Here at P-Fix, the ever-energetic Scott Winship has pivoted from a debate with me and others about the advisability of limiting or killing off the Senate filibuster into an extended and scholarly discussion of the origins and nature of partisan polarization. He’s mainly doing battle with the 2005 book “Off-Center” by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. I have no particular dog in that fight, other than to observe that Hacker and Pierson did usefully draw attention to the perils involved in allowing either party to unilaterally move “the center.”
But while I am not competent to joust with Scott on the proper exegesis of Poole-Rosenthal “scores,” I do find a couple of the assumptions he makes quite troubling.
The first is his understandable but still misleading reliance on self-identification of “liberals, moderates, and conservatives” (or some variation involving intensity) for defining the ideological character of the American electorate. Yes, polls of self-identification on this scale do show a very stable “center-right country” in which conservatives typically outnumber liberals three-to-two or even more. This is how Scott arrives at his fundamental argument that polarized elected officials don’t adequately represent the people who elected them, and also how he somehow concludes that the notable shift of Republican opinion to the right in recent years has made the system more, not less representative (that’s his major refutation of the Hacker-Pierson contention that the GOP has dragged the political center to the right).
Self-identification measurements are always iffy, as is made most evident by the vast gap between the number of voters who call themselves “independents” and the number who actually behave in an independent manner. But the hoary liberal-moderate-conservative scale is particularly influenced by the unpopularity of the “liberal” term, even among many voters who are “liberal” by the normal standards. This is what conservatives have bought with so many years and so many billions of dollars invested in the demonization of “liberalism,” compounded by the very different meanings the term has denoted here and abroad.
The distortion involved in using this term is made evident by many, many surveys that show millions of “non-liberal” voters agreeing with liberal values and policy goals, and by a few efforts to use a different typology. In the latter category, John Halpin and Karl Agne published a study earlier this year that found a significantly different spectrum of ideological self-identification simply by adding two other options — “progressive” and “libertarian” — to the usual three choices. The electorate broke down as 16% progressive, 15% liberal, 29% moderate, 34% conservative, and 2% libertarian — a much more equal distribution than the ancient three-to-two-or-higher advantage for the right.
It’s worth noting as well that the “center-right nation” meme has the perverse effect of holding Democrats to a higher standard of “bipartisanship” than Republicans, since “liberals” obviously have to move further to reach the actual political center than “conservatives.” And indeed, that’s pretty much what Scott suggests.
The second problematic feature of Scott’s analysis is that his data is (unavoidably, since you use what you can get) crucially out of date when it comes to profiling Republicans ideologically. Pre-2006 analyses of Republican elected official ideology may well be useful for a historical debate, but since this whole discussion began with the current partisan gridlock in Congress, the sharp movement of the GOP to the right following its defeat in the last two election cycles is more than a little relevant. To put it simply, the “moderate” wing of the Republican Party, at least in Congress, largely died after 2006 and 2008, partly because many moderates were defeated, and partly because party leaders and activists alike made a collective decision to blame both defeats on insufficient GOP conservatism. Few if any Republican “thinkers” are arguing for greater moderation or bipartisanship; more common are safaris to bag the increasingly rare species of the RINO. And most obviously, as Barack Obama seeks to implement the campaign platform (if not, as in health care, something to the right of his platform) he won on, Republicans in Congress are united against him while Democratic moderate dissenters are sometimes so thick you can’t stir them with a stick. This is not the picture Scott paints from his data of a political system where both parties have equally eschewed “the center.”
Getting back to the original discussion, Scott suggested that reforms to open up primary elections to independents might be a more fruitful approach to ending gridlock than restoring something like majority rule in the Senate. Though I favor open (or at least more open) primaries as a general proposition, the idea that this would have an immediate impact on polarization isn’t terribly compelling. It’s a subject that is complicated by definitions: some states with “closed” primaries allow very late changes in party registration, even on Election Day, which certainly gives independents every opportunity to participate. “Open” primaries range from the “jungle” primaries of Louisiana and Washington, to those in states with no party registration to begin with, to those who allow registered independents to vote in either party’s primary. But if you are looking in this direction for a cure-all, consider that the two most ideological senators, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, are both from open primary states. (Meanwhile, Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, and Olympia Snowe are products of closed primary states.) And remember, too, that registered “independents” are not always “centrists.”
In the immediate future, there are only two apparent routes to ending gridlock. One would be curbing the filibuster, either through intrapartisan pressure among Democrats to support cloture votes as a matter of course, or a change in the Senate rules. The other would be the revival of interest among Republicans in governing, either because they win elections and are forced to do so, or they lose so badly that today’s rightward stampede is reversed.
It often seems that Blue Dog Democrats, along with a handful of Senate moderates, are the only people in Washington who are serious about fiscal responsibility. Chasing the will-o-the-wisp of a 
Peter Beinart has a 
It is to Evan Bayh’s enormous credit that he never settled comfortably into the Washington political scene. His decision to pack it in, after 12 years, is a loss to his party, and even more to his country. Most of all, it’s a withering rebuke to Congress, which seems to have lost the knack for governing.
The big political news from the President’s Day weekend was the surprise retirement announcement of Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh. According to reports, the decision was so sudden that even some staff members were taken by surprise.
Everyone should read Matt Yglesias’s post,”