Why Do Politicians Polarize Policymaking?

Anthony Fowler (0:00)

Do we have a tie in?

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita (0:01)

I have a tie on.

Anthony Fowler (0:02)

Okay.

Wiola Dziuda (0:02)

Good. I'm Wiola Dziuda.

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita (0:05)

I'm Ethan Bueno de Mesquita.

Anthony Fowler (0:06)

I'm Anthony Fowler, and this is Not Another Politics Podcast. So we talk a lot on this podcast about political polarization. We talk a bit about gridlock and how things just aren't getting done. And we assume that those two things are related, that one is causing the other. We say, look, there's all these good policies out there that our colleagues have done some cost-benefit analysis and shown us that we should be implementing the following policy on immigration or health care.

It's obvious that any sane, reasonable person would look at these things and agree this was the right policy. That's what they say.

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita (0:40)

Do they?

Anthony Fowler (0:43)

And yet these things aren't getting passed, and we usually assume that this is due to political polarization. They're just, well, there's a bunch of crazy extremists, and they don't agree, those extremists don't agree on anything. And the reason we can't get anything done is we just have too many extremists who just don't agree on anything. But I think that that story probably misses an important feature of our politics, which is there probably are a bunch of things that if you got Chuck Schumer and John Thune in the room together, they would actually agree that they could probably improve our immigration policy. And nevertheless, they're not doing it, so why aren't they doing it? Maybe it does have to do with electoral considerations or some other complicated dynamics. Maybe there's some reason why, even though they would agree that there's some better policy to implement today, they're still not doing it.

And so why might that be? Ethan Bueno de Mesquita and Wiola Dziuda, the two of them have written a paper on exactly this topic, so I'm excited to talk to them about it.

Wiola Dziuda (1:37)

Thank you for having us on your podcast.

Anthony Fowler (1:40)

So tell me about your paper.

It's called Partisan Traps. It's a theoretical paper, so there's not going to be... It's just a word. It's a real paper.

Wiola Dziuda (1:50)

So the motivation for the podcast came from, I think, thinking like the economies that you mentioned in your introduction, in a sense like having the sense that there is a lot of kind of policies that could be implemented, that reasonable people should agree are, you know, welfare improving or well-being improving, and yet we hear politicians all the time disparaging the proposals of the other side and rarely agreeing on any reforms. And the first time I think this thought entered our mind of trying to think about it more carefully was when there was actually the health care reform by Barack Obama.

Barack Obama proposed a policy that, you know, we know that has been proposed in some similar form before by Mitt Romney. So it seemed like a policy that most of the people should agree. Maybe, you know, there were like some things to change on the margins, but it seemed like a policy that most of the legislators should agree is an improvement upon the current status quo. And yet Republicans came out extremely strongly against this policy.

And I couldn't shake this feeling that they do like this policy. They must like it. They like it when Romney implemented. But yet they say it's a partisan power grab. It's just a transfer of resources and ideas from the right to the left. And we should vehemently oppose it. So then there was this question like, do they really oppose it? Do we really think that this is a horrible idea? Or is there some reason why they are trying to convince the voters that politics is about zero sum games? OK, one side wins, the other side loses. There's really nothing that we can do that's going to increase the well-being of the majority of the voters.

Anthony Fowler (3:32)

OK, let's talk about the key ingredients of the model. We probably should come back and talk about the Affordable Care Act and whether you think this model explains what's going on in that case. I'm sure a lot of people do say that they disagree with a bunch of key tenets of the Affordable Care Act. Maybe that's just, you know, maybe they're just saying that.

And we can go back and talk about the details of that particular case. But what are the core elements of the model that lead to this kind of counterintuitive result that there are all these good policies that aren't getting passed for political reasons? So we have ideology, we have left-right ideology, and that there's a left party and there's a right party. And the voters know where they stand. And the voters are either left or right, basically. So there's, you know, so there's...