Party in the Electorate II

Grossmann & Hopkins on asymmetry:

The Republican Party is best viewed as the agent of an ideological movement whose members are united by a common devotion to the principle of limited government. Conservatives maintain an innate skepticism about—or opposition to—the use of government action to address social problems and tend to evaluate candidates and policies on the basis of ideological congeniality.

One reason is the impact of books and magazines.  Lee Edwards  writes of a 1965 meeting with Reagan:

 While he and Nancy were in the kitchen, we sat in the library den. Opposite us were several large bookcases filled with books. I got up and began examining the titles.  They were, almost without exception, works of history, economics, and politics, including such conservative classics as F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Whittaker Chambers's Witness and Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson.  There was also a book I had never read: The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, a nineteenth-century free-market economist.  I was stunned. I had never read Bastiat.  I opened several books -- they wer dog-eared and underlined.

Peggy Noonan:

I started reading NR, and it sang to me. They saw it the way I was seeing it: America is essentially good, the war is being fought for serious and valid reasons, the answer to every social ill is not necessarily a social program, when you let a government get too big you threaten your own liberties—-—and God is real as a rock. I was moved, and more. It assuaged a kind of loneliness. Later I found that half the people in the Reagan administration had as their first conservative friend that little magazine.

Back to Grossman and Hopkins:

In contrast, the Democratic Party is properly understood as a coalition of social groups whose interests are served by various forms of government activity. Most Democrats are committed less to the abstract cause of liberalism than to specific policies designed to benefit particular groups. Democratic-aligned constituencies make concrete programmatic demands on their representatives and, if the alternative is inaction, are often willing to compromise in order to win partial achievement of their objectives. Unlike the Republican Party, Democrats lack a powerful internal movement designed to impose ideological discipline on elected officials, which gives Democratic officeholders more freedom to maneuver pragmatically but also denies the party a common philosophy to direct its actions and a common cause around which to mobilize its supporters

• "Specifically liberal and generally conservative" 
• Group identity
• Activists and donors -- Are Democrats moving?
• In Congress  CQ Magazine, (More later in the course)

Growing Ideological Consistency

Polarization and Issues

Press Freedom

Polarization and Facts

Different News Sources

Party and belief: climate change

Party and belief thinking Trump won the popular vote



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Aversive Partisanship

Thomas Edsall: "Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as “downright evil.” In real numbers, this suggests that 48.8 million voters out of the 136.7 million who cast ballots in 2016 believe that members of opposition party are in league with the devil."

More data:

Self-Segregation