Gregory Rodrigue: It's hard to reach a national consensus when so many people are hard partisans
[Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist and author who specializes in a variety of contemporary social issues.]
As we cloister ourselves in like-minded enclaves, we're less likely to reach national consensus.
May 26, 2008
Voter turnout this primary season has been setting records. With interest so high, some analysts are predicting another blockbuster general election in November. But can American democracy survive all this heightened interest in the political process?
Half a century ago, political scientist Paul Lazarsfeld became one of the first scholars to document the link between political participation and partisanship. He discovered that partisans voted more regularly and with greater enthusiasm than those who resided in the ideological middle. Although most experts then and now agree that high voter participation is generally a good thing, Lazarsfeld observed that partisan-driven turnout also has its dark side.
"Extreme interest goes with extreme partisanship," he wrote way back in 1954, "and might culminate in rigid fanaticism that could destroy the democratic processes if generalized throughout the community." Therefore, he concluded that a "lack of interest by some people is not without its benefits too."
In other words, a healthy democracy needs the uncommitted middle, the fence straddlers and the apathetic as much as it the firebrand activists. Indeed, in a nation so torn by the passions of partisans, it is those of us who aren't all that enamored of either side who give politicians the room to compromise, which, of course, is the art that politics is supposed to be all about.
But these days, skeptics and the uncommitted are becoming few and far between. The number of voters in the middle has become smaller and smaller, and hence there are fewer people willing to hear what both sides have to say. In the 1980s, maybe 25% of voters could be persuaded to vote for either major party. According to one estimate, that number may have dwindled to less than 10% today. The squeezing out of moderates in the electorate has since led to the decline in the number of moderates (and by that, I mean members willing to work with the other party and maybe even vote with it occasionally) in the House of Representatives, where they held 37% of the seats in the mid-1970s but only 8% in 2005. ...
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As we cloister ourselves in like-minded enclaves, we're less likely to reach national consensus.
May 26, 2008
Voter turnout this primary season has been setting records. With interest so high, some analysts are predicting another blockbuster general election in November. But can American democracy survive all this heightened interest in the political process?
Half a century ago, political scientist Paul Lazarsfeld became one of the first scholars to document the link between political participation and partisanship. He discovered that partisans voted more regularly and with greater enthusiasm than those who resided in the ideological middle. Although most experts then and now agree that high voter participation is generally a good thing, Lazarsfeld observed that partisan-driven turnout also has its dark side.
"Extreme interest goes with extreme partisanship," he wrote way back in 1954, "and might culminate in rigid fanaticism that could destroy the democratic processes if generalized throughout the community." Therefore, he concluded that a "lack of interest by some people is not without its benefits too."
In other words, a healthy democracy needs the uncommitted middle, the fence straddlers and the apathetic as much as it the firebrand activists. Indeed, in a nation so torn by the passions of partisans, it is those of us who aren't all that enamored of either side who give politicians the room to compromise, which, of course, is the art that politics is supposed to be all about.
But these days, skeptics and the uncommitted are becoming few and far between. The number of voters in the middle has become smaller and smaller, and hence there are fewer people willing to hear what both sides have to say. In the 1980s, maybe 25% of voters could be persuaded to vote for either major party. According to one estimate, that number may have dwindled to less than 10% today. The squeezing out of moderates in the electorate has since led to the decline in the number of moderates (and by that, I mean members willing to work with the other party and maybe even vote with it occasionally) in the House of Representatives, where they held 37% of the seats in the mid-1970s but only 8% in 2005. ...