Focus on Political Fragmentation, Not Polarization: Re-Empower Party Leadership
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Political polarization, from my point of view, is a concern primarily insofar as it affects the capacity for governance—others might be troubled with a political culture characterized by divisiveness, lack of civil disagreement, and the like, but my concern is effective governance. Indeed, polarization might well involve tragic conflicts between the domains of voting and governance; as responsible party government advocates have long argued, coherent and sharply differentiated political parties appear to increase turnout, make the most salient cue in voting—the political party label—that much more meaningful, and through that cue enable voters to hold officeholders more meaningfully accountable. Thus, party polarization has electoral benefits; it is not a matter of all cost and no advantage. As a result, we should view partisan polarization as a significant problem only if and when its costs are substantial enough to outweigh these other benefits. To the extent partisan polarization contributes significantly to political paralysis and governmental dysfunction, then polarization shifts to becoming a major problem for American democracy. But if the concern about polarization is best understood as one about effective governance, the angle into this problem that is worth focusing on now and in coming years needs to be redefined. My argument is that we should identify the issue not as political polarization but as one of political fragmentation. By fragmentation, I mean the external diffusion of political power away from the political parties as a whole and the internal diffusion of power away from the party leadership to individual party members and officeholders. Until recently, much of the commentary on polarization has focused on the difficulty of fitting America’s increasingly parliamentary-like political parties into the Constitution’s institutional architecture of a separated-powers system. In times of divided government (but not only then, given the Senate filibuster rule, which remains in place on policy matters), will the absence of a “majority government” make it too difficult to generate the kind of concerted political action required for legislation? But beneath the surface fact of party polarization lies a more specific set of questions essential to getting at the capacity for effective governance. The issue is not polarization per se: it is where the sources of compromise and negotiation, deal making, pragmatism, and the like are going to come from. Polarization and divided government make those capacities and attitudes more necessary and, of course, more difficult. But polarized parties and their leaders can still forge compromises in crucial areas, at least those in which the need for action is generally viewed as compelling even if the specifics are contested (budgets, debt ceiling increases). That is, party polarization does not by itself necessarily make impossible the kind of compromises that enable government to function effectively, particularly in areas in which there is broad consensus that government must actually take action (again, passing budgets and meeting existing financial obligations are the paradigmatic examples). My claim is that political fragmentation of the parties (most obviously visible, at the moment, on the Republican side, but latent on the Democratic side as well) is more important than polarization in accounting for why the dynamics of partisan competition increasingly paralyze American government. Were the recent government shutdown and the dancing on the knife’s edge of a government default simply a product of the extreme polarization of the political parties—or of the inability of party leaders to bring recalcitrant minority factions of their parties and individual members along to make the deals that party leaders believed necessary? Ironically, stronger parties—or parties stronger in certain dimensions—might be the most effective vehicle for enabling the compromises and deals necessary to overcoming the partisan divide. The problem is not that we have parliamentary-like parties—it might well be that our political parties are not parliamentary-like enough. In particular, structural changes in the practices and rules of democracy have caused the party leadership to lose the capacity to control and discipline factions within the party and individual members. Political scientists have long distinguished three domains in which political parties function: the party as an ongoing organizational entity, the party in the electorate (the party’s voters), and the party of elected officials in their capacity as part of the government. To put my point most extremely, the “party-in-government” has been severely undermined in recent decades. As in any setting, organizations require a certain unity—embodied in effective leadership—to negotiate, make credible commitments, and forge deals with other organizations. It is this capacity that “the parties in government” have lost. We tend too often to focus on individual political personalities as the explanation for the failure (or success) of government. Yet in government today, the problem is not that individual leaders are much “weaker” personalities than in the past. It is that the overall structural system, particularly communications and election financing, have disarmed party leaders of the tools they had in the past to ensure and enforce party discipline and unity. These structural changes make party leaders less able to exert the kind of control and force that they were able to in certain earlier eras. In this chapter I offer one policy proposal designed to re-empower party leadership over other party members within the government: elections that are publicly financed through money that flows primarily to the political parties, rather than to individual candidates or officeholders. I offer this as one point of entry into the larger issue of how to reinvigorate party leaders’ capacity to exert leadership on behalf of the parties and to ensure and enforce party cohesion in the midst of contentious and difficult legislative choices. This proposal is less important in itself than as an illustration of the kind of directions we should be focusing on to enable more effective governance in the midst of highly polarized political parties.
Source Publication
Solutions to Political Polarization in America
Source Editors/Authors
Nathaniel Persily
Publication Date
2015
Recommended Citation
Pildes, Richard H., "Focus on Political Fragmentation, Not Polarization: Re-Empower Party Leadership" (2015). Faculty Chapters. 1949.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1949
