interviews
The Nationalization of U.S. Elections
by Dan Hopkins
December 31, 2020
This interview with Dan Hopkins, Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
What were the original assumptions in the Constitution about state-level loyalty versus national government loyalty?
It's a good question. The Constitution is now far enough back in our collective memories that I think it's really valuable to start by having some sense of what the U.S. was like at the time. There were some scholars who argued that the Constitution is well understood as a peace treaty between sovereign states about how they were going to govern their affairs.
In 1776 and even in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, the U.S. was a collection of 13 quite different colonies. It took the Georgia delegation six weeks to travel to Philadelphia in order to participate in the Constitutional Convention. Different colonies had very different economies and different religious heritages. This was a quite diverse country and, thus, the Constitution was designed to protect substantial levels of state-level autonomy. I think it is really important to recognize that at the time, many of the people thought of themselves as Americans, but also to a certain extent, as New Yorkers or Virginians or Pennsylvanians.
When do you start to see a shift towards politics in the U.S. becoming more nationalized?
To some degree, it's an ongoing process that has unfolded in fits and starts over our 200-plus year history. I do think that the Civil War is a critical turning point. In the run-up to the Civil War, you see many more implications of state-level identities. I'm a Georgian, I'm a Virginian. And obviously, the Civil War pitted state against state.
It's generally been the case that the Republican party has been more likely to invoke federalism. Of course, the exemplary issue is the issue of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Even in more recent times, the Republican party has advocated for there being less of a role in the federal government asserting itself to protect the rights of African-Americans, especially, but not only in the South. I think it's fair to say that if you've heard a state rights argument in the last 50 years, it's more likely to be coming from the Republican party.
There's also an element in which as power shifts, we see changes. When the Republicans control the federal office, sometimes it's Democrats who say, "Hey, it's important to let California write its own laws with respect to clean energy or car emissions standards." At the same time, the extent to which we see Republican states moving to block sanctuary cities, for instance, is surprising.
If you're a principled federalist, then presumably cities shouldn't be punished for diverging.
In general, I see very few principled federalists in American politics. I think that all too often in contemporary American politics, federalism is just the clothing we use to dress up certain arguments instead of being a principled approach to a range of policy problems.
What factors contribute to a nationalized political landscape?
I actually think there's a relationship between the transformation of campaign finance, the transformation of voting, and the transformation of what's getting covered in our newspapers. There's a unifying element to all of this.
Let's look at campaign finance first. In many of the most competitive 2020 Senate races, large majorities of money came from out-of-state donations. What does that do to the candidates, and how does that affect the way constituents perceive elections?
I think that the nationalization of the campaign finance structure is an example of our nationalized set of divisions. What we're trying to do is refract these highly nationalized divisions through our federalist system. And the result often distorts representation in critical ways. One of the key facts about campaign finance has been that as late as 1992, two-thirds of all donations to federal candidates, to members of Congress, were coming from within the state that they represent. 20 years later in 2012, only one-third of all dollars were coming from the states that people represented.
The danger is that the representatives and senators increasingly have one constituency where they get their votes, but a separate constituency from where they get their money.
That is not how our system was designed to work. It was not designed for members of Congress to spend four hours a day raising money from people who are not their constituents.
And simultaneously, there has been a collapse of local media. I wonder how the decline of local news plays into this landscape?
When the internet first became a sizable presence, there was a hope that it might actually lead to a proliferation of local news. With the internet there are very, very low production costs, so, theoretically, I could put up a newsletter about my neighborhood. But in fact, as you said, the rise of the internet and the rise of cable television led to this dramatic concentration of our attention on a very, very small number of nationalized news sources. Partly that's because the news media would target us based on where we lived. The Philadelphia Inquirer targeted a set of people who wanted to know about life in and around Philadelphia.
But more recently we instead see that the business model for many media companies is to compete based on who voters are and who readers are and who consumers are, rather than where they live.
Rather than providing me with information specific to Philadelphia, they will identify me as someone who likes the National Football League or cares about politics.
That has led to the fragmentation of our media environment. One of the real losers in this has been people's attention to state and local politics. State and local politics have never been on the top of people's priority lists. It used to be that if I were reading the Philadelphia Inquirer, as a by-product of learning what the Eagle's score was, I also learn a little bit about who my mayor was or who my governor was. And nowadays, since I can go right to ESPN or I can go right to Fox News, I can skip over all that state and local information.
In a world where state and local politicians want to be well-known, they're much more likely to attach themselves to a lightning rod federal issue than they are to actually dive into the challenging, complex issues that face their local community.
Which really allows issues to be manipulated. When we focused on immigration, something I found interesting was how much immigration was used as a campaign tool in Ohio or Maine. It’s easy to make a border terrifying when you don’t live near one. Do you feel like campaigning has changed based on the ability to take issues that don't have anything to do with your constituents, but are made to look like they have everything to do with constituents?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the real challenges with a nationalized political environment is that it encourages attention to issues that are evocative and emotionally charged and often have to do with specific groups of people, but ultimately do not have clear policy effects. I think one prominent example of this is not long after President Trump was elected he attacked football players who refused to stand for the National Anthem. I think it's a very instructive case because he wasn't proposing any policy. This was purely about symbols.
I worry that in the nationalized political environment, it's very hard to put together a political coalition that speaks to auto workers and nurses in the suburbs of Detroit, and retirees in Maricopa County. This is a very diverse country. One of the easier ways to knit together a political coalition is to reach for these divisive, identity-oriented issues, even if that's not actually what's going to motivate the policies that you're proposing.
I do think that there's been a real connection between the way in which our politics has nationalized and the way in which our politics has become more identity oriented.
It's these kinds of identity charged issues that can have an intuitive meaning to people in places from Montana to North Carolina.
Has your work clarified your opinion about how national politics should work? What do you advocate for moving forward in terms of policy and campaigning?
I certainly think that voters do better when they have the information that they need, and I think that we are missing an opportunity to really use our federalist system, because there are so many different kinds of issues that face the different communities in our country.
If we are trying to force all of those issues onto a single divide between Democrats and Republicans, we're going to miss a lot of critical issues.
I think some of the disaffection with contemporary politics stems from the fact that many of us deal with problems in our day-to-day lives that are not represented by the Republican-Democrat divide.
I do want to be wary of nostalgia — or suggesting that some earlier period of history was markedly better. Yes. I worry a lot that today's voters just don't know much about state and local politics, but state and local politics wasn't always vibrant and democratic in previous generations, right? As a social scientist, I think part of my job is to lay out trends. I do think that nationalization is something that we should forecast as being a major part of our politics moving forward.
I also think that there are some policy changes on the edges that I would advocate for that I think would help reinforce the connections between places and voters, and to make better use of our current federalist system. For instance, I think campaign finance matching, so that every dollar you get locally is amplified, is a great idea. I think that could encourage politicians to lay down roots in the specific communities they represent and to spend less time trying to raise money from Manhattan or Dallas.
I think we should also do everything in our regulatory capacity to help promote, protect, and foster high-quality, non-partisan coverage of states and localities.
As a country that is hemorrhaging reporters who cover states and localities I do think that given how many important decisions are made at the state and local level, as a society, we have a real stake in the quality of local news media. There are fewer statehouse reporters, there are fewer city hall reporters, and there are fewer people who are tracking state and local politics to hold our politicians accountable. I think that has been underappreciated, and one of the real dangers in contemporary American democracy.
interviews
Strong Partisanship, Weak Parties
by Julia Azari
May 13, 2020
Julia Azari is an associate professor of political science at Marquette University, and author of “Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate.” This interview was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | America today is thought of as extremely partisan, has it always been this way?
No it hasn’t always been the case. In fact, there was this period, from about the 1950s through the 1980s, in American politics and party scholarship, where parties were regarded as weak and highly varied internally. The thinking was that parties were decentralized organizationally, weak nationally and strong at the state and local level. In the middle of the 20th century, the American Political Science Association came out with this report that said, the American political parties don't have clearly differentiated platforms. Even up to the 1970s and 1980s, people were predicting the end of partisanship and a rise in independent candidates.
Then, in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the thinking quickly shifts to, “okay the end of partisanship doesn't seem to be happening anymore.” Because as it turns out, we are extremely partisan. Parties are actually quite well differentiated and national in their ideological scope. If you were to talk to a Republican in Maine and then to talk to a Republican in Oklahoma, there would be a lot of similarity – and the same thing goes for Democrats.
Party scholarship shifted from "American parties are weak and poorly differentiated and not ideological" to "American parties are very ideological and partisan divide is very stark." But that actually leaves a lot of questions open about parties as entities and organizations, which is where my research comes in.
Right, so how do parties fare in a partisan environment? Because one line of thought is – the more partisan a country, the stronger people’s ties are to their party – therefore the party itself is strong. But that doesn’t hold.
Yes exactly, and that is what a lot of my research is around at present.
The biggest part of my research is what I call the ambient societal conversation around political parties. Which basically asks, "What is it the people think political parties are, and why do people feel so skeptical and ambivalent about them, even as we're so deeply partisan?"
One thing I have found to be quite interesting while looking at public opinion polls, are the differences in opinion by gender and race within a party. For example, overall, men tend to rate their own party less favorably. Within the Democrats specifically, there is a large difference in favorability towards the party between white men and everyone else. We know that race and gender are hugely important in polarization between parties, but it seems that they have also driven some division within parties.
I’m also working, with another writer from Mischiefs of Faction, Seth Masket, on a piece of research that is asking what are the indicators of a weak party? What does it mean for a party to be weak?
That is so interesting. How does a party’s strength influence its ability to govern?
I wrote a piece for Mischief of Faction in 2017 about Republicans titled, The Party That Couldn't Coordinate in the Primary, Can't Coordinate to Govern.
In Congress, there's a lot of what political scientists call veto points – there's a lot of places where political change goes to die. So to deal with that and actually get things done, you have to build a coalition. With the amount of partisanship that we see today, doing that over party lines becomes near impossible. So instead, you have to have a very unified caucus.
What we saw with Republicans in 2017 was, even though they controlled the whole federal government, they couldn’t really get anything done. We saw a similar dynamic with Democrats in the summer of 2018 in regards to the way different factions within the party were talking about Abolish ICE. A lot of Democrats can agree broadly on where they stand on immigration. But then when it turns into actually making that into a policy, you need some kind of process to define your priorities and get everybody on the same page. Things break down very quickly when you go from a very broad position, like we don't like the Affordable Care Act or, we want to open up our policy toward immigration, to the actual details of a policy.
So that's kind of where party weakness comes in for me.
What do you think the 2020 nomination process so far has shown us about the strength of the Democratic party?
Meaning that while the Republican party can have a coordination failure, like with the nomination of Trump in 2016, they can then go on to coordinate a minimum coalition around their messaging and then win in the electoral college.
The Democratic coalition does not work like that. There's a lot of complexity in bringing all the different groups that make up the party together. We saw this in the 2016 election. In the case of the 2020 election, you've had a lot of candidates and a lot of discourse about other approaches that Biden doesn't seem like he's very interested in pursuing.
Bringing that whole coalition together is difficult. There are a lot of moving parts to the Democratic coalition. Democrats have historically been a party of process, and our system does not afford parties a good process.
What is a good process?
I think a good process would do a better job of aggregating different interests within political parties. It sounds weird to say, but I think it would actually do better if they had a more organized factions within the parties.
For example, having clear leaders that represent your geographic interest, demographic interests, ideological interests, who can come together and bargain. That happens to some degree at a convention, but not a lot. Will Sander’s people, for example, have serious influence over who Biden’s VP is? Probably not. The party is all about the nominee and once someone becomes a presumptive nominee, it's their party and it’s their convention. That may have some advantages. I'm pretty skeptical of it, because it doesn't leave a lot of room for considering the factions and the ideas of the candidates who did not win the nomination, but nevertheless make up the party.
And that's frustrating. I think parties need to bring back the representative nature of their internal democracy and improve it. But that does entail some delegation of power from voters to accountable party leaders, which people are very suspicious of right now. I don't have a lot of hope for that solution being viable, but thinking of the parties more as representative and less as direct democracies, would, I think, actually help more people's interests and values be better expressed.
That would be a return to how conventions used to work, right?
Old conventions were problematic in all sorts of ways, but I think there should be more robust representative relationships between people’s local delegates. There's local delegates from each congressional district. Even if you could write or call that delegate and explain things that were important to you, like healthcare, and encourage that it is part of the discussion. Primaries afford some of that, but I don't know they're the best intro instrument because they become so centered around a candidate.
It seems complicated to change – maybe not structurally, but in terms of getting public support, it seems really complicated. You wrote recently, “before we let in nostalgia for compromise go too far, we might consider that finding common ground politically has sometimes made things worse.” Could you talk about this idea of compromise and bipartisanship historically?
I think specifically what I was writing about in this instance was the ways in which bipartisanship and compromise have actually been harmful to discussions of race and immigration.
Bipartisanship has thrown African Americans under the bus repeatedly. Certainly until the passage of civil rights in the 60s, but generally a lot of the time. Highlighting the needs and concerns of African American citizens has been the last priority because it turns out it's fairly easy to build a coalition that doesn't address those needs or even a coalition that is outright oppressive.
The same thing with immigration. I was looking into some immigration bills in the late 19th century when a lot of really racist and restrictive things came out. Democrats and Republicans often disagreed about European immigrants, but there was bipartisan consensus that we should exclude people of Asian heritage and specifically, but not exclusively, people of Chinese heritage. And that's just really shitty.
Do you view the Coronavirus bill as bipartisan?
I wouldn't place that in the same category as some of the covertly racist issues that I was speaking about earlier. I think this another animal, the sort of clunky legislation that comes as a result of living in a big and complicated country. Because there have to be compromises, it doesn't go as far as it could.
People always speak about the psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s idea, the idea that after 9/11 there was great unity. You started to see this poke through in the discourse in the last couple of weeks after the Coronavirus crisis. It’s great for people to feel part of something larger and for that sentiment to be part of the crisis response, but that usually does have some exclusion and that exclusion is often racial.
After 9/11, we may have felt more unity, but we saw hate crimes and discrimination against people of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage sky-rocket at that time too. Often in these moments of unity, there is a target, and that is a concern for me.
I wouldn’t say the Coronavirus response legislation is dangerous in the way that the immigration and race compromises were, but as we think about bringing the nation together around this crisis, I would be concerned about ensuring that we are doing that in a way that's inclusive and not racist, and doesn't scapegoat or target people.
I keep hearing about Coronavirus as a great equalizer but I feel like it’s highlighting inequities not hiding them. And that again, seems to be missing from legislation.
Yeah. I think that's exactly right.
In terms of legislation that could address that, I think there could always be more and it could be more systemic.
I do want to note that where I was talking about bringing people together and not scapegoating, I have seen from left leaning people on social media, essentially, arguing that the exception to that would be directing the blame and punishment toward corporations, and the wrath towards the people who have powered this highly inequitable economic situation.
I'm not really sure what the right solution is as far as targeting or punishing those interests. This was a conversation after the financial crash as well. And the answer was pretty much like, we're going to veer away from any serious kind of populist ideology driving these decisions and anything that's truly punitive. Instead, we will prop up these major economic interests and try to give everybody else a little bit as well. The conversation now, in part because of that response, has changed a lot. I have an intrinsic dislike of blame politics, and scapegoat politics, and skepticism about populism, yet I think objectively it is very hard to deny that the economy is extremely unequal and extremely unfair. And that didn't just happen.
I think where we go from here very much remains to be seen. I was having a conversation about this with some of my colleagues, with a very wide range of political perspectives, yesterday. And some of us were trying to make the point that this situation really does highlight structural economic issues, and other people were saying, look, this is a crisis, and people are going to want to return to normalcy, not restructure the economy. And I just don't know.
It’s interesting to frame the conversation about what people want. Of course we all want to go back to normal. But should we? And, by the way, this might be our new normal, not abnormal, as things like this will continue to happen.
Andrew Yang was talking about UBI six weeks ago and maybe you could suspend your belief system and say, okay, yeah, I see how that would work, but that will never happen. Now, out of necessity, it is happening. Our capacity to imagine new things happening, politically, seems to have been cracked open somewhat.
That's a really interesting point. I think you are exactly right – imagination is very hard to get your head around in politics.
I guess the depressing addendum I have to that though, is that the thing you need to follow imagination up with is a process. And a process where the people with the ideas can envision a way in which they can manipulate those procedures that is simultaneously innovative and legitimate to build coalitions.
The weight of partisanship makes politics very stagnant and makes it very hard to reform things.