Why do the Americans vote like their neighbors?

The book by Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing is an analysis on the geographic distribution of republican voters and democrats in the United States. It addresses an ancient debate in a relatively little used angle in American political science around ideological polarization and its causes. His starting point is the tendency – recent according to him – of Americans to regroup in communities of similar orientation. He starts from the observation that a greater number of Americans now live in counties where the presidential elections have seen the victory of one of the candidates with more than 20 points ahead of his rival – which the authors call the “” Landslide Counties ». This phenomenon, rare in 1976 (the Carter’s election year is the reference year chosen in the book), is now common: this corresponded to a quarter of the Americans in 1976 and almost half today (p . The observation is undeniable and the arguments mobilized to justify it are a happy mix between anecdotal (the third part for example) and the university register (psychology, demography, political science). The book is indeed the fruit of a collaboration between a journalist, Bill Bishop, and a sociologist from the University of Texas, Robert Cushing, who, both, have succeeded in reconciling academic references and ease of writing. It constitutes a very interesting synthesis on a subject that has occupied the political scientists for several decades, that of the growing partisan antagonism which characterizes American political life ; A notion which covers both the division into separate and antagonistic poles, but also a certain homogeneity within these poles. For the authors, the Americans tend to regroup according to affinities of lifestyle, which, as a last resort, would explain the rise in political polarization in the country.

Social homogeneity, electoral polarization

If the general public has visualized polarization with the adoption by the media of electoral cards in red (republican) and blue (democrat) during the 2004 campaign, the phenomenon is much older. We can easily bring it up to the 1960s with the ideological redefinition of the Republican Party. Conservative commitment of Gop (Grand Old Party) and the implementation of the southern strategy, under the leadership of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, made the party an increasingly homogeneous vehicle of the values ​​of the right. The 2004 election was a summit of this evolution, as evidenced by the intensity of the debates and the electoral mobilization. But we also remember the geographical distribution between republican and democrats: the latter prevailed on the east and west coasts as well as in the major urban centers of the Midwest ; The rest of the country, however, supported the Republicans. This striking geographical cleavage is the subject of Bishop and Cushing’s book. But the latter are interested in local and not national developments, which strengthens the interest of the work because it shows the complexity of American electoral developments, too often reduced to simplifications at the national level. However, the logics underlying political life are eminently local and require to look at the territorial distribution of citizens, which is very important within a federal system-the first part is also entitled “ The Power of Place ».

Bishop and Cushing’s argument is to say that the United States has entered a process of self-sortingwhich is based on the free individual choice to define his place of residence according to his personal values ​​and a certain way of life. The movement is all the more striking since 5 % of Americans move to another county every year, or 100 million people between 2000 and 2008 (p. 5). Thus, since the mid -1970s, Americans have chosen to live with people who have shared their values, their vision of the world, their lifestyles, and, in the last instance, their political options. Even if this process does not have the primary of political commitment, its consequences are clearly of this nature. This movement is an extension of what sociologists call the “ White Flight “, When the white populations leave certain neighborhoods of cities to train homogeneous communities, most often in suburbs – we then speak neither more nor less than a new form of segregation, voluntary and individual this time. This process creates pockets of voters that have a similar political profile. This homogeneity has direct political consequences: it promotes polarization by facilitating the ideological escalation of candidates, especially for elections in the House of Representatives. Indeed, faced with a relatively homogeneous electorate, the electoral constraint changes in nature. The holder does not have to fear the opponent of the other party, but the one who comes to challenge him within his own party during the primaries. And that challenge will himself play the overbidding card by presenting himself as closer to the values ​​of the voters and denounce the compromises made by the holder. Tactics are all the more promising since voters participating in the primaries are by definition much more motivated by values ​​than median voters.

The process thus described has the advantage of putting the classic advanced explanation into perspective to explain polarization. The ordinary argument denounces the “ gerrymandering »Supportant as an essential source of partisan confrontation. Bishop and Cushing highlight a social argument without direct link with institutional changes. They therefore put the thesis of the manipulation of electoral redistribution (redistrict) – p. 28 to 31. It is however true that the latter is extremely visible because it has the appearances of common sense. Since the decisions of the Supreme Court in the 1960s (Wesberry v. Sanders,, Reynolds v. Simsand above all Baker v. Carr In 1962), the States rebalanced the constituencies which, historically, favored the campaigns on the cities. Since then, as political developments progressed, many constituencies have thus become concentrates of minority groups (we speak of “ Majority-Mnority Districts ) Generally favorable to Democrats. Conversely, other constituencies have become more homogeneous in another way, becoming republican. Thus, elected officials in the House of Representatives face politically homogeneous electorates (we then speak of Safe Seats): the rate of re -election to the room happily exceeds 90 %. The problem with this argument is that it does not correspond to the reality of the partisan evolution of the constituencies. Bishop and Cushing use the work of Alan Abramovitz and his colleagues who, in an article of PS : Political Science and Politicsstudied the partisan effects of electoral redistribution in 1980, 1990, and 2000. However, according to these political scientists, the number of seats “ safe (Defined as having majorities of more than 20 % in favor of one or the other party during the presidential elections) has varied little: he went for example from 201 to 203 in 2000, but he decreased after the redistribution of 1980. Bishop and Cushing underline when the polarization of the constituencies took place between the rediscovery, not just after. The phenomenon is therefore more gradual and more social. It does not reside in an abrupt institutional change.

A risk of fragmentation ?

But what social phenomenon are we talking about ? All the interest of the book lies in this parallel between developments that we do not think a priori To correlate: the most personal life choices (starting with the choice of residence) and the vote. But this intuition is carrying its own weaknesses. Starting with the chosen analysis scale. That there is a process of geographic concentration and homogenization is certainly an interesting hypothesis, but on what scale manifests itself ? The state ? The county ? The district ? The city ? The process described in the book actually occurs at different levels, and according to variable criteria. Thus, it can easily be said that California is divided between a democratic peaceful coast and a republican hinterland, but each county also has its own divisions, as well as each city, even each district. The book alternately passes from one to the other, thus transforming an attractive intuition into a scientific approximation. The authors also take the phenomenon of ideological polarization as an indisputable fact, without taking into account the debate which animates political science on this point. References to Morris Fiorina’s work, for example, are far too fast (p. 25-28). In his 2004 work, Culture war. The myth of a polarized america (written with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope), he showed how the phenomenon of polarization is characteristic of political elites, and not of the vast majority of Americans, for whom a consensus on essential questions is easily identifiable. THE Big spell Takes the opposite of this argument but without really confronting the thesis of Morris Fiorina.

This observation leads to a more general criticism of the work: can we speak of a phenomenon which “ torn “(Tear apart) Americans ? The journalistic exaggeration is outcrop in the choice of the subtitle. Especially if we take a little bit of historical perspective. America has always been a nation experiencing divisions between communities – the most obvious being racial. A work as known as that of Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1966), also defined the United States as a series of “ island communities “(Island Communities). At the end of XVIII^e A century, Benjamin Franklin was already complaining in his letters to hear more German than English in the streets of Philadelphia. The migratory wave of the end of XIX^e and the beginning of XX^e of course multiplied this phenomenon. From this point of view, the current evolution described in the Big spell appears very modest and seems far from fragmenting the United States. Publications of all orders on the theme of Disunited States are legion, but it is a safe bet that centrifugal forces, creators of consensus, are much stronger than the risk of fragmentation described in the Big spell.