I have to say that this was the worst chapter in the book (chapter 6). I will grant that studies verifying what we already know are important; however, studies that tell the opposite are also, if not more, important. This chapter disregards any information that challenges its perception of the political landscape and offers strange evidence to reinforce its views.
The first major gripe is with the authors’ dismissal of the Fiorina book: Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. Later in the semester we are going to read this book, but I bought it early and read it already. Fiorina wanted to point out that it is the political class that has polarized—not the population. Fiorina also points out that voters choose extreme candidates not because they necessarily believe in them, but that they are their only choice. The authors grudgingly accept that the masses are not polarized, but then decide, contrary to Fiorina, that it’s the electorate that is polarized and choosing extreme candidates. Do the authors provide their own evidence to the contrary? Not really. They misconstrue close presidential races as a polarization of the masses rather than of the candidates. If one candidate was moderate then it is likely that candidate would win with more than just a thousand or so votes. It’s easy logic, if on a scale of 1-100, with candidates at the 20 and 80 mark, they have no chance of getting cross over votes; however, if one where to position himself at the 40 or 60 mark they could pick up cross over votes and still keep their base since the other would be even further away from them. There is another way the authors try and kick away Fiorina’s work. They bring in a sociologist (not a political scientist!) to try and persuade us that the polarization is due to the differences Liberals (Progressives) and Conservatives have in the definition of right and wrong. You might ask how can one link this to electoral politics, and the answer is awkward. First, we are presented a question from the NES about child raising. From this we are expected to follow a train of thought: wanting children to be “traditional” leads to religious orthodox following which in turn leads to voting Republican. Some how we are expected to believe that from this question that the country’s moral foundation is up for grabs and is polarizing America. I’ll ignore my rational question of how a survey question worded so poorly and with little empirical use got put into the NES and move on (read it and think about for a while and reread it, page 200). The other addition to the sociologist’s point was that physical punishment of children somehow leads to voting for Bush. They present a nice little graph that looks like it has a tight correlation. The problem is that we don’t get to see a regression of the data to see how significant this correlation is when controlling for other variables. My statistics professor from a couple of years ago would have brought this up for the class to laugh at, but not as an example to prove a real political point. The authors would have us believe that physical punishment is another moral ground to be fought over and that if you spank your kid then you must be religiously orthodox and a Republican. I want to see the data saying that spankers are Republicans and that it matters politically. Maybe Democrats should run on a platform of pro-child spanking.
My second gripe is minor, but bugs me. The authors went to so much trouble to convince the reader that while the populous doesn’t care, the electorate is polarized and ready to start political war, and yet forget that work when it came to explaining voter turnout. Like usual they try and convince us that Progressive reforms have hindered Democracy rather then strengthened it. Their argument about some of the dips of voter turnout are good, such as expanded suffrage and getting the dead to stop voting. Though in usual misdirection, the authors then decide that other Progressive elements work against voter turnout. They insist requiring voters to register to vote hinders turnout (which I agree but only with limits), but then they turn full circle and say that it doesn’t matter because Texas goes out of its way to make voting easy, including lax registration requirements and they only get around 45% turnout. Then they make the argument that if America has automatic registration then turnout would be higher. This doesn’t hold water with every other argument they’ve made, that is that and expanded electorate leads to lower turnout. In Wisconsin we have same day registration, which almost like having automatic or no registration, and we still don’t have exceptional turnout (80%, my definition). They eventually lead to a bunch of conditions that would lead one to vote. From this list, it is clear that not caring about the issues (polarization) would have to fit in somewhere around efficacy. How they forgot that they admitted that most of the public have roughly the same opinions which would then probably lead to low efficacy and low turnout is beyond me. Apparently spelling out that voters are polarized with suspicious evidence deserves more pages than spelling out a conclusion they already reached that would help explain low turnout.
I have tolerated this text because I have had to, but now the simplicity and bias are too much. I can’t wait to be done with it and move on to more intelligent material. If the authors want to prove a point they should write a paper with proper empirical analysis that allows them to, not a text that misconstrues information with bizarre evidence to present a point. I feel like saying to the authors, the Progressives did not wreck Democracy, they got rid of the corruption of the old Party Boss system. Unless they like higher turnout with the mastery of necromancy (the mystical power of raising the dead).
