From the Austin American-Statesman, Thursday, April 8, 2004 (Link expires 4/14/04):

People becoming more extreme versions of what they were before

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Thursday, April 8, 2004

Most Americans live in counties that haven’t changed their party preference in presidential elections in more than a generation. That political uniformity comes with a cost, according to social psychologists, as followers of the two parties look at the same set of facts and see two different worlds.

“You have people who are generally living in a Republican or Democratic county, and they are not going to hear both sides of the story,” said Robert Baron, a social psychologist at the University of Iowa. “So the discussion will be twisted and biased, emphasizing those things that support the dominant norm and disparaging or questioning the credibility of the things that contradict it.”

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice will answer questions today from the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and, if the recent past is any guide, both Republicans and Democrats will have completely one-sided reactions to what she has to say.

After Richard Clarke testified two weeks ago, Republicans and Democrats had entirely different views of the former White House counterterrorism chief’s criticism of the Bush administration: Seventy-six percent of Democrats sided with Clarke, according to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll; 83 percent of Republicans backed Bush.

The American system was set up to encourage wide-ranging debate, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein says. It was also designed so that “people in one community have an obligation to listen to others and do what’s in the interest of the nation.”

As the nation’s communities become more politically lopsided, however, “you get people who sometimes see their fellow citizens as confused or vicious, as not fully members of the same community, and that can make discussion and mutual understanding difficult,” Sunstein said. “I think we’ve seen some of that. Some communities think extremely unfair things about the other side.”

What’s going on, with the polar opposite reactions to Rice, Clarke and nearly every other issue that confronts a nation in a presidential election year?

A separation

The answer, in part, can be found in a dramatic demographic and political shift. For eight presidential elections, from 1948 to 1976, presidential elections at the local level on average grew more competitive.

Republican voters became more likely to encounter Democrats at the courthouse and in the express line at the grocery. Democratic presidential voters became more likely to have Republicans as neighbors or bowling league partners.

There were still counties filled with Republicans and communities of mostly Democrats, but the average county was growing more politically diverse, at least when it came to presidential voting.

After 1976, however, the political mixture began to separate, and for the next six presidential elections, Republicans and Democrats pulled apart.

By the time George W. Bush narrowly defeated Al Gore in 2000, the nation’s counties had grown more politically segregated than at any time since the end of World War II.

Meanwhile, those majorities are growing. Nearly seven out of every 10 voters live in counties where presidential elections are becoming less competitive, according to a study of U.S. election data by the Austin American-Statesman’s statistical consultant, Robert Cushing.

Does it matter that American voters are increasingly living in ideologically homogenous communities? The American-Statesman queried more than a dozen political scientists, social psychologists and political pollsters, and they all said, yes, it matters a lot.

Life of extremes

Like-minded people have a peculiar effect on each other. In groups, they become more extreme versions of what they were before. Conservative people, in groups, become more conservative. Liberals become more liberal.

In one experiment, according to social psychologist David Myers of Hope College in Holland, Mich., French college students prone to being critical of the United States were asked to discuss their complaints. After the talk, the group had become more critical of the United States. In another test, moderately pro-feminist American women became strongly pro-feminist after a discussion.

One of the latest experiments in what social psychologists call “group polarization” has been conducted by University of Texas business professor David Schkade and the University of Chicago’s Sunstein.

Schkade and Sunstein examined the decisions of three-judge panels in the U.S. Court of Appeals. It was a “natural experiment,” Schkade explained. Judges are political appointees, either Democrat or Republican. And the three-judge panels are picked randomly, so there is a constant mix of Republican and Democratic judges.

Schkade and Sunstein found what you would expect: Purely Democratic panels were more liberal than groups of three Republican judges.

For instance, in environmental cases, all-Republican panels sided with a company about three-quarters of the time. Before a Democratic panel, the company won only 25 percent of the time.

But what happens when the panels are mixed? Here, Sunstein and Schkade uncovered the power of group polarization.

“The very interesting thing we found is that an individual judge’s vote shifts in the direction of the average ideology of the other two judges,” Schkade explained.

A Democratic judge sitting with two Republicans voted more conservatively than she did when sitting on a panel with a Democratic majority. Republicans worked the same way, becoming more liberal on panels with two Democrats.

And when three Republican judges sat together, they all voted more conservatively than when any of the three sat on a mixed panel. Democrats worked the same way.

Federal judges are chosen for their ability to think critically, impartially. Yet even these men and women, people who have spent a lifetime weeding bias out of their thinking and writing, are affected by the power of the group.

An urge to be liked

The psychological forces found in the chambers of federal judges are also at work in communities.

“If you sit around wondering what you know about President Bush, well, if you live in a Republican place, you are likely to think of positive things, because you have heard them so frequently and recently,” Baron explained.

And if you live in a county dominated by Republicans, you are likely to hear new and different arguments in favor of the president, so you grow more confident in your decision as others corroborate your views, Baron said.

Groups also become more extreme, social scientists say, because of the most basic of human emotions: People want to be liked and accepted.

If your group is Republican, Baron said, “you want to make sure that nobody mistakes you for a Democrat. And one way to make sure you aren’t mistaken for one of those other people is to be slightly ahead of the pack in terms of your Republican-ness.”

Baron describes a subtle competition within groups, as individuals seek to gain favor by being slightly more Republican (or Democratic or Christian) than the group average, setting off a snowball of opinion that gradually moves the group to more extreme positions.

“It’s hard to be a moderate Republican or a moderate Democrat, in other words,” Baron said, “because you’re afraid that other people will call you, whatever. In racial terms, you would be called an Oreo, if you are black.”

These are the kind of social mechanisms that work in communities with strong majorities, according to Baron, Sunstein, Schkade and Myers. There haven’t been any large experiments or tests for group polarization in U.S. counties, but “if you have political (concentration) in geographic terms, then the prediction is that people are talking one to another and they’ll think a more extreme version of what they thought before,” Sunstein said.

In thousands of U.S. counties, that process has been at work over the past 30 years, as where we live has influenced what we think and how we vote.

ZIP code as politics

At one time, a person’s politics would reflect his class, race or occupation. All those factors still play roles in shaping an individual’s beliefs. More recently, however, a ZIP code has come to have political meaning.

You can see in South Austin bumper stickers designed and printed soon after the U.S. invasion of Iraq: 78704Peace. The idea came from a meeting of residents in a neighborhood that gave Ralph Nader more votes in 2000 than Bush.

Thirty years ago, regions and parties were more politically mixed.

“At one point in the past, it was true that Republicans and Democrats occupied rival turf,” University of Maryland political demographer James Gimpel said.

In the mid-1970s, the nation’s politics started to change. Parties turned more ideological. Democrats became more liberal. Republicans grew more conservative. And people noticed.

“Fifty years ago, it wasn’t so clear which way religious people went politically,” said Nathan Persily, a law professor and redistricting expert at the University of Pennsylvania. “To the degree that there is a Bible Belt, and there always was one, now the Bible Belt is affiliated with one of the major parties, namely the Republicans.”

As parties became more ideologically pure, regions that were home to people with strong beliefs gradually became affiliated with a single party. Hispanics turned to the Democratic Party, so immigrant centers became Democratic. Rural voters aligned with the Republican Party, so vast reaches in the country’s middle turned red on television maps. Single women affiliated with the Democratic party, so cities with large numbers of unmarried females trended blue.

In other words, the parties moved to the people.

At the same time, the extraordinary prosperity of the past generation allowed people to pick and choose among places to live. And people often chose to live with those who were like-minded.

“When we talk about choice, what we generally end up with is people self-segregating,” said Diana Mutz, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist. “It’s one of the main problems with choice. We choose to be with people similar to ourselves.”

Those choices weren’t overtly political, she said.

“When people make choices about where to live, they aren’t making it on the level of politics explicitly,” Mutz said. “But they are making it on the basis of things that correlate strongly with politics, and as a result, they end up with mainly like-minded others.”

In 78704, liberal writer Molly Ivins lives just a few blocks from liberal radio commentator Jim Hightower, and they both live just a few blocks more from neighbors who designed the 78704Peace bumper sticker.

Place aligned with ideology, which aligned with party. Like-minded people came to live in the same place, which made it more likely that the group would polarize. Party, place and people all began to agree, lined up like matchsticks in a box.

“There is an old idea that one thing that makes for a stable, well-functioning democracy is the presence of cross-cutting cleavages,” explained Erick Schickler, a Harvard University political scientist. “That is, your enemy on one issue may be your ally on another issue, and that makes for stability and keeps conflict more cordial and restrained.”

Both Clarke and Rice face a public that has fewer of those “cross-cutting cleavages” than a generation ago; people have fewer neighbors of a different political persuasion. And Congress is more ideological, less likely to compromise than at any time in the last 50 years.

The calls for nonpartisanship and unity on the Sept. 11 commission, meanwhile, echo an older way of handling public business, when party, ideology and place weren’t so neatly matched.

“That was America circa 1955,” Schickler said. “It’s not America in 2004.”

bbishop@statesman.com; 445-3634