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From Crisis to Reform: A Call to Strengthen America’s Battered Democracy [1]

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Date: 2023-04

3. Partisan polarization

American society is increasingly defined by a widening gap between people who identify as either liberal or conservative, or as supporters of the Democratic or Republican Party. These Americans are sorting themselves into more homogeneous groups with similar political leanings and limited opportunity for interaction with those on the other side, which can blind them to the many issues on which large majorities still agree. Political identity is coded into choices as mundane as where someone buys groceries or what television shows they watch. That Americans across the political spectrum use the shorthand of “red” and “blue” to define geographic areas is a testament to the partisan divide.

The specific character of US political polarization is particularly damaging to democracy when compared with other countries. While many democracies feature sharp debate and ideological competition between left and right, partisan affiliation in the United States has also become more closely tied to racial, ethnic, and religious identity. This makes it far more difficult for parties to gain supporters through attraction and persuasion, and far easier for unscrupulous politicians to present their opponents as an inherent and existential threat. Critiquing one’s own camp or supporting a position associated with the rival party can seem like a betrayal, engendering a blind loyalty that ignores abuse of power and corruption by unaccountable leaders. At its ultimate extremes, politics based on immutable identities can lead to the sort of chronic dysfunction and insecurity seen in places like Bosnia and Herzegovina or Lebanon. It undermines the idea of a common national identity, of a community of citizens with shared interests, and hampers progress on even the most practical governance problems.

Another distinction is that US polarization is not tied to a single personality, notwithstanding the recent dominance of Donald Trump among Republicans. The divide began long before Trump ran for president, and it seems likely to persist after he has left the scene. The current political rifts in countries as diverse as Poland and Venezuela can largely be traced to the 1990s, but the United States arguably set out on its modern partisan trajectory in the 1960s and 1970s. The durability of US polarization has meant that it is often passed from parents to children, making it harder to dislodge.

America’s first-past-the-post electoral system, in which voters may choose only one candidate and even a candidate with a small plurality can win, has set the stage for polarization by making it difficult for any third party to emerge as a viable alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. The two-party structure is more entrenched than in other established democracies with similar electoral systems, like the United Kingdom or Canada, where third parties hold sizable shares of the legislature.

Members of Congress reconvene in a joint session to ratify President Biden's Electoral College win after being evacuated when rioters stormed the Capitol. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

But it is the practice of partisan gerrymandering that has the most corrosive and radicalizing effect on US politics, generating a multitude of districts in which one party can be virtually certain of victory. Most of the 50 states still allow their elected legislatures to oversee the process of redrawing district boundaries to account for population changes, meaning lawmakers from the governing party can essentially choose their own voters—an inversion of democracy. The only real competition an incumbent faces in a well-gerrymandered district comes from challengers in the intraparty primary elections, for which voter turnout is often limited to firm party loyalists. This encourages the candidates to take extreme positions and drives political discourse away from the center over time. Gerrymandering has deep roots in the American system, but it has become more sophisticated thanks to strategic and technological advancements in recent decades, and the two parties’ growing affiliation with particular demographic groups has made it possible to predict a given community’s voting patterns with greater precision. Analogous but more distorted forms of gerrymandering and district malapportionment can be found in less democratic countries around the world—including Hungary, Jordan, and Malaysia—where incumbent forces seek to tip the scales against the opposition and maintain a share of legislative seats that exceeds their share of the per capita vote.

The American system puts elected officials in charge not just of district maps, but also of electoral administration, including counting and tabulation. Most countries assign electoral management to independent or politically balanced commissions, but in the United States, the task falls to state-level partisan officeholders who may be on the ballot themselves. This conflict of interest was on prominent display in 2018, when the top election official in Georgia, Republican secretary of state Brian Kemp, won the governor’s seat after using his existing post to amplify unfounded fears of fraud and purge hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls. In 2020, President Trump called on Republican officials in key states—including Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in Georgia—to alter the final vote tallies in his favor, but to their credit, they resisted enormous pressure and refused to do so.

Partisanship and polarization affects even the judiciary in the United States. Unlike magistrates in nearly all of America’s international peer countries, many state-level judges are directly elected by the public, in some cases on partisan tickets. Federal judges are appointed for life and enjoy considerable independence in practice, but nominations by the president and the confirmation process in the Senate have become highly politicized over the years, eroding public confidence in judges’ impartiality.

The combination of increased polarization and the advent of new media platforms has helped to push an avalanche of conspiracy theories, inflammatory views, and disinformation into the political mainstream. Social media have also become conduits for hate speech and intimidation, driving some people out of the digital public square. Despite recent efforts to enhance the transparency and consistency of their content-moderation policies, social media companies’ opaque algorithms continue to support the rapid dissemination of false and harmful narratives online, yet calls for tighter restrictions have triggered alarm about the danger of censorship and favoritism. The decision by major platforms to remove accounts belonging to President Trump and other right-wing figures after the Capitol riot pleased those users’ critics while angering their supporters. Meanwhile, segments of the population have grown more distrustful of traditional news outlets that aspire to objectivity and fact-based journalism, with the majority of Americans now viewing news media as biased. This has led consumers toward more partisan options that reinforce their own views; the far-right alternatives have disproportionately spread false or misleading narratives in the United States. The resulting information ecosystem is fraught with unreliable content and divided into exclusive echo chambers, feeding further polarization and undermining the shared civic discussions that are necessary for the functioning of any democracy.

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[1] Url: https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-report/2021/crisis-reform-call-strengthen-americas-battered-democracy

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