In the midst of a harrowing political campaign, can Americans tone down their partisanship and unify around their common American values? Matthew Levendusky finds that Americans misperceive those in the other party and can improve their views if they are reminded of our shared national identity. From the Olympics to the 4th of July, some moments remind us that we have more in common than we may think. But reduced animosity also requires knowing real people on the other side of our divides and building cross-partisan friendships.
Guest: Matthew Levendusky, University of Pennsylvania
Studies: Our Common Bonds
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: Can American identity reduce partisan animosity? This week on the science of politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. In the midst of a harrowing political campaign, can Americans tone down their partisanship and unify around their common American views? This week I talked to Matthew Levendusky of the University of Pennsylvania about his Chicago book, Our Common Bonds. He finds that Americans misperceive those in the other party. They can improve their views if they are reminded of our shared national identity.
From the Olympics to the 4th of July, some moments remind us that we have more in common than we may think, but reduced animosity also requires knowing real people on the other side of our divides and building cross-partisan friendships. This interview was recorded just before the assassination attempt on former President Trump, but in its wake, there’s been a lot of hope and attention to our capacity for unity. This discussion provides at least an opening for change, though neither of us is optimistic that individual Americans can overcome the increasing divisiveness of our political leaders, but this conversation at least lays the groundwork for what is possible. So tell us about the main findings and takeaways from your book, Our Common Bonds.
Matthew Levendusky: Great. So first, thanks for inviting me on. And so the book started in part because I was interested after thinking about affective polarization for a number of years, to think about how we might take steps to reduce it. So rather than just studying what causes it or even what its consequences are, how we might think about ameliorating some of those consequences. So, the main idea of the book is that by working on correcting the misperceptions that people have about the other party, you can reduce that level of animosity that they have. But it’s important to note that it’s a reduction of animosity, not an elimination of animosity. So, there’s no silver bullet, there’s no, those little internet ads, “One weird trick to a flat belly,” or whatever: there’s no one weird trick to get rid of animosity. This is just about maybe lowering the temperature, so to speak a little bit.
Matt Grossmann: Why is that a good goal, to reduce the negative feelings that people have about the other political party? And aren’t the political parties giving us reasons to dislike them that maybe we should look to them rather than us?
Matthew Levendusky: What I tell people is that part of animosity really is a good thing, so some level of partisan animosity is a good thing because parties are giving us big important choices about the way the political world and the social world should look and should behave. So, part of the animosity that we see is I think a healthy reflection of the democratic competition that’s going on in our politics and in our society.
But I like to think that there’s part of that that is based on the sort of misperceptions that we hold about the other side. And that’s really what, not just the strategies that I’ve done, I talk about in the book, but lots of other things. So, a lot of the strategies that were in the Strengthening Democracy Challenge or things that a number of other scholars have done are all, I think getting at those same things, which is the let’s think of it, not so much the healthy part of the animosity, but maybe the unhealthy part of it.
Matt Grossmann: You said you’ve investigated the rise for a long time: does it matter why we got in the situation for reducing it, or you just take it as a given that it’s high?
Matthew Levendusky: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of important things to think about and some factors that lead it to be maybe sort of artificially high. So, part of the long-term rise is going to be connected to changes in the elite party system, changes in the levels of voter sorting, those sorts of things, and that’s maybe more about the political competition and the political differences between the parties. But take for example, the ways in which mass and social media might askew our perceptions of the other party. I’ve done some other work looking at media coverage of polarization and fits in with lots of other work on media coverage of politics more broadly, where basically what we find is that media tends to report on the loudest voices in the room, the most extreme individuals, the kinds of people who are what Krugman, Cobb, and Ryan called the deeply engaged, people for whom politics sits at the center of their identity. But those people also aren’t very normal and lots of other people don’t look like them.
And likewise, we can think about politics and social media. So one of the things we know from lots of reports from Pew, but also from the work of folks like Chris Bale and Jaime Settle, is that the types of people who talk about politics online are really weird. It’s a small percentage of people, again, who are really interested in politics. And so they’re not very typical. And so we tend to know more people on our own side. And so, I think our view of our own side is going to be less distorted by that because we have a more accurate picture of that. But for the other side, for a variety of reasons, basically that like attracts like in lots of different ways, we maybe have less contact with them.
So if I see someone I went to high school with on Facebook and they’re posting all kinds of crazy political things, I think, “My goodness, everyone on the other side is just nuts. Look at the types of things they’re thinking about,” when I don’t maybe see that that is just a small fraction and the most extreme part of that party. And so, that’s the sort of thing that a lot of these treatments are trying to get at is that thing where people are misperceiving who the other party actually is.
Matt Grossmann: What are these misperceptions and what difference do they make? And it seems like your view is a little bit more focused on shared values rather than misperceiving the social coalitions of the party or their level of extremism.
Matthew Levendusky: Yeah, I think there’s a nice example in some work that I did with Jamie Druckmann, Sam Clarke, [inaudible 00:06:41] Cobb, and John Ryan, it was in the JOP, I think in 2022 where we asked people what they thought their ideology was and how interested they were in politics. So, some people got that and some people were asked about to talk about themselves, and some people were asked about the parties. And when you look at what Democrats or Republicans say about themselves, and you contrast it with what people think of the other party, they’re just really different. The modal person basically says, “Yeah, I’m moderate, maybe leaning a little bit to one side or the other,” which would be consistent with the partisan sorting that we’ve seen over the past 30 or 40 years, “And I’m sort of interested in politics.” Those people have, let’s say a relatively moderate ideology, a relatively moderate interest in politics.
But people think that those in the other party are all at the ideological extremes. So, Republicans think that Democrats, the modern Democrats, are very liberal, Democrats think the Republicans as very conservative and they tend to think that the modal person on the other side is very interested in politics. So they have both this political interest and political ideology misperception, and so that part of what people dislike about the other side is not so much that it’s like, “Oh, I inherently dislike Republicans,” it’s that, “I dislike really extreme and very deeply involved people who are going to center politics in their everyday life.”
So, part of what the treatments are doing is reminding people that that’s not accurate. So if you take one of the ones in the book, which is reminding people of cross-party friendships that if you get people to substitute someone that they know and respect a friend or a family member or neighbor from the other party, and you get them to substitute for that really extreme person would be like, “Okay, well yes, there are some reasonable people on the other side, so maybe they’re not all like that, so maybe I can Republicans in general more, even if I dislike this particular group of them.”
Matt Grossmann: You also remind Americans of their shared national identity and show that that can reduce polarization, so talk about how you do that. And I guess interpret that as whether we’re just substituting one kind of group norm and misperception for another. In other words, are we just reminding people that Americans are great and so we’re going to substitute misperceptions of foreign countries for misperceptions of the other party?
Matthew Levendusky: Yeah, great question. What I did in those experiments was I asked people to read a short newspaper article and then write a little paragraph about it, and the short newspaper article was one that had been published a number of years ago now in, I don’t even remember what newspaper, but to celebrate the 4th of July, and just talked about many of the different accomplishments that America’s had over time. And when you look at what people wrote in the paragraphs, it was lots of things about American government know our freedom, the ability to achieve the American dream, lots of things like that or sort of the things that people hold most dear about American life.
One interesting contrast though, the initial experiments were done in the Obama administration and I was curious to see if they had changed over time, so I re-ran them in the summer of 2020 and found that they were still effective, but it was mostly because Republicans were responding to it. Democrats were responding somewhat less effectively in 2020. So, I don’t quite know what that means, if we redid it, what would we find? My guess is that we probably find it still works, and probably my gut is that if I had redone it, is that would still work a little bit for Democrats, but maybe a bit less effectively. I think probably everything with 2020 needs a bit of an asterisk next to it because I did them about two months after the George Floyd protests. So, I think that was still very much in the minds of [inaudible 00:11:05] Democrats. And I found in other work since then that a lot of the effects of the Floyd protests have largely dissipated at this point. But I think there probably is still something there, that there are still some commonalities that might try to prime it a little bit differently if I were going to redo it today.
On the second part, just to make people, for lack of a better word, jingoistic or nationalistic, it’s a great point. So there’s a nice paper by a couple of scholars who showed that it tends to change the way people view other countries, which isn’t something I thought of, but makes perfect sense. So I think it is in so many things about striking the right balance between having people be proud in the accomplishments of America, but also kind understanding what America still has left to achieve and not also falling into jingoism. So one of the things when I talk about this is to sort of say that you can be patriotic without being jingoistic and recognizing there still is a lot for America to do and still things to be proud of, but also no reason to necessarily disparage other cultures as well.
Matt Grossmann: So timely for us. Now, you also took advantage of the fielding dates of some of your surveys to show that people are less negative about the opposing party during the July 4th holiday and during Michael Phelps’ success in the Summer Olympics. So tell us about those findings and interpret how widely you think that they would apply. In particular, this year we had the July 4th holiday right after Biden’s debate performance, and we might not get the same kind of break from politics that we sometimes get in the Summer Olympics period. So yeah, how much would you expect these to apply this year?
Matthew Levendusky: Yeah, so those findings came from the National Annenberg Election Survey, which in 2008 had randomized the day people were interviewed, which allows you to do some kind of nice stuff looking over time. And there I found that right around that weekend where Phelps won his last couple of gold medals, which is also right around the time that the women’s gymnastics team won the all-around gold medal that people liked the other side more than they did the periods afterwards. It’s a small effect on the order of a couple degrees on a feeling thermometer. It’s only detectable because of the massive size of those Annenberg studies. So these are not huge changes, these are quite modest ones, but I think would be consistent with people maybe thinking about the commonalities there rather than the political divisions.
And I think that that is an interesting contrast. That data comes from 2008, which in many ways feels like a lifetime ago ago. And I think that part of, the difference is exactly what you hit on, which is that politics now just seems to pervade much more of our day-to-day lives in a way that it didn’t back then.
As I remember actually sitting with my family and watching, I happened to be visiting them that weekend, we were all watching the Olympics together and even though it was in the midst of this very important political campaign, again, it’s a long time, but I don’t remember having any political conversations at that point, we were focused on this, whereas I sort of suspect in a few weeks if people sat down and watched the Olympics, they wouldn’t be feeling that same way this year. And likewise with July 4th, I went to visit my mom and dad and my siblings and all the conversations everyone was having were centered around Biden and Trump and the debate, even among relatives aren’t particularly political. So I think to the extent that politics seeps into all these different areas of our lives that’s going to dissipate and minimize some of the effectiveness or the efficaciousness of some of these other factors of reducing those political divisions.
Matt Grossmann: So it’s more salient now. We also have different candidates, 2008 strikes me as it’s the last time that majorities of Americans liked both candidates running, for example, very unlike this year when lots of Americans dislike both candidates. And it does relate to these findings. I know you know that we don’t really know what people have in mind when they’re thinking about what’s your opinion of the other party, but it certainly seems more likely that they’d have Trump and Biden in mind than their other Americans who happen to be Democrats or Republicans.
Matthew Levendusky: Yes, absolutely. And that’s part of it. So I think I’d say two things. One is that I think it’s important to think about all this work on polarization is not the inevitable shift of these social forces, that’s part of it, especially when you think in the long term, the realignment of the South as the parties, those sorts of things. But there’s also a real role for political agency that parties and candidates make particular choices and that has a big effect on polarization.
So one of the ones I like to, that I often like to play out for people is that if we were to go back to 2012 and imagine things work out slightly differently and Mitt Romney wins the election over President Obama, if you remember pre-election, Obama ended up winning slightly better than the polls had predicted. And so you could imagine a small shift would’ve tilted things the other way. Than Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan become the standard bearers of their Republican Party and I think that the future plays out quite differently. Trump probably doesn’t quite feel the need to come into politics in the same way, it shifts the contours of the Republican Party, I think probably in some important ways.
And so that’s part of it. And part of it is also that I think that that highlights in a way the value of thinking about people’s feelings about elites versus ordinary voters. So I don’t know that there’s a ton of strategies that are going to work or maybe even a need for strategies to say make someone dislike Trump or Biden more. But when I talk to groups or talk to people in the civics community or whatever, one of the things I say to them is, I think one way of thinking about this on a person-to-person level is could you do things with people from the other side? Could you work with them? Could you find cooperation and do these things? And that to me is the type of animosity we’re looking to minimize, that it’s going to be really hard to do things about the kind of political part of this so can you do some of these other maybe more social things? It’s maybe a smaller task, but I think one that can still be important.
Matt Grossmann: So you also look at partisan social networks and whether people have friends that are in the other party, and you’re able to test both the sort of association with that and partisan attitudes and the effect of reminding people about those friendships. So talk about those findings and how you interpret them.
Matthew Levendusky: Sure. So the associational data comes from Pew which asks these questions about partisan homophily. And as you might expect, most people’s friends are typically from their own party and that falls very consistently with the fact that life attracts a variety of different metrics. So most people’s friends are the same race, have similar levels of income, education, etc.
But it’s not completely homophilous with respect to party and that it’s the lack of complete homophily that ends up being important. And so what I did was I primed people, so asking them to think about someone they know in respect from the other side and to write a short thing about why they like them. And we find that when you do that, it does reduce people’s animosity towards the other party for the reason that I suggested earlier. It seems to be that they’re kind substituting that friend for the misperception.
And two interesting things when you dig into those open-endeds, and we asked a couple of follow-up questions when I did the study. So one that I thought was interesting, I assumed a lot of these would be family members and they are, but actually the most common answer really is, this is just a friend. And so there’s a lot of this that people actually do have these contacts. So there is certainly a segment of the public who just rejects the treatment out of hand, 15 to 20% depending on the sample. But most people write something like, roughly-
Matt Grossmann: They reject it and they say, “I can’t think of anyone.”
Matthew Levendusky: Yeah, they say… Or even much stronger than that like, “I would never be friends with the other side. Those people are all crazy. I can’t even believe you’re asking me this.” But most people end up sort of thinking about someone. And the interesting thing is that most people are actually also pretty close to that person. And I think there’s an important lesson there is that as political scientists and social scientists we’re exactly the sort of people who tend to center politics in our lives. This is something we’re really passionate about, we’ve chosen to study, but for most people, politics isn’t at the core of their identity. And so a lot of people sort of said, “Hey, we disagree on a lot of stuff, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect that person, or we can’t get along.” And maybe they don’t always have political conversations, but there is an understanding that you can still be friends with someone even if their political views differ from you.
Matt Grossmann: So this would seem have implications for the kinds of changes in polarization that we’re seeing if people aren’t able to make these cross-partisan friendships as much. How do you think the changes in social polarization, even if people aren’t actively doing what 15% of your respondents are doing, they might just have the same occupations and geographic areas and other kinds of social characteristics that are increasingly associated with partisanship?
Matthew Levendusky: Yeah, I mean, I think to the extent that there’s a limit to it, that’s probably going to be the limit. I actually think in some ways the interesting shift that I don’t quite know how this will play out, is thinking about the workplace. So you can think back to … There’s a variety of nice papers from Diana Mutz from, at this point, quite a few years ago. But showing that the workplace is really a way we tend to encounter people of differing political views. Universities would sort of there be the exception that proves the rule.
With the rise of remote work and people interacting less, that actually to me is one of the things that we might lose there. More broadly, that kind of interaction with people you don’t know very well, I think has been a bit of a casualty of the post-pandemic world. It’s something I think about more … So I spend part of the year in Italy, which is a very different culture, and it’s one of the things that I’ve come to really appreciate about it that happens there much more than just in the US, for a variety of reasons face-to-face interaction, especially with strangers, is just more prized there. And it’s something, especially every year when I arrive, that really strikes me and I really come to enjoy while I’m there. Even as someone who’s very much an introvert, that casual conversation with other people, because I think it is … Those are muscles in a way you have to exercise.
And I think that that has been one unfortunate consequence of the pandemic, that I suspect if you were to repeat these findings in a few years that that might have some implications for how we think about the other side if we’re missing some of those, for lack of a better word, third space interactions with people.
Matt Grossmann: You also look at and find effects of shared sports fandom as being able to reduce partisan polarization. So I want to hear about those results, but also how you think about partisanship versus fan identity. On the one hand that’s kind of our archetypal, strange, irrational tie, but on the other it might open the way to thinking that some of this is a little more performative. People might not really believe what they tell us about the other party.
Matthew Levendusky: Yeah, I think that’s right. There we did some little vignettes where we gave people different scenarios that were matching on the favorite team or the party and contrasted the different levels. But yeah, no, I think there’s a great line in Eitan Hersh’s book that in much the same way that Red Sox fans will tell you on a survey that like, “Oh, I never let my child marry someone who roots for the Yankees,” there’s a similar performative aspect to it as well from the political side.
And again, I think it also gets to what the survey question says versus what it means. So when we say to someone, “Oh, would you be upset if your child married a Democrat or your child married a Republican?” This was really brought home to me when I did the in-person discussion experiments because I was actually in the room while people filled out the questionnaires. And that social distance [inaudible 00:26:02], asking people, “Would you be comfortable having someone from the other party as a neighbor, as a friend, if your child married someone,” that was the question that in almost every single one of those events, at least one if not more people would get very upset about and come up to us and tell us that they didn’t want to answer it. They didn’t know how to answer it.
And the reason why was they said, “Well, what does it mean to just know someone’s like a Democrat? What else do I know about them? What are they?” And that people, again, are maybe going to draw on that really extreme stereotype about it. It’s like, “Okay, the one thing you told me about this person is that they are an X. So X must be the most important thing about them.” When in reality people are a lot more complicated, they’re multidimensional. And so thinking about that complexity of that identity maybe mute some of the effects of some of that.
Matt Grossmann: You also, as you mentioned, have try to remind people of views that they might share. This struck me as a little bit less consistent with some of the other stuff we’ve had on, in particular those Stanford experiments of a lot of different things, where at least on the policy view side, reminding people that they share ideas isn’t that effective. So how do you think about what you did versus the more, I guess, a-popular approach of just saying, “Look, we have all this in common. We all agree on these things.”
Matthew Levendusky: Yeah. In terms of the discussion experiments, I think a small part of it is when you bring people together and you have a discussion across party lines, I think a small part of the effect is that, oh, there’s some unexpected common ground. And of course it’s always really hard to piece apart these different mechanisms, but looking at the data and talking to the folks as they did it, it seems like the more consistent part of it was something along the lines of, “Well, I still don’t agree with them and I still think they’re wrong about a lot of stuff, but at least I understand it now.”
And so it’s not so much about saying, “Oh yeah, there’s some unexpected agreement. It’s like, “Okay, it hadn’t occurred to me that you would have a legitimate rationale for your point of view. That this isn’t just based on prejudice or misinformation, but you actually have some substantive rationale for your opinions. And so it’s really that kind of better understanding of this.
So one of the things I’ve taken away from this is two things. One, and this is very hard for a faculty member because by definition you have to be in love with the sound of your own voice, is that listening is more important than talking. And the second part that I think falls as a close parallel to that is that understanding has to proceed persuasion. A lot of the groups that I talk to or folks that want to meet with me are often because they’re politically interested, it’s how they find this work, they want to say, “Well, I want to persuade people on the other side.” And I always tell them that rather than having persuasion be your first goal, understanding has to be that first goal.
So the value I think of a cross-party conversation is much more about the perspective getting, that you get to hear someone else’s point of view and why they think it. So often when I’m talking to these groups, I can push them more in that direction as an initial goal, because I think that’s likely to be something that is a more useful and productive path.
Matt Grossmann: Talk a little bit about, more about what you did with these discussions. And I guess we’ve talked about the sort of they might learn something, but they also might essentially develop a social relationship in the process and how you think about that.
Matthew Levendusky: Yeah, so what we did, I worked with a series of RAs, shout-out to Leah, Liza and Dom. And so we traveled all around the Metro Philadelphia area, sorry, the metro area of a large east coast city, which just happens to be Philadelphia. And so we would advertise on Facebook, because this was still before Facebook changed the way it’s political ads works, you could do this. And interestingly, the most effective recruitment strategy, we tried a bunch, was reminding people that if you came to our one-hour study, we would give you $20. So much less effective than participating in research, learning about politics, no, no, no, it was about people making $20.
And so what we would do is people would come in, they’d fill out an intake questionnaire, and then we would randomize them to either be in heterogeneous groups with equal numbers of Democrats or Republicans, homogeneous groups with just Democrats or just Republicans, or a controlled condition where people discuss something apolitical. And in this case it was what the best beach towns are on the Jersey and Delaware shore. We wanted something that would engage people for 15 minutes and wouldn’t bring up politics. And if you’ve ever been to Philadelphia you know that people have very strong opinions about where you should vacation.
Then we invited people to … We gave them a short article just to frame the discussion, and then we broke them into discussion groups for 15 minutes. And I think one of the things that we did that ended up being important, although I didn’t really understand it at the time, was that we established a whole set of clear norms that I basically had read and talked to a lot of people who’ve done discussion experiments before. And so I followed a lot of their protocols, which involved having everyone take a turn, being respectful, not interrupting other people.
And at the time, again, I did that because I thought, “Okay, this is the best practice for how you do these experiments, and I want to follow that.” But I think it also, that civility, also conveys a bit of mutual respect. And I think that also gets a part of what people learned, because we show in the post [inaudible 00:32:41] analysis that people felt respected from the other side, they felt heard. And I think that structure works towards that. And so that’s something that when people ask me, “Well, how could you simulate something like this in real life outside of a lab or outside of the context of one of these groups that hold these structured discussion-“
Matthew Levendusky: These groups that hold these structured discussions, I tell them I think that actually goes a long way to conveying respect for the other person, showing that you’re interested. And what they’re doing is I think some of those ground rules and that hearing the other person’s perspective is a lot of what’s doing the work here.
Matt Grossmann: So, as you’ve mentioned several times, there is this work from the other divide that we’ve talked about here that a lot of the animosity towards the other party, or part of it, is just an animosity toward politics in general, or people who are too political like us. So how do you think about that? And I guess the alternative of just … And there is other work that shows, we’ve also talked about here, that if you say, “Would you like a neighbor who’s a Republican?” It’s not a problem for Democrats so much as they have a yard sign, they have a flag. So, what about just the idea that we need people to be less partisan, outwardly partisan, and that is really what people dislike?
Matthew Levendusky: Yeah, I mean it’s a great point. And I think there’s probably something to be said for thinking about what the right sort of level of political involvement is for most people. So I guess I would say two things. One is the old concept going all the way back to Dahl of polyarchy, and this idea that what we need are people with different levels of political interest. And one I think unfortunate turn in our politics over the last say 10 to 15 years has been the sense that politics has come to pervade everything. And I don’t think that’s particularly healthy for anyone because it shifts us into this mindset where everything’s about your politics, it becomes a part of your identity, and it just heightens these sort of conflicts.
And I think part of it is also thinking about what that right level of political interest is. I don’t necessarily have a perfect answer here, but I actually sometimes think it’s important to take a step back and think about these things. And I think Eitan Hersh’s work is a really great example of this. And so, instead of just getting upset about national politics, if you want to be politically involved, what is something you could do that would be constructive? And there’s probably not a lot you can do, to be honest, at the national level, but you could do a lot more at other levels. And you might then also see things from a different perspective, how can you engage more effectively? And that’s not something that might break down along those predictable partisan lines.
Matt Grossmann: But we’re swimming against a pretty big tide here. We have at best from all of your interventions, we have pretty small effects. We don’t know whether they’ll last, particularly for thinking about things like the 4th of July and the Olympics. We got the weekend effect against the campaign, getting close to election day. If we think about something like around January 6th or something like that, can we actually reduce partisan animosity when it matters? Or is this us trying to hold back a tide that’s coming whether we like it or not?
Matthew Levendusky: So, when I talk about these sorts of things, what I always say is: elite problems require elite solutions. So at some level, a huge driver of this has been elite changes, and ultimately we’ll need elite level changes to really do this. The problem is just I have yet to hear anyone articulate any sense of what that looks like in any way, shape, or form, and I don’t think that solution exists. I always joke when I do these things with groups, if I knew what the answer was, I wouldn’t hold it back. I would just tell you. It’s that I don’t think anyone has a good solution for those things.
So yes, I think that’s right, that you can’t at some level really change those large structural factors. That’s why I said I sometimes think of the goal as being something maybe a bit smaller, but also a bit more achievable as something you can think about how to do. Because if I had to guess, my guess is that those broader elite changes will have to come from some sort of reshuffling of the party system along some new lines that will introduce some new cleavage. But the problem is we won’t know what that is until it’s already here.
Matt Grossmann: So, my institute runs a political leadership training program for people who might want to run for state legislature at some point. We also see state legislative staff and we see legislators. And then the take I always give is that the legislators are too late in the process to do anything about this. But many of the things that we try to do for political training program, it’s half Democrats and half Republicans, and a lot of things that we do try to do are similar to your interventions about creating social bonds. And to some extent when I’ve talked to other people who do these kinds of things, they all say it doesn’t really matter what the curriculum is, it’s just getting people together regularly, spending time with one another.
So, to what extent do you think these same lessons are applicable to people who are really in the midst of politics? The kinds of people who would run for office, rather than just members of the public.
Matthew Levendusky: Yeah. It’s interesting because I’ve done a bit with a similar thing here through the Council of State Governments that does something with the Mid-Atlantic region that I’ve spoken at for a number of years now. And one of the things I say to them is: think about the people that you can encounter behind the scenes in a way. Rather than when the cameras are on and you’re performing the media spectacle of politics, to think about that as maybe who people really are and how you can build bonds and relationships in those ways.
And that’s the way in which, again, intersecting with changes in the media system and lots of other things, that those are larger forces that you can’t combat against. But what I like to think of those things as doing is maybe planting the seeds of how you could see, okay, if we could work together to do something sort of behind the scenes and do something on some of these policies that you can slowly and at least on some things, maybe make some progress. It’s not going to be wholesale change, but you can maybe make some interventions that nudge things in the right direction.
Matt Grossmann: So you said you spent a lot of time in Italy. How much of this do you think is unique to the American context, especially our polarized two-party system? If you still had a left and a right and sorting, but you didn’t necessarily have everything bound up in two parties, would this be easier to solve?
Matthew Levendusky: Yeah, and it’s interesting because there’s been a real interest in this, in the comparative politics literature in Western European democracies, and they too have seen a rise in the same sorts of things. It’s a little bit different. The nature of the party system makes it a bit distinct. But I think that some of this is more general. Some of it, though certainly exacerbated by the two-party system where there’s a very clear in group and an out group. In other party systems, it seems to be more that people really dislike the radical right, but they’re a little bit more indifferent towards the center-left versus, say, the center-right or something like that.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available biweekly from the Niskanen Center. I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you liked this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website. How Political Values and Social Influence Drive Polarization, Reducing Polarization with Shared Values, Polarized Opinion on Climate Change and Messages That Move Conservatives, Are Americans Becoming Tribal with Identity Politics Trumping All? And Compromise Still Works in Congress and with Voters.
Thanks to Matthew Levendusky for joining me. Please check out Our Common Bonds, and then listen in next time.