I am pleased to welcome Nick Stephanopoulos to the ELB Book Corner, writing about his new book, Aligning Election Law. This is the second of five posts:
In yesterday’s post about my new book, “Aligning Election Law,” I explicated the concept of alignment. Today I’ll switch from democratic theory to empirical political science and review what we know about the extent of alignment in modern American politics. The news, in short, isn’t good. At every level of government, policy, representational, and partisan misalignment are distressingly common. Moreover, the beneficiaries of misalignment are far from random. They include proponents of the status quo, the rich, and the ideologically extreme. This dismal record is why I speak in the book of “misaligned America.”
Starting with policy alignment, the definitive work (at the federal level) is Martin Gilens’s book, Affluence and Influence. Gilens compiles roughly two thousand survey questions from 1981 to 2006, all asking respondents if they supported or opposed a specific change in federal policy. He then determines if each change was, in fact, implemented during the four years after the date of the poll. According to this dataset, when a majority of respondents backed a given policy—either the status quo or an alternative to it—the majority’s preference was realized over the next four years about 54 percent of the time. This is quite a low rate of majoritarian alignment. Barely more often than a coin flip, from the 1980s to the 2000s, did federal policy align with the median respondent’s views.
At the state level, Devin Caughey and Christopher Warshaw are the authors of the most comprehensive work on state policy alignment. Caughey and Warshaw analyze dozens of issues and hundreds of surveys from 1935 to 2020. They also compute both collective policy alignment (the share of respondents who agree with a given policy outcome) and majoritarian policy alignment (whether a policy outcome is congruent with the median respondent’s preference). With respect to collective policy alignment, they show that, on average, state policy matches the views of 55 percent of respondents. With respect to majoritarian policy alignment, the average figure is slightly higher: a 59 percent rate of congruence with the median respondent’s preference. These results are broadly similar to Gilens’s findings at the federal level: On the whole, state policy alignment is about the same—about as poor—as federal policy alignment.
With whose preferences are policies aligned when they’re noncongruent with the views of the general public? One answer is people who favor the status quo. In Gilens’s dataset, a popular majority’s desire for federal policy change is realized within four years at a rate of just 39 percent. In contrast, when a popular majority wants federal policy to stay the same, it prevails at a rate of 75 percent. Another group that benefits from policy misalignment in its favor is the one that accounts for the title of Gilens’s book, Affluence and Influence. In the book, Gilens demonstrates that, when the preferences of middle-income and high-income respondents diverge by at least ten percentage points, the probability of federal policy change is highly responsive to the views of the wealthy. On the other hand, this probability is entirely nonresponsive to the views of the middle class—despite their much greater number.
A last form of policy misalignment has been documented only at the state level. Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips show that, in sum, state policies are more congruent with the preferences of ideologically extreme respondents—conservative and liberal—than with those of ideological moderates. This pattern is attributable to the polarization of state policy. Across the roughly forty issues that Lax and Phillips examine, state publics generally favor the liberal policy outcome in fifteen to twenty-five cases. Yet in a majority of states, there are actually fewer than fifteen, or more than twenty-five, liberal policy results. “[B]lue states tend to go ‘too far’ in adopting liberal policies and the red states go ‘too far’ in the other direction.”
Turning to representational alignment, scholars including Joseph Bafumi and Michael Herron, Michael Barber, Seth Hill and Chris Tausanovitch, and Boris Shor have calculated ideal points—overall ideological positions—for voters and members of Congress on the same scale. This literature finds that the ideal points of representatives and senators are sharply bimodal. Almost all members of Congress are liberals or conservatives while very few are moderates. The literature further finds that voters’ ideal points could hardly be more different. In stark contrast to members of Congress, most voters are moderates while smaller fractions are liberals or conservatives. The space between the polarized ideological distribution of members of Congress and the more normal ideological distribution of voters, then, represents the extent of collective representational misalignment. The sheer size of that space reveals just how misaligned Congress collectively is with the preferences of the American public.
This picture of extreme politicians and more moderate voters recurs at the state legislative level. Raymond La Raja and Brian Schaffner compile the estimated ideologies of state legislators and voters from Catalist, a leading voter file vendor. Again, most state legislators are liberals (if they’re Democrats) or conservatives (if they’re Republicans). And again, the ideological distribution of voters is very different: a bell curve with its peak close to the center of the ideological distribution. Collective representational misalignment is therefore almost as severe for state legislatures as for Congress. At both levels, voters at the ideological fringes are overrepresented while voters in the ideological middle experience inferior representation.
This discussion should make clear one group whose members enjoy highly congruent representation: voters at the ideological fringes. In modern American politics, Democratic officeholders take more liberal stances than do most of their constituents, while Republican politicians hold more conservative positions. This is bad news for most voters, who are ideologically moderate yet consigned to liberal or conservative representation depending on officeholders’ party affiliations. But it’s a godsend for the smaller fractions of voters who are themselves staunch liberals or conservatives. As long as their preferred party is in power, the extreme representation they get is the extreme representation they want.
Who are these voters at the ideological fringes in whose favor politicians’ policy stances are so skewed? Among their ranks they count most campaign donors. Campaign donors, the small group of Americans who give money to candidates for political office, have a highly polarized ideological distribution. However their ideal points are calculated, most donors are liberals or conservatives while very few are moderates. This pattern looks nothing like the more normal ideological distribution of the entire American public. But it’s virtually identical to the polarization of elected officials. Of the array of scholars to make this point, Barber shares the most arresting results. Democratic (or Republican) senators are more liberal (or conservative) than both the median voter in their state and the median voter from their party. But the ideal points of senators are almost exactly the same as those of their median donors. The distribution of donor-senator representational alignment peaks at zero—that is, no ideological gap at all.
The last stop on our tour is partisan alignment: the fit between officeholders’ party affiliations and their constituents’ partisan preferences. To evaluate collective partisan alignment, I use the efficiency gap: a measure of the partisan bias of district plans. I consider both the absolute and the net efficiency gap. The absolute efficiency gap is the absolute value of the metric. It indicates the size of a legislative chamber’s partisan bias but not its partisan direction. For the U.S. House, the trend of the absolute efficiency gap is roughly U-shaped. The chamber’s partisan skew was relatively large in the 1970s and 1980s, indicating substantial collective partisan misalignment. The chamber’s absolute efficiency gap then shrank in the 1990s and remained small through the 2000s. Over the last decade, the U.S. House’s partisan skew has grown again, albeit not to the size of the 1970s and 1980s.
The net efficiency gap, in turn, is the raw, unadjusted value of the efficiency gap. It tells us which party benefits from a legislative chamber’s partisan bias (and to what extent). In the U.S. House, Democrats enjoyed a steady and significant advantage in how efficiently their votes translated into seats in the 1970s and 1980s. This Democratic edge then evaporated in the 1990s, leaving Republicans in a slightly superior position. Since about 2000, the net efficiency gap has gradually moved further in a Republican direction, reaching pro-Republican levels in the 2010s comparable to the pro-Democratic scores of the 1970s and 1980s.
Finally, majoritarian partisan alignment is a simpler concept than collective partisan alignment. Majoritarian partisan alignment exists in a legislative chamber when the party favored by the median voter is also the party to which the median legislator belongs. There’s majoritarian partisan misalignment, on the other hand, when the party that earns the most votes fails to win the most seats as well. Political scientists sometimes call this scenario a “manufactured majority”—a majority made possible by how votes happen to be converted into seats.
In the U.S. House, there have been three cases of majoritarian partisan misalignment over the last half-century, all benefiting Republicans. In 1998, 2000, and 2012, Democratic candidates received 50.1 percent, 50.1 percent, and 51.2 percent of the nationwide two-party vote, respectively. Yet in those elections, Democrats obtained 49.0 percent, 48.8 percent, and 46.2 percent of U.S. House seats, respectively. In the U.S. Senate, there have been eleven instances of majoritarian partisan misalignment since 1980, again all in Republicans’ favor. In 1980, 1982, 1984, 1994, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2014, 2016, and 2018, Democratic candidates received more than fifty percent of the nationwide two-party vote over the three elections that shaped the chamber’s composition. After each of those elections, though, Republicans controlled the U.S. Senate. Only once since 1980, in 1998, did Republicans win a U.S. Senate majority after also earning a majority of the nationwide two-party vote over the three determinative elections.