If you ask them, Americans will tell you that they want constructive compromise and a more conciliatory political regime, even though they are reluctant to reach agreement when it comes to the specific issues that they actually care about.
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In "Why American Political Parties Can't Get Beyond the Left-Right Divide," three experts on voting behavior argue that proponents of a revival of a less divisive politics should keep their hopes down.
The core of the argument made at a conference last month at the University of Akron by the political scientists Edward Carmines of Indiana University, Michael Ensley of Kent State University and Michael Wagner of the University of Wisconsin lies in the graphic representation in Figure 1, which shows the distribution of political orientations in the United States.
According to their analysis of American National Election Studies poll data from the last forty years, the electorate is divided into five ideological categories: liberals, who make up 19 percent of voters; conservatives, 27 percent; libertarians, 22 percent; populists, 11 percent; and, in the lighter gray center, moderates, at 21 percent.
Carmines's five-group analysis produces more finely grained results than traditional analyses of political identification that focus on just three variables: conservative, liberal or moderate. These traditional surveys show a much larger bloc in the moderate center, generally 35 percent or more. This tripartite conservative-moderate-liberal approach results in what Carmine and his collaborators contend is far too large a group in the middle. Their method reveals a much weaker moderate core.
This finding undermines the prospect of basing campaign strategy or a third political party on an imaginary centrist coalition:
"Many of those self-identifying as ideologically moderate are actually polarized from each other – making a centrist third-party's rise very difficult."
Carmines expanded on this point by email:
"Analysts have been misled by the number of respondents in surveys who claim to be moderates or place themselves toward the middle of the ANES seven-point ideological self-identification scale question. These measures indicate that moderates are the largest ideological grouping in the U.S. But these estimates are misleading because the group of individuals who are moderates by this definition are actually not moderate according to their positions on economic and social issues. By this latter operational definition only 21 percent of the public were moderates in 2012 and only 13 percent in 2008. Moreover, many of those who self-identify as moderates are actually libertarians or populists — groups who have diametrically opposite sets of issue positions. Attempting to build a winning electoral coalition from such a diverse set of voters is unlikely to work. Having said this, if Democrats were to follow the recent behavior of the Republican Party and move leftward as much as the G.O.P. has moved rightward, then there would be a greater opening for a successful centrist third party."
In a separate email to the Times, Wagner, one of Carmines's co-authors, writes that most "moderates" are "not pure centrists, but a healthy mix of libertarians, populists, and centrists." Attempting to unite populists and libertarians under one new banner is virtually impossible because they are "just as different from each other as liberals are different from conservatives, making it hard for a centrist to appeal to them."
In a follow up email, Ensley – Carmines's other co-author – provided an anecdotal example of the challenges faced by advocates of a centrist approach.
Ensley describes a "stereotype of a populist, an older, white male voter, who is probably of union family. He is worried about Social Security and Medicare being there for him. However, he is also probably uncomfortable with issues like gay marriage. He is probably uncomfortable with abortion on demand. He is probably a church-going fellow." Ensley argues that if this hypothetical voter is given a chance to cast a presidential ballot for Michael Bloomberg (sometimes mentioned as a possible third party candidate), he "is probably indifferent between Bloomberg and the Democratic and Republicans options. They are all equally unappealing."
Conversely, Ensley suggests, "a typical libertarian, Ron-Paul type voter looks at Bloomberg and celebrates the social liberalism (pro-gay marriage, pro-choice), which is the exact thing that the populist does not like about Bloomberg." At the same time, however, the libertarian sees in Bloomberg "a nanny-state, pro-regulation, soda-taxing machine that repels" him.
What then, Ensley asks, is the poor hypothetical third party candidate to do? Any move to appease the populist side is likely to repel the libertarian side and vice versa. As soon as a centrist candidate starts to "take sides, then the grand coalition of populists, moderates and libertarians crumbles."
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