On Growth and Polarization

Here's another Civil Beat column I just published. It's a short look into the 20th century history of development in Hawai'i, along with the duel threat of overpopulation and underpopulation. All of these arguments have appeared on my blog before-- though in a more rambling tone and spread out over a half dozen posts.

As a disclaimer, let me clearly say that there is no doubt that population growth is wreaking havoc on our infrastructure, natural resources, and climate. My argument is that unless we diversify our economy and heavily invest in local business, education, and the technology sector-- that we are going to face some really hard times.

On a completely separate note--

While Kaua'i's County elections are all non-partisan, last year we saw the rise of ad-hoc slates. And we're now facing an unprecedented level of discord and partisanship within our council chambers. In an effort to understand the grid lock within our county and federal legislative bodies, I recently started reading a book called Beyond Ideology-- which is on the root causes of partisanship. And about four pages into it I came across this stunningly accurate description of party polarization:

This book argues that fellow partisans' shared risk has wide-ranging effects on congressional party politics. It leads members of one party to support efforts to discredit the opposition party on the grounds of its incompetence and lack of integrity, not simply to oppose its ideological policy agenda. It persuades members to rally around the initiatives of their own party's president, and, as a mirror image, the other party to resist initiatives championed by an opposing party's president. It prompts members to routinely back up their own party leadership's efforts to exert control over the floor agenda. And it encourages members and leaders to steer the congressional agenda toward issues that allow them to differentiate themselves from their partisan opposition and thus to make the case that voters should prefer one party over the other. Members' diverging political interests drive the parties apart on many issues that bear no clear or direct relationship to the principled policy disagreements between liberals and conservatives.

Tracing the sources of party conflict speaks to the very purposes political parties serve in a democratic system. If party conflict in Congress were only rooted in members' disagreements over policy, then partisan debate would simply represent the range of public policy preferences that exist within the country's elected leadership. It would do no more than give voice to officeholders' legitimate, policy-based disagreements over matters of public concern. If, however, party conflict also stems from legislators' competition over power and office, then parties do more than reflect the underlying policy disagreements that exist in American government and society. Parties also systematically institutionalize, exploit, and deepen those divisions. Indeed, partisan political interests can create conflict where it would not have otherwise existed. Evidence presented in this book suggests that legislative partisans engage in reflexive partisanship, in which they oppose proposals because it is the opposing party's president that advances them. 

A clear implication of this analysis is that the public's well-documented skepticism about political parties-- a skepticism greatly at odds with political scientists' general attitude-- is well founded. At the same time that political parties help make government more coherent and understandable to the broad public, they also have some negative consequences. In seeking to advance their collective interests of winning elections and welding power, legislative partisans stir up controversy. They impeach one another's motives and accuse one another of incompetence and corruption, not always on strong evidence. They exploit the floor agenda for public relations, touting their successes, embarrassing their opponents, and generally propagandizing for their own party's benefit. They actively seek out policy disagreements that can be politically useful in distinguishing themselves from their partisan opponents. All of these sources of partisan conflict would continue to exist regardless of members' different ideological orientations. Even if there were ideological consensus in the Congress, political parties would continue to score points in their fights over power and office. In all these important respects, the American public is hardly misguided in thinking that "partisan bickering" goes on in congress...

The grim logic of two-party competition is that a party can potentially gain as much electoral mileage from damaging its opposition's reputation as from building a positive record of policy achievements of its own.