Everything is broken and nothing matters anymore

How polarization and the US Senate killed hope for accountability in Washington

America’s political system is broken.

Specifically, our various methods for holding politicians to account have been completely upended by partisan polarization and an explosion in the political biases and malapportionment of the United States Senate.

This might sound like a counterintuitive take given that the president was impeached less than 24 hours ago. But the relevant question is not whether the majority was heard, the question is whether their voices will ultimately matter. Will the Senate convict the president? Will it even hold a fair trial? Both look increasingly unlikely.

Join me in discussing the theory of electoral accountability as a motivator for political action, and how the relationship has recently broken down. (And please accept this essay as a substitute for yet another hot take on impeachment polling.)

Polarization harms electoral accountability

First, allow me to diverge from the conventional wisdom on partisan polarization, for no germane reason, but rather to state something interesting. I believe that the polarization of issue positions by party can actually be helpful to voters. It allows the parties and their related interest groups to send clear signals about what they support and better equips low-information voters to make “informed” decisions, as party labels become a more informative and encompassing heuristic.

Now, let me rejoin the chorus of academics arguing that political polarization is also obviously bad in a few ways. It drives a wedge between voters who belong to different parties and social groups, decreasing compromise and a shared understanding of issues and agendas. It enables cable networks to spoon-feed hyperbole and, often, misinformation to particular audiences, causing a divergence in the very political realities in which voters exist. It might even make political violence more common. Polarization causes the fabric of our society to stretch ever wider—and thinner—and as the various sides are pushed toward their poles.

However, I think we don’t discuss enough how polarization also makes electoral accountability tougher. Because politicians can count on the support of roughly all of the voters who are loyal to their party, politicians who live in “safe” seats face almost no motivation to stray from the party line. This dynamic is asymmetric, I think; it gives more license to the minority party than the majority to stray from the will of the people, as the minority occupies fewer competitive seats. As Jonathan Bernstein wrote for Bloomberg this week, that means Republicans fear fewer consequences for wrongdoing, at least for today:

Because Democrats won big in the 2018 midterm elections, there just aren’t that many Republicans in competitive districts. So if we expect district opinion to be a major factor in how members vote, especially on a high-profile measure such as impeachment, we’d expect the bulk of potential defections to be on the Democratic side.

If politicians aren’t paying attention to the opinions in their district, what are they looking to in determining whether their actions are “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong” (likely in the electoral context)? Bernstein suggests an answer:

Lawmakers may have accepted the idea that what matters most to their re-elections is the president’s popularity, rather than district opinion of their own actions. In other words, they may be betting that House elections have become so nationalized that it doesn’t really matter what they do. If that’s the case, then party-line votes may be designed to prop up (for Republicans) or bring down (for Democrats) the president’s approval ratings.

Well, given the stability in the president’s approval ratings, that’s prettying terrifying to hear if you believe in the delegate model of legislative representation, in which representative should do what the people tell them to do.

“But Elliott”, you may be objecting, “this isn’t a problem so long as a majority of the people control the methods that hold politicians accountable”. Yeah, that could be right—but they don’t always do so!

The Senate makes this worse

The idea that the majority should control the government is, like, so totally 2019 y’all. Too bad for you, the government was created by elites who largely distrusted “the people” when it came to the matters of the state. The idea that a majority of voters ought to be in charge of everything the government does would have been one of the most unpopular opinions at the constitutional convention. That’s “tyranny of the majority”, of course! The Founders favored safeguards that would slow progress and ensure that the electoral minority was at least consulted in legislative matters.

That might be a good idea in theory (emphasis on “might”), but the implementation—the United States Senate—has not stood the test of time. (Please allow me to make my spiel about why the Senate is bad, and then I’ll connect the thoughts and make this relevant to our discussion. OK, a bit of history here…)

When the Senate was created, the largest state in the union (Virginia) was “only” 9 times the size of the smallest (Delaware). Equalizing the representation of each state meant that Virginians got “just” 9 times a say in Senate votes than did Delawareans. I guess that’s not too bad, especially since the political majority and minority had some things they agreed on (slavery was not one of them).

However, two factors have made this disparity politically toxic: population growth and partisan polarization by population density. Today, a resident of Wyoming has 68 times the voting power of any given Californian. Surely, the founders did not have that in mind. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson dreamt that the fledgeling United States would grow to be primarily agricultural—his ideal style of living—and the country had just 2 million people in 1787. He could not have imagined that the Senate would have evolved into such an anti-democratic institution.

Malapportionment is bad prima facie, but the rise of partisanship and rural-urban polarization is what really makes the Senate anti-democratic and almost completely unable to provide political accountability. Because rural voters are more likely to be Republican, the Senate magnifies the say of (white, rural, conservative) Republican voters at the expense of those who live in more populous states (and are more likely to be non-white and vote Democratic.

The disproportionalities in representation magnify Republican attitudes on everything from health care to school funding to military spending. Further, it also biases the impeachment process against the will of the majority. As I wrote last week, a plurality of Americans—but not of states—want Donald Trump impeached. And that makes conviction less likely.

But polarization’s role in increasing party-line voting has not been confined to the US House. Senators from uncompetitive states face no electoral pressures to break from their party—on any issue. So not only is the Senate rigged against the majority party, but its disagreement with the majority is also harder and more stubborn than ever. If the chamber were representative of the attitudes of the country as a whole, impeachment should garner the votes of roughly 53% of senators. But the Senate is not representative of the majority, and there are few pressures to compromise, so impeachment advocates will be lucky to win the 42 votes for convicting the president that come from states were impeachment is net-positive.

So, what can be done?

First, abolish the Senate, or at least make it more proportional (via adding and/or collapsing states). The Founders would not have approved the institution as it operates today. It it is long past time for it to be reformed—or abolished.

The fix to partisan political polarization will be harder. Some reformers favor a change to the country’s electoral rules, such as implementing ranked-choice voting, that could increase the number of competitive parties and decrease vitriolic, partisan gridlock in Washington. I think that bringing back classified newspaper ads, thus shoring up funding for and readership of (local) media outlets, could also bring about non-electoral accountability. Prosecuting cable news outlets that spread misinformation could also help bring us closer.

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Editor’s note:

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—Elliott