Tag Archives: Democrats

We Should Expect Divided Government For a Long Time

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Back in July, I wrote about the unrepresentative nature of the House of Representatives:

The House doesn’t represent the will of the people, because small states are over-represented (some congressional districts are nearly twice as large as others) and recent gerrymandering results in more Republicans being elected than Democrats, even though Democrats get more votes.

What I should have said is that some small states are over-represented and others are under-represented. For example, Rhode Island’s two members of Congress each represent only 525,000 people. Wyoming’s single member represents about 580,000. Yet Delaware‘s one member of Congress represents 925,000 and Montana‘s represents more than one million.

That might be a wash in political terms, because some small states lean left and some lean right. Unfortunately, of the 12 states that have no more than two representatives in Congress, eight lean right and only 4 lean left.

In addition, we shouldn’t forget the District of Columbia, which has more people than Vermont and Wyoming, definitely leans left and isn’t properly represented in Congress at all (they don’t have a senator and their representative gets to talk but not vote). This all adds up to an advantage for the Republicans.

In that post, I also said that gerrymandering resulted in more Republicans being elected to the House in 2012 than Democrats, even though Democrats got more votes. I was right about the numbers: the Republicans received only 47.6% of the total House vote, but ended up with 51.7% of the seats, which resulted in the Republicans having almost total control of the House of Representatives, since the House is run more efficiently (i.e. less democratically) than the Senate.

It might be the case, however, that gerrymandering doesn’t explain the Republicans’ success. That’s not to say the Republicans haven’t done their best to draw Congressional district boundaries to their advantage. They clearly did so the last time they got the chance and did it with more dedication than the Democrats.

Nevertheless, a recent study suggests that the Republicans have a natural advantage in House races. The reason could be that Democrats have gerrymandered themselves by tending to live in big cities, college towns and old manufacturing centers. That’s how gerrymandering works. You try to clump together people who vote for your opponents in as few districts as possible. This creates a few extremely safe seats for your opponents (ideally, they’d get 100% of the vote in a few districts), and a bunch of relatively safe seats for your side. It’s basically voter segregation or ghettoization. By living close together in places like Atlanta, Ann Arbor and Toledo, Democratic voters appear to have put themselves at a natural geographical disadvantage in House races.

The people who did the study claim to have tried out thousands of different district boundaries in 49 states (no Alaska? no Rhode Island?). The results were not encouraging for Democrats or opponents of gerrymandering:

In the vast majority of states, our nonpartisan simulations produced Republican seat shares that were not much different from the actual numbers in the last election. This was true even in some states, like Indiana and Missouri, with heavy Republican influence over redistricting.

It might be possible to counteract this Republican advantage by creating lots of districts that radiate out from the centers of towns and cities and would include a nice mix of urban, suburban and rural voters. The authors of the study seem to discount this possibility. At any rate, their point is that by living in relatively close quarters, Democrats are at a natural disadvantage when it comes to electing members of the House of Representatives.

A reasonable conclusion to draw from all of this is that Congress is even less representative than it seems to be. The Senate was explicitly designed to favor the interests of lightly-populated states, which now tend to vote Republican, while the House exhibits some favoritism toward small states, but more importantly is gerrymandered, whether on purpose or by simple geography, to favor Republicans as well.

The good news is that Democratic presidential candidates may continue to do relatively well, since most people pay at least some attention to politics during presidential elections and most people agree with Democratic policies (progressive taxation, more social spending, less military spending). Democrats who run for President will do well, that is, until they actually have to govern. Then they’ll have to deal with too many Republicans in Congress.

It’s the Austerity and Lack of Trust

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The chart below shows government spending after our last four recessions (that’s total federal, state and local spending, corrected for inflation, with the numbers at the bottom representing yearly quarters after the recessions).

After three recessions, government spending went up. After the most recent recession, it’s gone down:

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It makes sense for families to cut spending if they run into economic difficulty, but it makes no sense for the government to do the same. In situations like we’re in now, the government has to counteract the natural tendency of families and businesses to cut back when economic times are hard. Common sense and economic theory tell us the government should spend more after a recession in order to help the economy recover, even if that means increasing government debt until things get better. Yet we’ve been following the opposite policy the past few years. The result has been a relatively weak recovery that has left too many Americans unemployed and underemployed.

Why have we acted so stupidly? The obvious answer is that there were Republicans in the White House after those earlier recessions. Now there’s a Democrat. That’s why Republicans in Congress supported government spending after the earlier recessions, but have vigorously opposed it this time. (After all, Republicans love certain kinds of government spending, despite what they claim.) Hypocrisy, foolishness, the desire to recapture the White House, combined with the failure of Democrats to make the case for more stimulus. It’s all those things and more. 

The chart is from “How Austerity Wrecked the American Economy” at Mother Jones. The author updates the story here.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman sees a connection between the declining acceptance of evolution among Republicans and their rejection of stimulus spending: in order to be a good Republican these days, you have to deny climate change, evolution and modern economics.

Another economist who has repeatedly pointed out the stupidity of what we’ve been doing is Joseph Stiglitz. In a New York Times article called “In No One We Trust”, he explains how we’re losing trust in each other and our institutions as inequality increases. The article is especially interesting when he shows how a lack of trust and an excess of bad behavior got us into the economic mess we’re still trying to get out of:

Trust is becoming yet another casualty of our country’s staggering inequality: As the gap between Americans widens, the bonds that hold society together weaken. So, too, as more and more people lose faith in a system that seems inexorably stacked against them, and the 1 percent ascend to ever more distant heights, this vital element of our institutions and our way of life is eroding….

The banking industry is only one example of what amounts to a broad agenda, promoted by some politicians and theoreticians on the right, to undermine the role of trust in our economy. This movement promotes policies based on the view that trust should never be relied on as motivation, for any kind of behavior, in any context. Incentives, in this scheme, are all that matter.

One Reason Our Democracy Is In Trouble

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A recent paper by three political scientists argues that American voters don’t nicely divide between liberals and conservatives. There are also populists and libertarians. In order to understand the American electorate, therefore, we need two dimensions, not one. This observation isn’t new, but it’s worth keeping in mind when thinking about our dysfunctional political system.

Instead of the standard left/right dimension, we need a left/right social dimension and a left/right economic dimension. Polling data indicates that the electorate is rather evenly distributed between four ideological tendencies:

04edsall-chart-popup

At the lower left, liberals are liberal on both social and economic issues. That’s the official Democratic party position. At the upper right, conservatives are conservative on both social and economic issues. That’s the official Republican position (although “conservative” is a misnomer for today’s Republican Party).

Meanwhile, populists are liberal on economic issues and conservative on social issues, while libertarians are the opposite of populists, being conservative on economic issues and liberal on social ones.

On a social issue like gay marriage, for example, liberals and libertarians tend to be in favor of it. I mean, who cares if gay people get married? Well, populists (say, a truck driver who belongs to the Teamsters) and the conservatives at the Republican National Committee aren’t happy about it.

On an economic issue like the minimum wage, however, liberals and populists like the idea that people with jobs should have a relatively decent standard of living. Conservatives and libertarians, on the other hand, think it’s wrong to force business owners to pay their employees an artificially high wage.

The authors of the article identify a fifth group, the moderates in the middle, whose ideology isn’t especially liberal or conservative. They represent some of the infamous “swing” voters who don’t know who to vote for (Obama, Romney, who can decide?).

What the diagram shows, however, is that the populists and libertarians will also tend to swing between the two major parties, since their views don’t match up nicely with either the liberal/liberal Democratic candidates or the conservative/conservative Republican ones.

It may also be the case that the moderates, populists and libertarians will tend to avoid voting altogether, since the major candidates don’t fully represent their views.

Would it be better if there were four major parties instead of two? That might result in more people voting, which is supposedly a good thing in a democracy. But that would seem to require making our political system more representative, for example, by moving away from winner-take-all and allowing minority parties to gain more power. The authors of the paper don’t expect much to change any time soon:

There is no great mystery as to why American political parties can’t get beyond the left-right divide. Parties are by nature risk-adverse organizations … tightly moored to the status quo. Only under the most extreme circumstances—for parties, that means repeated losses at the polls—do they adopt changes in their electoral strategy. Thus, as long as both parties can plausibly convince themselves that their ideological appeals are not responsible for their electoral defeats, they will avoid making any fundamental changes in their basic strategies.

At the same time, … neither Republicans nor Democrats will be able cultivate a majority by only focusing on their core ideological supporters. There are simply not enough additional conservative and liberal votes to be harvested to produce an electoral majority. So, for the time being, both parties are caught in fundamental dilemma—they lack the incentive to move beyond their ideological anchors and yet they cannot become a majority party by becoming more closely tied to these anchors. They are thus set adrift in a sea of future uncertainty.

I read about this paper in an article in the New York Times. The author of the Times article is mainly interested in the idea of a middle-of-the-road third party. I think a middle-of-the-road third party might satisfy fewer people than the two we already have.

Now That That’s (Almost) Over

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(until the next time…)

Selected Reading On The Mess We’re In

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Historian Sean Wilentz makes a forceful argument in favor of Obama invoking the 14th Amendment to protect the world’s economy:

… the president would have done his constitutional duty, saved the country and undoubtedly earned the gratitude of a relieved people. Then the people would find the opportunity to punish those who vandalized the Constitution and brought the country to the brink of ruin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/opinion/obamas-options.html?pagewanted=2&hp

The New York Times editorial board is justifiably outraged that many people living in Republican-run states will still lack health insurance next year — they’ll earn too little to be covered by the Affordable Care Act and too much to be covered by Medicaid:

Their plight is a result of the Supreme Court’s decision last year that struck down the reform law’s mandatory expansion of Medicaid and made expansion optional. Every state in the Deep South except Arkansas has rejected expansion, as have Republican-led states elsewhere, [although] there is no provision in the ACA to provide health insurance subsidies for anyone below the poverty line … those people are supposed to be covered by Medicaid… Eight million Americans who are impoverished and uninsured will be ineligible for help of either kind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/opinion/a-population-betrayed.html?ref=opinion

Of course, Congress could easily fix this problem, but that would require You Know Who to cooperate.

At Jacobin, Shawn Gude writes about the fundamental tension between capitalism and democracy, in the context of living-wage legislation in the District of Columbia:

The controversy throws into sharp relief one of our era’s great unspoken truths: Capitalist democracy, if not an oxymoron, is less a placid pairing than an acrimonious amalgamation. The marriage that Francis Fukuyama famously pronounced eternal is in fact a union of opposites. Inherent to capitalism is inequality, fundamental to democracy is equality. Class stratification, the lifeblood of capitalism, leaves democracy comatose. The economic “base,” to put it in classical Marxian terms, actively undermines the purported values of the political superstructure.

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/08/capitalism-vs-democracy/

And finally, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that we can undo the decisions that got us into this mess:

We have become the advanced country with the highest level of inequality, with the greatest divide between the rich and the poor… The central message of my book, The Price of Inequality, is that all of us, rich and poor, are footing the bill for this yawning gap. And that this inequality is not inevitable. It is not … like the weather, something that just happens to us. It is not the result of the laws of nature or the laws of economics. Rather, it is something that we create, by our policies, by what we do.  

We created this inequality—chose it, really—with laws that weakened unions, that eroded our minimum wage to the lowest level, in real terms, since the 1950s, with laws that allowed CEO’s to take a bigger slice of the corporate pie, bankruptcy laws that put Wall Street’s toxic innovations ahead of workers. We made it nearly impossible for student debt to be forgiven. We underinvested in education. We taxed gamblers in the stock market at lower rates than workers, and encouraged investment overseas rather than at home.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/joe-stiglitz-people-who-break-rules-have-raked-huge-profits-and-wealth-and-its-sickening-our

Meanwhile, the Swiss are voting on whether to guarantee everybody a minimum monthly income of $2500 francs ($2800 dollars). They’re also voting on a proposal to limit executive pay to no more than 12 times what the company’s lowest-paid workers earn. Who knew that the businesslike, orderly Swiss were a bunch of commies? Or maybe they’re just fed up with rising inequality, even in Switzerland.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/04/us-swiss-pay-idUSBRE9930O620131004