bare majority, they're going to need all of their members in agreement. Nobody can defect. In order to pass legislation, you might also need unified government in terms of the lower chamber, the upper chamber and the governor, and if it's a state that's more closely divided, that both may not be possible to have unified government in many years, and also you'll have more closely contested margins, and so you're going to have to probably work across the aisle a bit more. In contrast, if you have a case where one party holds 70 out of 100 seats and they only need a majority, they can easily pass things on a single party line, even while allowing some of their members to vote against the party if it's kind of not in the constituent's interest or something. So at the federal level, for the most part we've seen relatively tight margins in recent years, I mean certainly in the Senate, but in the House as well, as we see right now.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 12:31

You know it really only at the beginning of the Obama administration was there a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, and so that's where, again, institutional rules matter there.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 12:41

So part of the reason not the only reason, but part of the reason that federal legislation is kind of forced to be bipartisan in many respects is the filibuster in the Senate.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 12:52

So if a minority of legislators can block legislation, the only way to pass legislation is to get 60 votes in the Senate, and so unless it's a budget reconciliation bill, which only get it one bite at each budget period, so each year everything else is potentially filibustered, and so you're likely going to end up with, you know in the current Senate, at least nine or 10 Republicans supporting legislation that passes.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 13:21

So you know that's an institutional reason. And then I think there's also the reason that when the parties are putting together kind of big packages of legislation, it becomes a bit of a compromise in a law role and major pieces of legislation are going to have some things that you know the Republicans like, some things the Democrats like, often things that the kind of extremes of both of their parties don't like. But that these pieces of kind of legislation, particularly these ones, you know, when you hear about some of these big things that have been crafted to avoid the debt ceiling or the transportation kind of inflation reduction act, you know they combine a lot of different things that have pieces that can get different members on board, even if the party is a whole from the minority is not on board.

Shawn: 14:06

Let's talk a little bit about polarization. This is another narrative, and the dominant narrative being that we're experiencing incredibly high polarization, at the extremes, and I think it's important to distinguish between polarization within each of the parties and then polarization within the electorate. I think it's probably true that both of these have existed, you know, to varying degrees and with varying intensity, you know, since the inception of the country, but it feels particularly tense and again, this could just be the narrative, but it feels particularly tense within both the parties and then also within the electorate today. Is this true? Is it unique? And, if it is, is it bad?

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 14:50

So I think that it is somewhat unique in a couple of respects.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 14:54

So I think that one of these is that polarization among our elites, so among our political parties and our elected officials, encompasses more issues now than at other periods of high polarization or history.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 15:09

So if you look at kind of common vote based measures of polarization, so one of these is a thing called the DW nominate score. That's based on the roll call voting records of members and it plots members ideal points or their ideological location. And if you look over time you see that you know, back in the post civil war era or kind of leading up to World War Two, there were high levels of polarization as well, and it was really kind of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s that were the anomaly in terms of low polarization. And then we're back to high polarization again today. But what's really different there is that in the past it was really a couple of key issues that divided the parties and now it's so many things. It's economic issues and social issues, it's how we engage with international relations and so forth. So kind of the extent of issues that are polarized I think is greater now than in the past.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 16:02

I think that a second change and this is on the side of the electorate is that the public is either polarized or, at a very minimum, sorted. So by sorted I mean that they may not take extreme positions, but the people who self identify as Democrats take left of center positions and people who self identify as Democrats take right of center positions. But that, combined with this issue based or ideological based polarization or sorting, is also a rise of what we call affective or social polarization. And so this is the idea that increasingly people view their partisanship as a core part of their social identity. They think about their partisan group as the in group and the opposing party as the out group. They tend to have more animosity toward the opposing party, and one thing that's kind of changed over time and that reinforces this is and this is a work by Lillianna Mason is that people's identities are now overlap. So now not many people have cross cutting cutting identities between their party, their religion, their sexual orientation, their race and so kind of. When all these orientations are kind of reinforcing, it makes it even more that you're a strong in group to which you want to protect, that you're kind of view the world through the lens of what's going to kind of make my in group look good and make the out group look bad.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 17:27

And so you know, I think that in this political environment I do think that there are kind of problematic aspects of this level of polarization. So I think it does impact our ability to legislate. You know, it doesn't make it impossible and, as he said before, bipartisanship is possible, but it raises the risk of gridlock. So for our legislators, if they have, you know, very far apart preferences, in many cases it may mean that gridlock, so the absence of policy change, is a better alternative for some members than accepting a compromise on policy or kind of accepting some sort of disagreement. And sometimes this is because gridlock is actually kind of current policies closer to what they want. In other cases it's because they want to kind of reject that half loaf and kind of hold out for the whole loaf, and I think their electorate or their primary electorate would want them to. So I think that it increases the likelihood of gridlock.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 18:24

It also, I think perhaps even more problematically, is it decreases our ability to engage in civil discourse.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 18:31

You know, I think we see this both among our elites and elected officials as well as among the mass public, that the way in which people talk about people in the opposing party is increasingly not that these are, you know, civic minded individuals who are doing their best to govern, and they may have different ideas of what is the best policy but they are, you know, committed to the democratic ideal and to helping constituents. But instead people see both the policies as being dangerous on the other party, but they see the people as being dangerous as well. And at the mass level we see this as kind of stereotypes that people hold about the other party and even this kind of rising and concerning trend of harassment, threats and violence being directed at elected officials and this kind of perspective that people, again, because they see these stereotypes, they kind of are engaging motivated reasoning where when they read a news story that kind of demonizes the opposing side, they believe it, they say yes, that matches my preexisting worldview. I'm going to kind of take that in and buy it.

Shawn: 19:37

It makes people kind of very angry and very distrustful of the opposing side and I think that that is problematic, not not just for legislating but for our kind of civic discourse more broadly, I think often, at least for the lay person and this might be true in academia as well when we talk about what we expect of our politics or a change in tone, or politics are governing today, that what we often mean is a change in the more modern era, and what gets lost and I think what you've reminded, or the context that you've put this in a couple of times is that we have lived through periods of time in which we experienced high polarization, both within parties but also within the electorate, that we've experienced high periods of partisanship in our history. So, in that context, then, I wonder if the narrative that we hear now, or the story that's spun now, that the degree of partisanship and the degree of polarization is posing a threat to our democracy, an existential threat to our democracy, is, outside of context, overblown, or do you think we have something to worry about?

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 20:44

So I'm a little bit of two minds here. I think that I think, on the one hand, the degree of partisanship and polarization well high has not precluded places of bipartisanship and compromise from occurring, but it has made it harder and in particular, it has made gridlock more likely. And I think we see this on these kind of standoffs over the debt ceiling and government funding bills that there are perhaps real consequences of this, and I think we saw even on this last one, even though they made a deal, it still impacted the credit rating of the United States. And so I think that there is a real consequence of this kind of legislative approach, of kind of rinksmanship that might be coming with polarization. I also think that and we can talk more about primaries in a bit if you'd like but I think that legislators' attention to their primary electorate has weakened the kind of degree of representation that we see in our democratic politics. So legislators are being more responsive to a very small fraction of their electorate. If they're responding to their primary electorate, then they would be if they respond to their general electorate.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 21:58

So there are a lot of people whose voice is not being reflected by what their elected officials are doing in terms of policy or approach, and I think that the kind of way in which our civic discourse has been damaged through polarization are concerning Some of what I see as the biggest threats right now in terms of our inability to agree on kind of issues of election integrity or democratic norms. I don't think that those have to come with polarization. I think we can have polarization without that. But I think that those types of concerns I think really are existential threats and kind of concerns about the state of our democracy. That if we cannot agree that January 6th was something that was inappropriate and a threat to democracy and that we see as something that's a partisan story, that's a real problem. If people disagree on what the appropriate tax rate is, I don't think that that's the same type of problem.

Shawn: 22:56

So you mentioned the primary voter and this is something that I wanted to talk about because, again, there's this conventional wisdom and it might be situated solely in the modern era, but the conventional wisdom is that politicians, when running for office, the first stage gate they go through is the primary voter and then the general voter, and that politicians, or at least candidates running for office, have to appease or appeal to the primary voter. And then the conventional wisdom is that they tack to the center to appeal to the general election voter. But that that's changing that a lot of analysis and research today seems to suggest that there's an increasing influence of the primary voter on the candidate pool and a lot of this attention is focused on the primary Republican voter, on the Republican candidate. So I have two questions here. I'm wondering how this has influenced, I guess, politics Generally. But is it true that this is primarily a Republican party issue, or are we seeing the same thing on the Democratic side?

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 24:04

Yeah. So I guess first just to kind of walk through the logic which I think you started alluding to, but maybe I could kind of flush out a little bit more in terms of how we've been thinking about it. Some of my research with co-authors is that if a legislator thinks that the median voter in their primary electorate disagrees with the median voter in the general electorate, they have to decide which of those electors they want to be responsive to. Basically, are they going to side with the majority of voters in the primary and against the majority of the general electorate or vice versa? And on many issues they may be able to appease vote that they don't disagree. So you kind of have this coincidental representation. But on those issues where they disagree, legislators have a choice to make and in work that I've been doing with Sarah Anderson and Dan Butler, we've argued that there are two key reasons that legislators are going to have an incentive to side with the primary. The first is that the primary electorate is going to be more unified on average in its position and this means that if you think about an issue as just being binary, that you can either support or oppose an issue. The primary electorate in part because they share a party. They share kind of similar ideologies and preferences means that you're probably not going to have something where the primary electorate has only like 52% favors an issue and 48% oppose it. Instead, you're likely to be in a scenario where 80% of the primary electorate favors the issue and 20% opposes it. So if the legislator goes against the median voter or the majority of the primary electorate, they're going to go against a lot more of the electorate. By contrast, the general electorate because it's going to combine Democrats, republicans and independents is going to tend to be more closely split. So even if you go against the majority, you might be in a scenario where you go against 52% of the electorate but you're still siding with 48% of the electorate. Second reason is what we refer to as the primary premium, basically the idea that the primary electorate is going to be more responsive to a legislator's issue positions or roll call voting record than the general electorate, and the logic again is pretty intuitive. So in the general electorate people are voting on the basis of party.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 26:18

We know that in both the presidential as well as congressional elections it's upwards of 90 plus percent of Democrats vote for the Democratic candidate, 90 plus percent of Republicans vote for the Republican candidate. So the legislators actual roll call record isn't gonna matter that much, like, yes, there are some of those close marginal races, but for the most part it's not gonna make a big difference, but in a primary it could, and so legislators again, then it gives that incentive to side with the primary electorate. So one thing I would just add is that that becomes kind of probably more magnified or more relevant when legislators represent safe seats. So one of the trends over time and kind of one of things that's contributed or kind of been part and parcel of our polarization, is that there are more safe seats in Congress now. So by that I mean seats that one party is likely to win by a large margin. So we don't have a lot of seats where the members the normal kind of presidential vote in the district is 48 to 52 percent. Instead it's members who represent a district that typically votes Democratic 75% of the time or typically votes Republican 70% of the time, something like that. And so again it makes it you care less about the general electorate and more about the primary. All of that logic that I just explained. I think it does hold on both the Democratic and on the Republican side, and I think that in both parties there are also wings of the party and kind of groups in the base or kind of the activist class who want to push out those who they see as insufficiently committed to the kind of ideology or position of the party.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 27:53

The waves that we've seen have been a little bit different. You know. I think the first one that got a lot of attention on the Republican side was the Tea Party Movement, which was really focused on conservatism, particularly on economic issues. Then we saw not quite parallel, but a kind of similar move on the Democratic side with more progressive candidates, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, defeating Democrats that they saw as insufficiently liberal, and this included both social issues like abortion, including Marie Newman's challenge to Dan Lipinski here in Illinois, where I am as well as economic issues. And then more recently on the Republican side we've seen it both in terms of conservatism but also in terms of Trump loyalty, and I think that's kind of something that's fundamentally different than what we've seen on the Democratic side is there has not been a similar leader loyalty story that we've seen there. But I think you know, certainly that was what we saw with the primary challenge against Liz Cheney and other Democrats who are sorry, other Republicans who had supported the impeachment against President Trump. Liz Cheney there's no debating that she is a fiercely conservative individual in terms of a traditional left-right spectrum, but she was not seen as sufficiently loyal to Trump and therefore she was attacked and beaten in the primary election.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 29:20

In terms of kind of where the parties have ended up. So, given that they both have some of these dynamics of kind of pressures to purge the moderates and replace them with more committed partisans or ideologues, it does seem that there's been some evidence that Republican primary electorates have ended up choosing the more extreme candidates more often than the Democratic candidates. But I think it's still a bit early to say whether this is something systematic or whether this was the result of just a couple of election cycles. But, for instance, in 2022, there were 14 congressional incumbents who lost in primaries and on the Republican side, the kind of people who lost or kind of even had contested primaries, it was overwhelmingly the kind of very conservative or pro-Trump candidate who won, but on the Democratic side it's been a bit more split.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 30:17

So in contested primaries there's been a mix of victories for the moderate candidates or kind of mainstream candidates, I should say, as well as victories for the more progressive wing of the party.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 30:29

So you both saw, for instance, on the kind of Senate side you saw progressive candidates like Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin win. But you also saw Tim Ryan in the Senate primary in Ohio who was the more kind of mainstream candidate won, and in several of the house races. In one case actually there were two incumbents against each other, with Sean Casten against Marie Newman here in Illinois. Casten beat out Newman, so he was the more mainstream candidate, she was the more progressive and so there hasn't been a kind of clear win for the progressives within those primaries. And one possibility is that Democratic voters recognize that moderation might be part of electability. So come general elections Democratic voters might see that if they wanna win that seat they have a better chance with the more mainstream candidate and they prioritize that. But I don't think we quite know enough to kind of know there's really something systematic going on there. But there might be a little bit of a Democrat Republican difference there.

Shawn: 31:31

I think what seems to be sucking a lot of the oxygen out of the room when it comes to the state of democracy in the United States is the idea that we're potentially facing civil war, that the division in the United States is between liberals and conservatives and there's no real space between four things like bipartisanship or compromise. But I wonder if that is actually a symptom of something else that might be happening that is maybe less existential, and that is that we're seeing more of a realignment within the Republican Party itself than we are so much at the aggregate national level across both parties and all voters.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 32:18

I mean.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 32:18

So I do think that we are seeing a change within the Republican Party where I think and there was elements of this before, you see, with Scott Walker's rise in Wisconsin, but I think that 2016 and Trump kind of accelerated this and kind of brought it to the front.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 32:39

Is that and we see this in terms of the realignment that, like, high education voters are now kind of seen as more democratic? So you have this kind of oddity where high income voters are Republican but high education voters are Democratic. Is this kind of the Republican Party, instead of being predominantly the focused on economic interests and what's good for business, what's good for the upper class, has kind of really brought more centrally into the party the kind of white working class and those who kind of feel racial resentment, those who feel kind of left behind or kind of really frankly criticized and insulted by the message of some Democrats or the Democratic Party in terms of how they have talked about them or kind of approached them in terms of our politics. And I think that that was an element of the Republican Party that maybe was there in some kind of nascent form before Trump, but really was kind of brought centrally into the party by Trump and it now is kind of part of the base that legislators are focused on and are responding to.

Shawn: 33:43

So you mentioned safe seats a little bit ago, and I want to talk about this because this is also influencing the way we politic, and one of the ways that we get to safe seats is through the redistricting process, and I'm interested in the role that it's playing in our contemporary politics, and so really quickly. Redistricting is essentially the redrawing of congressional boundaries on a 10-year basis, although that can happen on a different schedule on both sides. Also, republicans and Democrats have been accused of gerrymandering, which is redistricting in such a way as to maximize their own vote share while also minimizing the vote share of the other party, and our understanding is that this gerrymandering creates an unfair environment, perhaps safe seats in a way that dilutes the power of voters in some areas and that, taken in the aggregate, can give extremely disproportionate power to parties in the House and in state legislatures that didn't really or actually win votes commensurate to the seats gained. So I'm wondering if this is as insidious as it's purported to be and, functionally, what form is it taking?

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 34:52

Yeah. So I think I guess I have two main points that I want to make about gerrymandering. So first is that redistricting and gerrymandering is one of the go-to explanations for polarization and in fact even former President Obama has made comments that allude to there being a strong connection between redistricting and polarization, and for that claim I would say there's really not a lot of evidence. So the first is the most obvious one and I talk about this with my students is the Senate. Senate polarization has tracked right alongside the House and obviously there's no redistricting or gerrymandering happening to state borders. The other part of the evidence against this one is that you have similar kind of changes in polarization within decades as you do at the periods of redistricting every 10 years. You also have similar levels of polarization in places in the country that haven't changed their borders that much within states versus those that have. So as a link directly between redistricting and polarization, so via this kind of creating safe seats, that's a bit overblown in terms of the story. But where I do think that there is a concern about redistricting and gerrymandering is about how redistricting affects representation, and so when we think about redistricting and gerrymandering the kind of real concern is that it's making it harder for the electorate to express their views in a way that translates into who wins seats. And so, as you alluded to in your kind of opening comments about redistricting, we can think about redistricting as being kind of a strategy that happens in a couple of different ways.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 36:33

So if redistricting is done by a state legislature, as it is in the majority of US states, if the majority, particularly if they have a unified government, they might be thinking about two different things. One is how do they help their current incumbents and this might be true also if you have divided governments, so kind of a sweetheart deal or a bipartisan gerrymander. So how do you help your incumbents? In this case, you actually want to draw safe seats for them. So a member would love to run in a safe seat. It's a whole lot easier to run in the safe seat than it is to run in a competitive seat.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 37:05

However, that doesn't necessarily help the party as a whole, and so the second goal of a party engaging in redistricting is to create an advantage in terms of the seats that they win relative to the votes that they get. So you can think about this as something called the seats votes curve, or basically you could think about for what fraction of votes do you get what fraction of seats? And in a place with proportional representation this would be the 45 degree line. If you win 45% of the votes, you get 45% of the seats. But in the US, because of the structure of our electoral system and the single member simple plurality system we have, it doesn't look like a proportional representation system. So you might win 25% of the votes and get none of the seats. Or you might win 75% of the votes and get 100% of the seats.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 38:01

But what redistricting can do is it can systematically bias it towards one party, and they can do this by using cracking and packing. If you want to win more seats than you do votes, what you might want to do is pack your political opponents into a couple of districts. So let's say I'm the Republicans and I'm in control of the legislature. I want to pack all of those urban areas with Democratic voters so that there are a couple of districts that they win, but they win with way more votes than they would actually need to win those seats. So those Democratic candidates are going to win with 85% of the vote. Let's say that means that the surrounding areas are going to be Republican-leading and it might also take a few other areas of Democratic strength and crack them. So you see this in Austin, texas, that Austin is broken up into several edges of Republican-leading districts. So what we end up with at an aggregate level across the state is you're going to have a couple of districts that the minority party wins by a large margin and then lots of seats that the majority party wins by a smaller margin. So you actually don't want to create those as really safe seats. You want to create them as kind of leaning toward one party enough to kind of weather a kind of moderate swing in the political tides, but maybe where, let's say, 60% of the vote is likely to go toward the party in power. And what this means in terms of then thinking about representation and the kind of problem there that I alluded to is that it means that when voters change their views about who they want in power, they may not actually be able to change who's in power very much. So in those districts that are packed for the minority party, even if the kind of Republicans who live there, or even many of the Democrats, decide that they're unhappy with the Democrat in office, there's really no chance that the Democrat is going to lose to a Republican in those districts and then in many of the other places that might be drawn to help the Republicans. It would take a really big political wind for the Republicans to lose those seats.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 40:14

So, as an example of this and this draws on some work by Jonathan Rodnitz-Stanford he's done some work looking at Pennsylvania. So this is a state that has a heavily Republican gerrymander, so Republicans are advantaged. And so in 2012, democrats did very well in statewide elections and won many of them. Obama won reelection with 53% of the vote in Pennsylvania. Democratic candidates for the US House won 51% of the votes that were cast statewide for House candidates, but they only ended up winning 28% of the seats. So Democrats only held five of 18 seats in the US House for Pennsylvania. So even though those candidates won a majority of votes, they had a very small minority of the seats.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 41:06

The example I just gave was one where it would be a Republican gerrymander to help themselves, but this is not uniquely a Republican problem.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 41:14

So, for instance, in the court cases that have gone forward here Wisconsin, pennsylvania, north Carolina are maps that were argued favored the Republicans, but Maryland and less on the court case, but here in Illinois as well maps that are thought to favor the Democrats.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 41:29

The difference here between the two sides it's not because one side, I think, is morally better than the other when it comes to redistricting. I think there are just two things that have made it harder for Democrats to do this. One is that Democratic voters tend to be concentrated in urban areas, which makes it very easy for them to get packed, and even in Democratic-leaning states they end up packed because they're living close together and it's compact, contiguous. All those criteria is very districting. The other is that nationwide, more of the states that have moved towards using independent commissions have tended to be Democratic-leaning states. So places like California, colorado, others, and independent commissions don't have the same incentive to help one party over the other. So it's not necessarily a story that this is just a Republican tool. It's just that it's bring perhaps a little bit easier for Republicans to use.

Shawn: 42:26

A lot of the things that we've talked about high levels of partisanship, increasing polarization, the impact of redistricting and gerrymandering on our representation. These are often foils for, and explanations for increasing extremism, both within the electorate but also within the parties, and I think, as you've mentioned pretty clearly, there's some merit to this, and some of this is also overblown or misunderstood, and so I'm wondering is it fair to say that the electorate and the elites within the parties are becoming so, our politics are becoming more extreme? And, if so, is it possible, in this complex web, to bumper sticker those things that are maybe contributing the most to that?

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 43:11

You know, it's certainly something that as academics that we want to do. We want to have kind of a hypothesis or an explanation and then test that hypothesis and say factor X is the most important cause or explanatory variable for this outcome. But I think that polarization has been one of those places where there is no single explanation. There are factors that I think contribute and some that probably don't contribute a lot, but there really is no kind of go to kind of single thing that if we just fixed X it would fix our politics and kind of. When we think about the current kind of explanations that get a lot of attention, obviously redistricting is one of them and I've already talked about why that's not a great explanation. Primary elections are another explanation that we've alluded to as well and I think here I would argue that primary elections probably contribute to, you know, a feedback loop that reinforces our polarization. But it's not necessarily a great explanation for the original kind of rise or cause of polarization, because polarization in Congress has been rising since the early 1970s and nothing in the timing of primary elections really fits that. It's also the case that variation across the US in open versus closed primaries which might affect kind of who that median voter in primary elections is doesn't matter a lot, but some evidence. Maybe the top two primaries or top four, like Alaska just implemented, might kind of have some moderating effect. But in general primary elections can't really be pinpointed for explaining the rise in polarization, even if they contribute to this feedback.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 44:51

Another explanation that people have gone to is money in politics. So saying you know, it's how our elections are funded and it's kind of people at the extremes giving money, you know. Again, there's some evidence here, you know. So there's research by LaRajen Shaffner that suggests that at state legislatures when more money comes from political parties who have more of incentive to care about kind of winning majorities, they actually tend to give toward more moderate candidates and therefore end up with lower polarization in the legislature, versus when rules mean that more money comes from individuals, you end up with more polarized state legislatures. However, again, it doesn't really explain the rise in polarization because the polarization of donations actually occurs after much of the recent congressional polarization I think. In some research I think I saw that it wasn't until the early 2000s that donation patterns became more highly polarized. So again, there are a lot of factors that reinforce it, but kind of the original impetus for it. There's not kind of one explanation for it.

Shawn: 45:57

So the reason I ask is and I think the reason you know this is an interesting question for researchers as well is because if we can pinpoint it, then, as you said, we can fix it, and maybe the potential end result of all of these problems with our system is that, you know, democracy crumbles, right. So then, if we can't pinpoint it, then that's scary right. And so in a lot of ways, I guess I feel go with me here, because this is elite, but I feel as if we've passed, you know, the Rubicon and that democracy, american democracy, is maybe irreparably damaged. Are you comfortable talking me off the ledge?

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 46:37

Unfortunately not. You know, I think there are certainly elements where I have some hope. You know, I do think that a large number of our elected officials at state, local and federal levels, and even in both parties, do want to be good civil servants and kind of work on behalf of constituents and care about democracy and democratic norms. But I think that what worries me the most right now and I kind of alluded to this before is not that parties care strongly about kind of differences in tax policy or healthcare policy or how we engage with Russia, China or other countries, but it's that election integrity, fairness and the rule of law have become such partisan questions. And, on the one hand, this isn't entirely new. You know, debates about voter ID law have always been about which side they advantage at the core of it. But I think that what we have seen since the Trump administration, in particular, since the 2020 election, is that things that should be shared to democratic norms are now increasingly viewed through the same partisan lens that we interpret other things through. And I think that when our elected officials appear more concerned about their base and what their base believes about the 2020 election or about the former president's behavior in it than they do about the democratic norms or rule of law. I think that that is a problem. By no means are the Democrats angels in all of this. Certainly, I think that they have tried it in ways to make their side look good and the other side look bad, and are not just focused on democratic norms directly, but I think the current example is just one where it's not equivalent between the two sides that I think we, even right after January 6, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, others in those first days they were willing to blame the former president for his behavior and say that he had no place in office. I think it was. You know, I forget the exact words that they choose, but I feel like it's concerning that their language and other legislators shifted after that and now, as we enter a new primary election season, when Trump is the front runner for his party, that the elites within his party even who expressed concern about how he approached democracy, they're not leading a charge to say that this has to stop.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 49:19

And so I think that we're a little bit between a rock and a hard place where, on the one hand, the Justice Department and states who are pursuing President Trump through the indictments if they don't pursue him, then it seems like elected officials are above the law or former elected officials are above the law and that's a problem for democracy. But it's also a problem for democracy if the kind of indictments or investigations of him are seen as partisan witch hunts and kind of further erode trust in our democracy and democratic norms in the world of law. So I think you know this is for me kind of perhaps the biggest thing and then secondary to that is how people feel about. Kind of I think everyone at a core believes that everyone who is eligible to vote should have the chance to vote, but I think that this isn't really reflected in the types of support that the two different parties propose and want. And so I think you know, if you or others are interested in great work on this, Jake Grumbach at UC Berkeley has some really great work in his recent book about how polarization plus the nationalization of politics has meant that US states have both become laboratories for policymaking but also kind of what he calls laboratories for back, democratic backsliding, as they've engaged in these kind of coordinated efforts to change voting rules and gauge and gerrymandering and kind of push policies that are kind of really driven by organized interests rather than the voters themselves, and I think that that also perhaps offers a kind of sad view on American democracy.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 50:56

But I think for me it's really the state of where we are, with the kind of democratic norms and elections as well as concerning. But I do you know, and I'll just reiterate this, as I said before, I do think that both sides have people who truly want to make this country a better place and truly value our democratic institutions, and I think that I just wish that they had more electoral incentives to prioritize that over their base.

Shawn: 51:25

All right, really quick final question. You ready for it?

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 51:28

Yes.

Shawn: 51:29

What's something interesting you've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 51:34

It's an excellent question and I thought long and hard about this when you reached out. And you know, I have little kids a four year old and a one and a half year old and I have to say there's not been a lot of reading, watching or listening to things that don't involve them. So I'll just say something really interesting is raising kids.

Shawn: 51:55

You know you are not all of my friends that have kids. That's the exact same response I get. So I both you know, I appreciate that and I'm excited for you and sympathize.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 52:05

Excellent.

Shawn: 52:07

Dr Harba Jung, thanks for being here. I really appreciate the conversation.

Dr. Harbridge-Yong: 52:10

Thank you so much. It was a great time.

Shawn: 52:17

Our democracy is in danger, but perhaps we're giving too much weight to some things and not enough to others, or maybe a better way to think about it is it's a soup that has elements of increased polarization and partisanship, as well as a more extreme party voter and some of these other things that Dr Harba Jung mentioned extreme policy preferences that get a lot of attention and a deterioration of shared truths within the electorate that's translating to chaos in our halls of government.

Shawn: 52:47

Understanding this is important because, as we discussed in this episode, if we can determine which elements are causing the problem and to what degree, then maybe we can engineer a solution. What we do know is this All of these things together are straining our democracy, and it remains to be seen just how resilient that democracy is. But it is telling that Dr Harba Jung, even while diluting the power of some of the narratives we hear the role of partisanship and gerrymandering on our democracy despite that still feels as if our democracy is in a unique danger, and the next few years will be especially important in determining the strength of our democratic guardrails. All right, check back soon for another episode of Deep Dive. See you next time, folks.