Are Elections Fueling Polarization in the House of Representatives? (with Andrew B. Hall)
Are Elections Fueling Polarization in the House of Representatives? (with Andrew B. Hall)  
Podcast: Understanding Congress
Published On: Mon Nov 07 2022
Description: The subject of this episode is, “Are elections fueling polarization in the House of Representatives?”Polarization in Congress is a well-documented fact of life. This is particularly true on high salience issues, such as immigration and abortion. Yet the tendency of legislators to reflexively oppose policy ideas offered by the other party has bled into other, more prosaic issues. For example, in late 2021 an infrastructure bill became a bone of political contention. Republicans who voted for it were denounced by their colleagues. Nevermind the fact that the legislation might actually do good for these legislators’ constituents.Why are there so many hard left and hard right members of our national legislature? To help us think through this issue, my guest is Andrew B. Hall, a political scientist at Stanford University. Dr. Hall has published many articles on elections and representation and is the author of Who Wants to Run?: How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization (Chicago, 2019).Kevin Kosar:Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our Republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.Andy, welcome to the podcast.Andrew Hall:Excited to be here. Thank you.Kevin Kosar:If I had a dollar given to me every time somebody said, “Congress is polarized because Americans are polarized,” I'd have enough bucks to take a really good vacation. The idea that America has become the land of red states and blue states, with right wing rural folks and left wing city folks, has become pretty popular. You see references to it in the press all the time. So that prompts the question—we have a polarized Congress: are voters the reason we have a polarized Congress?Andrew Hall:It's a very reasonable question. I don't think it has nothing to do with it. I do think it's true that some Americans have become quite polarized. Obviously, we see it play out with things like the rural-urban divide that you're talking about. But I think that there's a really important fallacy that a lot of people don't always think through when they think about Congress polarizing, which is that there's absolutely no guarantee that any change or non-change in people's opinions, will map into what congressional candidates or members of Congress say or do, because there's this intermediate step which is really important—who actually decides to stand up and run for Congress? If the people who decide to run are just systematically different from what the voters at large want, then unfortunately, what people want or what they think or how they think or how polarized they are may not have any reflection in what options they're actually presented to vote on.So—to get back to your question itself—I think it's of course true that people are polarizing to some degree. I think it's vastly overstated. And when you look into evidence on most salient policy issues, it turns out that there's a large chunk of Americans caught in the middle, who find both parties unpopular, and who don't like the positions being espoused by lots of salient political officials on either side. But the people who actually run for Congress are polarizing super dramatically, so the voters are not being given a lot of opportunities to vote for the types of people they would prefer, who might actually be more moderate.Kevin Kosar:Well, if this is not a bottom up phenomenon, if it's not the case that the average American has a really intense view one way or another on all sorts of issues, like updating the Electoral Count Act of 1887—on which we had a party-line vote in the House the other week. If that's not the issue, a polarized public driving everything, then is this about the political parties? Are the political parties simply recruiting candidates who are on the extreme left or extreme right?Andrew Hall:I don't think that aren't part of the story. I think parties are driven by the kinds of people who are willing to spend a lot of time on party-related activities. And those people are not going to be very representative of the public at large. They're going to be particularly passionate people, who might have more extreme views, and so they may want to go out and recruit candidates who fit their viewpoints. That certainly could be part of it. The thing I always like to emphasize though is that the word “party” carries a lot of connotations that don't make sense in the US system. The parties in the US are extremely weak. They don't really have a lot of carrots or sticks to offer people who are running or who have decided to run. For example, one of the most important things—that not everyone knows—is that anyone can run for office and say they're a Republican or a Democrat. The parties are feckless to define what it even means to be a member of the party because of this completely open system that we have.If you look to parliamentary systems in Europe, the party can actually define who's on the ballot and even—in some places—order them or kick someone off if they're not reflective of what the party wants. That's just not how our system works. So when we think about the parties running candidates in the US, they just don't have that much to offer. They can beg people to run for them and they can certainly link them up with resources that help them run—such as campaign finance or other types of advising—and that definitely makes a difference, so I don't want to say they do nothing. But at the end of the day, they both struggle to convince people to run, because it's not a very appealing job.They're also powerless to prevent people from running, which is—of course—most famously what we saw with Donald Trump, who was in no way a Republican, and who the Republican Party at large did not want to run in 2016. And yet look what happened. But more generally, they're not that powerful at determining who runs. So, if we want to explain the set of people who do run, especially for Congress—which is a lower salient office compared to president—we need to look to other explanations besides just party recruitment.Kevin Kosar:If the parties are not these powerful entities that can screen out people, at least not in the US context, what about the primaries: this process by which you have a low turnout election, often in the summertime, where if you're a Democratic voter you get a ballot and it lists only Democrats. And if you're a Republican voter, you get a ballot that lists only Republicans. And if you're an Independent or something else, you either can't vote or you have to declare yourself for one party or another, which is frequently the case. Is this creating a self-selection process? Are primaries driving extremism in Congress and, therefore, polarization?Andrew Hall:I definitely think primaries are part of the story, and the reason I think they're part of the story is that I think there's a general phenomenon in American politics across a wide range of contexts where more extreme people care more and are more willing to show up, do stuff, and speak loudly. If we look across the entire system—whether it's showing up at local city council meetings, tweeting relentlessly about your political views, or voting in a primary—we've created a system where, at almost every phase of every important part of the process, these small groups of people with extreme views are massively empowered relative to the rest of us, which I think is hugely problematic. I think primaries are a good example of this, where the set of people who turn out is a very, very small slice of the electorate. The turnout rates are remarkably small and it seems like they do have very different views, on average, from the rest of us. That can create and complicate incentives. One thing it does—which is related to what I think is going on—is it might give a more moderate candidate pause in thinking whether to run for office or not because they might not look forward to having to survive a bruising primary against someone who might be more naturally popular with this small primary electorate.On the other hand, if I had to rank order the different parts of the system that are giving advantages to more extreme people, I wouldn't rank primaries as high as conventional wisdom might suggest. That's because primaries are really complicated, and there's a lot going on in primaries that's not ideological. If we look across the country, we can find lots of cases where, in fact, the more extreme person—the more culture wars-type person, whether on the left or the right—isn't actually the one who succeeds in the