Where Are All The Moderate Politicians?

When it comes to polarization, most people in American politics blame the voters. But much of the political science data suggests most voters are actually moderates. So, where are all the moderate politicians?

In a new book, Who Wants To Run?: How The Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization, Stanford political scientist Andrew Hall argues that the reason we don’t have more moderate politicians is actually quite simple…there just aren’t any incentives for them to run.

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Transcript

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm Wioletta Dziuda.

Anthony Fowler:

I'm Anthony Fowler.

Will Howell:

And I'm Will Howell, and this is Not Another Politics Podcast.

Will Howell:

All the talk in our politics is about polarization. It's about how we are at each other's throats. And a lot of that conversation has to do with where the electorate is at. And a thing that we've talked of a lot about in the show that we'll continue to talk about is that in fact, average voters are good deal more moderate than you would think if all you did was listen to mainstream media and what they have to say about voters.

Anthony Fowler:

And our producers given us a hard time on that, by the way. We keep saying that, we keep asserting that most voters out there are moderate. And so we are going to, at some point have an episode that is completely dedicated to that question.

Will Howell:

Exactly. We need to establish the point, but the polarization, as it operates among the mass electorate is one thing, there's also the polarization that decidedly does exist. When you look at elected officials, Republicans, and Democrats disagree with each other more today than arguably they ever have, when you look at elected officials in Congress and in state legislatures around the country.

Anthony Fowler:

The civil war was pretty bad, but...

Will Howell:

Yes, although not within Congress. During the civil war, we didn't have much Southern representation in Congress.

Anthony Fowler:

They ousted them, yes.

Will Howell:

But yes, inter-party disagreements within Congress are at historicized. There's kind of an open question about why that is. How did that come to be and why aren't there more moderates coming forward and running for office?

Wioletta Dziuda:

So the natural explanation that I hear over and over again in the media is that voters are just polarized. And given that voters are polarized, polarized candidates run, and the extremist candidate can gather enough support and make people excited to show up and vote for them. Doesn't make really sense, is it that voters are driving the polarization of the policy makers or is there perhaps some other mechanism that is responsible for that?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Anthony, you spoke to someone who actually has a book, who actually we've mentioned on this show many, many, many times who has a very interesting answer to this question.

Anthony Fowler:

I did. I spoke with Andy Hall, who's our good friend. He's a professor at Stanford. He wrote a book called Who Wants to Run, which is on exactly these questions. It's about whether or not moderate candidates really do better in elections or not. And if they do, why don't we see more moderates running? There's a lot of interesting stuff in the book and we had a really fun and interesting conversation.

Anthony Fowler:

We've talked about you a lot on the podcast. We've featured several of your papers and we've talked to several of your co-authors and you're a good friend and you're a colleague that we respect very much and we respect your opinion. And you've certainly your research and your views have influenced a lot of what we said on the podcast. So it's actually great. It's a long overdue to actually have you as a guest on the podcast. Thank you so much for doing this.

Andy Hall:

Long time listener, first time caller, Anthony, excited to be here.

Anthony Fowler:

So we are hoping to primarily talk to you about your book, Who Wants to Run? How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization. So the book is largely about political polarization, something that we think about a lot. We talk a lot about on the show, obviously, and you have a really interesting argument that's backed by a lot of interesting evidence that if you really wanted to address political polarization in the US, we should really think about and spend a lot of time trying to do something to change who actually runs for office. A lot of studies on polarization focus on the voters and voting behavior, or they focus on the incentives facing people who are already in office. Why should we instead re-shift our focus and think about who runs to begin with and changing the kind of person that runs?

Andy Hall:

It's harder than people think to get really important, meaningful shifts in ideological representation. Obviously politicians lie. Obviously they take positions opportunistically when they can, but you're not going to get a Bernie Sanders to wake up one day and turn into a Joe Biden or like some other moderate in the same way that you're not going to get Joe Manchin to wake up one day and turn into a Bernie Sanders or something like that. There are real constraints, I think, to what people will do when they're in office. And so if you look at lots of other research on how do we get ideological change in Congress or in legislatures in general, we tend to think a lot of it comes through replacement rather than through the adaptation of sitting members' positions. That actually has a bunch of implications for how we might think about polarization.

Andy Hall:

When you look in the data, you start to realize it's not just that incumbents are polarizing, all of the people who run for office look really polarized. And so you might be in a situation where voters actually want to support more moderate candidates, but they're just not getting the chance to. It's not that different from thinking in economics about supply and demand. And as V.O.Key put it, if only Rascals run for office, then voters are guaranteed to pick a rascal for office. And I think that some of the, I mean, obviously there's some truth to the fact that polarization has something to do with voters and all but I think there's also a really important part of it that's that voters are getting screwed by the choice that they're being given.

Anthony Fowler:

There's a ton of interesting empirical work in the book. A lot of it hinges on being able to correctly measure and classify politicians as relatively moderate versus relatively extreme. We have a lot of experience doing that for sitting politicians. We can look at their role call votes in Congress, for example, and say Bernie Sanders seems to be more extreme than Joe Manchin. How do we do that for electoral candidates?

Andy Hall:

Well, they all raise money. And that's really helpful because logically, while of course, a lot of stuff goes on with campaign finance, if I'm an incumbent who casts a lot of far right roll call votes, let's say, and I get money from a certain group of donors, it seems pretty reasonable to maybe those donors like far right ideological positions. And then to make the further leap, and this is the key idea in most of the literature, if I'm a candidate and I get money from those same donors who tended to give to far right incumbents, then it seems logical again, to suspect that's probably a more far right candidate than other candidates.

Anthony Fowler:

I mean, one claim that you want to make is that to the extent that there is high and rising polarization over time, at least not all of it is distributable to the voters. It's not the voters' fault that we're in this position. Why do we think that? What kinds of analysis can we do that help us figure out how much of it is the voter's fault?

Andy Hall:

It's tricky. There's two or three basic things I do. Certainly, none of them are perfect. So the first thing I do, let's look at everyone who ran, and what were their positions in every district for the past 30 years or whatever and let's ask the question when you calculate polarization in the legislature, as the difference in the ideological scores of the median member of each party, what does that look like for the actual incumbents we elected and what would it have counter factually look like if instead in every single election for the last 30 odd years, voters in each district elected the most moderate candidate in their race? When you do a simulation like that, you find something quite remarkable, which is that the amount of polarization in that hypothetical best case scenario for moderation is really, really high. It's almost as high as the level and the growth in polarization we observe with what actually happened in these elections. That suggests to us that there could be this really deep constraint that even if voters wanted to, they don't have a lot of opportunities to really reduce polarization through their vote choice.

Andy Hall:

The second part of the argument is then to look at, okay, what about these rare opportunities when someone more moderate really does run and is in a competitive race in a general election, well, what happens in those unusual cases? And in those cases, the more moderate candidates tend to do quite a lot better on average.

Andy Hall:

The third part of it, we need to find cases where more moderate people than usual ran or something like that. And that's actually really hard to do. What I do for that is I look at these big salary reforms in state legislatures. So state legislatures don't pay people very well in general. And so when you raise salaries a lot, you could really change the calculus. I mean, some of the reforms I look at are changes from literally $40,000 a year salaries to $80,000 a year salaries. What I show is on average, it seems like those reforms lead to a set of more moderate people running. And when more of those moderate people run, it seems like more of them win and the legislature be comes less polarized.

Anthony Fowler:

So there aren't a lot of moderates that do run, when they do run, they seem to do well. And so one idea is okay, why is it the case that moderates aren't running at high rates? And you noted that when you pay more, you get more moderates running. Why is that? Why would we expect that paying legislators more would induce more moderate? You might think that might just would make everybody want to run more, but why does that especially induce moderates relative to extremists?

Andy Hall:

Ideologically, more extreme people care a lot more in some sense about who serves them in office. And in particular, they really don't like when someone from the other party is in office, because they're ideologically very distant from that person. And that creates this force that makes a more extreme person, just on average, more fired up about this. And so when you raise salaries, you do raise that benefit for everyone. But the more extreme people were already more likely to run because they have this ideological loading that the more moderate people don't. That's the basic idea.

Anthony Fowler:

A relevant argument it seems you want to make is that it's not a very good job to be a politician. For the vast majority of us, it would be fairly unpleasant. I mean, as you start talking about solutions for political polarization, a lot of it just comes down to how can we make this a more appealing job for sensible, moderate people? How can we lower the cost of running? How can we increase the benefits of actually holding office?

Andy Hall:

My view is these costs have gone up and these benefits have gone down. And so I try to go systematically through them. As I said before, there's no way it them all together. So it's all an exercise in kind of subjective, qualitative judgment. But the main things I point to are people raise... They're not just raising more money, but they're raising more money from more donors over time, which suggests, and is consistent with anecdotes that they're spending more time doing it than they used to and they're certainly complaining about at it more. So that's a big cost that I think has gone up.

Andy Hall:

On the benefit side, of course, the real value of the salaries has gone down because they're not inflation adjusted. But probably much more importantly than that, they're not getting these opportunities inside the legislature to grow their career the way that they used to with the erosion of the seniority system, the fact that the party leadership is drafting the bills now. But I have no way to measure the full cost and the full benefits. And certainly other people have argued to me that they think it's gotten easier to run because technology has improved and so forth and I'm open to that argument. Lydon Johnson had to drive around the whole state of Texas in his old car, replacing the oil every like three day and stuff and that was really hard. And so maybe that's easier now.

Anthony Fowler:

Although I think they still do that. I think they still do a lot of driving.

Andy Hall:

The quality of the automobile is a lot higher than it used to be. So there are arguments to be made, but that's where I stick it out.

Anthony Fowler:

Let's just talk about salaries. Should we start considering what if we double the salaries of members of Congress? What can we say about that? Would that actually induce more moderate, sensible people to run?

Andy Hall:

One, I think in isolation, it probably wouldn't be effective. If we paid members of Congress a 1,000,000, we might really change who runs and we might not like what we see. It's sort of a weird policy lever to think about an isolation. But second of all, this is the more complex point that I think is really important is I think we're very much stuck in a really important and not very good trap in the US, especially at the federal level where people think their politicians are terrible. And as a result of that, they think it's crazy to pay their politicians more than they already do. And that in turn is almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I think it's fair to say we're in some kind of trap like that. So that's why I think salaries themselves, probably not that effective for Congress, but trying to escape this trap requires a bunch of thinking about how could we reward a whole different group of people that aren't our current sitting politicians so that new and different kinds of people wanted to run in the first place?

Anthony Fowler:

What do we have to say about how we might reform the campaign finance system in a way that would reduce polarization and make more people willing to run?

Andy Hall:

It could be really damaging system in the sense that it's a race to the bottom where if you know your opponent's doing it and you think it's good for your election outcome, you're both going to end up doing it essentially all of your waking hours because your opponent is. I don't think people should do no campaign fundraising. I think it's important. First of all, it's one way that we put up some attempt to filter for people who will work hard and get over hurdles that are put in front of them. But on the other hand, when you do it at this unconstrained level we're currently doing it, I think it does give these very bad incentives. So I think ideally we would in other race to the bottom type settings, we'd have some kind of regulation that said, you're not allowed to fundraise anymore than this and therefore you don't need to worry about your opponent doing it a bunch more than you because you're both bound to these rules. And if we could get people to somehow commit to only raising up to some certain amount, I think they have this other potential big advantage, which is wow, now I can run for office and I only have to fundraise this relatively small amount of the time.

Anthony Fowler:

Have you thought about ways we could reform our institutions for elected officials in ways that would make it a more desirable job? So for example if you change the committee system, if you change things about the institution that made it so that a new legislator could actually accomplish something, would that induce more moderates to run?

Andy Hall:

I think there's an ongoing conversation about legislator capacity that basically we need to return to this past era where members of Congress had more money for staff and they were more the center of policy making rather than the party as a whole and the party leadership in particular. When I have this chance to become a legislator and I'm going to get to craft a bunch of my own legislation based on help from my own expert staff and in part, as a result of that, as I get reelected, I'm going to climb through this pretty well defined seniority system and get increasing levels of prestige, and that's going to help me run for other offices or do something successful after I'm a politician and so forth, that's a much more compelling job offer than you're going to show up in this highly polarized legislature. You're going to get these memos from the speaker saying, you need to raise this much money if you want one of these committee positions. And by the way, if you get on this committee, you're just going to be doing whatever legislation I decide is important. That's just a much less compelling job, I think.

Anthony Fowler:

Are there other reforms or potential solutions that we haven't talked about yet that you think are worth mentioning?

Andy Hall:

Yeah. I think there's a perception gap, also. I think in a lot of way, people throw around this phrase "pandemic of misinformation." I think we're in pandemic of misinformation about a whole bunch of other stuff that no one's talking about. I think a lot of more moderate people have been just bombarded with New York Times and Vox explaining pieces about how everyone's so polarized. And a lot of it's not true. There's a lot of voters out there who are not that extreme. I think all of this rhetoric coming out of political science in the policy world that massively overstates how polarized Americans are, I think that's having its own effects on the decisions of people to run. And as a policy matter, I mean, correcting that misinformation I think could be quite powerful though I'm very open to testing that and discovering that it's not true. That's just a hypothesis of mine.

Anthony Fowler:

And I'll even go so far as to say that in some cases, these arguments are self-serving. In some cases you get people who themselves are extremist ideologues, who are trying to convince everyone else that the public is also full of extremist ideologues. And there for we should nominate my preferred candidate for office, or we should put forward my preferred policy proposal because it's at... And so there's this self-serving part of it, which is very frustrating. So it's a huge problem.

Andy Hall:

And the average American is not out there talking about politics. They're seeing and talking to people from the other side without even necessarily realizing it, because they're talking about the MMA fight that they saw on TV last night. And political scientists are going around thinking that everyone's doing what they're doing, which is talking about politics 24/7 and getting in these huge arguments. And the reality is most Americans hate talking about politics, don't want to argue about politics and don't.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, I suspect most, at least the kinds of most elites in people considering running for office don't appreciate just how valuable moderation is electorally. That's a hunch that I have and some of it is based on talking to these people and some of it is realizing the fact that they're themselves in a bit of a bubble. All the people they talk to are party insiders who... So yeah, so I think correcting some of those misperceptions I'm sure would have a big impact.

Andy Hall:

The thing in that vein that I'm most interested is this idea about turning out the base. And Dan Thompson and I have published this paper about how more extreme nominees turn out the base. And the really important thing that we found, which is consistent with theoretical arguments that have been made before is that be careful what you wish for when you nominate someone you think is going to turn out your base because they might turn out to turn out the other party's base even more. And we've seen that in... I mean, that's really, I think in a lot of ways, the story of 2020. Trump did turn out a group of Republican voters who don't normally vote and that was to his benefit, except he turned out way more super dissatisfied Democrats than he turned out his own base.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, there's a lot more to talk about. Okay, so one thing I think we should talk about, and I think one, I think fairly reasonable response to your book would be to say there's not a lot about primary elections in the book. You've shown us, I think pretty convincingly that in general elections voters do prefer more moderate candidates over more extreme candidates, but is it true that primaries are causing polarization? So one, do you have anything to say about that and two, do you have anything to say about how these kinds of patterns that you're talking about in your book have changed over time, even in recent years, even maybe the last couple years, since you've written your book?

Andy Hall:

At the time I wrote the book, I felt there was pretty strong evidence that in these house primaries, 99% of which receive no media coverage, the advantage to being more extreme is way smaller than people think. Second thing I would say is it could definitely be changing rapidly. And a reason to think it might have changed is of course Trump. A reason to think it might not have changed is just that the way the media covers these primaries is very misleading. They find the one example and then they claim that's happening in every primary. If tomorrow we woke up and a ton of really highly qualified, more modern people decided to enter primaries, the people who turn out to vote in primaries could change. The whole system could change in a really noticeable way that would be hard for us to predict. And so that I think is an open to question.

Anthony Fowler:

Okay. Thanks a lot, Andy. It's great to talk to you. Is there any other last minute things you want to say to our listeners? We'll have you back on, so this isn't your last chance.

Andy Hall:

Yeah, let's do the pandemic of misinformation, is our next podcast.

Anthony Fowler:

That sounds great.

Andy Hall:

This is really fun.

Anthony Fowler:

Thanks so much, Andy.

Andy Hall:

Thanks for having me.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So it seems to me that we do agree with a lot of the storytelling that Andy does and evidence that he shows us, what do we think are the weakest point, or is there anything that we would model differently or we would maybe find a different explanation for his findings?

Anthony Fowler:

Well, I mean, I'll throw a few. A reasonable concern and Andy does a lot of work to try to rule this out. He's forthcoming about it, but I think a reasonable concern about some of the initial findings that we talked about about moderate's doing better, what he finds is that when a party nominates a relatively moderate candidate, that the party does better in the general election. We don't know for sure from that evidence, that it's because of the candidate's moderation versus other things that happened to be correlated with ideological moderation. So if it were also the case that moderate candidates also just are just more competent people in general, maybe they have more business experience, maybe they... If that were the case, then we wouldn't know for sure if it's the fact that if it's just their competence or their experience that's causing people to support them, not their ideological moderation, per se.

Anthony Fowler:

Even if you wanted to get into the weeds, there's even a nitty gritty concern, which is that the way that he measures moderation comes from campaign contributions. And you might wonder if you're an especially gregarious person who's a really good fundraiser and you're good at raising money from lots of people, that means you raise more money, you might raise more money from a more diverse set of people. I think we actually talked about this exact issue when we discuss Brandeis' paper. I don't think this is likely what's really going on here and I think Andy does a good job of at least considering and ruling out this possibility. But I think he would acknowledge that the evidence doesn't tell you for sure that it's ideological moderation that's causing these candidates do better. We know that moderates are doing better. We think it probably is because of their ideological moderation, but it could be that moderate candidates also are just better and more competent on other dimensions and that's why they're doing better.

Will Howell:

Or that they have a different appetite for being in a spotlight. Our former student, who's now a teaching fellow here at the Chicago SUFU has this work in which he shows that moderates in Congress speak less in public forums in various ways and it's the extremists who are talking the most. That might be a function of strategic behavior within the legislature. It may instead be a function of types of people. If you are at the extremes, you get a certain benefit from appearing on TV that holding office is going to deliver for you.

Anthony Fowler:

And I think the policy implications would be more or less the same, which is whatever the reason, we know that they're less willing to serve in office than the extremists are and so we need to find some way to make the job itself more desirable or the cost of running lower.

Will Howell:

Where you would get a difference though, in terms of the policy intervention, is that let's say you passed a rule that said nobody who's running for Congress can appear on TV, or something like that. You take away those kinds of expressive benefits. So you say you no longer get to go to rallies or just the opposite. You increase those, then it would cut differently.

Anthony Fowler:

I like that idea. Should we play around with that possibility? What if...

Will Howell:

What if well this is what they do in courts?

Anthony Fowler:

I mean, we're really trading off things because of course we think there are good reasons. It's a good thing for democracy that there's lots of accountability and people know what's going on in Congress and people know what their member of Congress believes, but if we could somehow get the media to report on what they're doing in Congress and give voters information without turning AOC or Kyrsten Sinema or whoever it is into a minor celebrity where we're like we're following them around and caring a lot about what dress they're wearing or something like that, I think that would probably be a good thing for democracy for lots of reasons, but it would...

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah. But the examples that you just raised, actually, you tell me that whether you're in the spotlight or not is a little bit endogenous. So AOC is in the spotlight but do we really know what Sinema has been wearing for the last two weeks while being... The moderate people in Congress, they don't tend to be extremely visible, at least not in the sense that a leverage follower of politics is [crosstalk 00:23:49]-

Anthony Fowler:

Sometimes they get followed into the bathroom against their will. So that's-

Will Howell:

But... Yes.

Anthony Fowler:

So that's clearly a reason-

Wioletta Dziuda:

But that's...

Anthony Fowler:

... why you might not want to... Right? I mean...

Will Howell:

Yeah, that's a function of them being pivotal, that's their voice matter a ton, which I think is actually... I mean, it's something we should think about here, because when you think about whether or not to run for office, there are these considerations we've laid out. There is also all right, I'm going to spend all this time, am I actually going to win? Moderates are more likely to win. Am I more likely to be pivotal? Am I more likely to exercise influence? Or at the margin of what an infrastructure bills going to look like? And the answer there is yeah you are. We know all this stuff about Manchin and Sinema precisely because it's with them that all the action lies and whether or not this big bills going to pass.

Wioletta Dziuda:

And that's exactly why they're in the news. So they were not in the news because of what they tweeted and because of what they said until they became important for this particular bill.

Will Howell:

But those are two, and I mean, not being followed into the bathroom. But being influential would seem to weigh heavily in favor of moderates running. Like hey, if you're a moderate look, not only are you more likely to win, your votes are more likely to matter in that unmodeled legislative process. If these other factors are nonetheless depressing their willingness to run, they must weigh really heavily.

Will Howell:

When we think about an intervention that might cut directly against it... Where I thought you were going to go, Anthony, is to think about the debates that go on within the judiciary or within courts about whether or not to allow cameras in the courtroom. And the argument for doing so is about transparency, against doing so is because we want to maintain the integrity and dignity of a courtroom and avoid grand standing. And you could imagine that, well, if we put cameras all over the courthouse and had reality TV on Capitol Hill, what's that going to do? If you're a moderate, you say, "My God, I don't want anything to do with that." Our previous story about moderates as being of a certain kind of type is true and that what we should instead do is insulate legislators from the public gaze and that would make the work more attractive to precisely the people who are more likely to win and more likely to be influential.

Anthony Fowler:

Again, there's trade offs. It's worth saying, it's not obvious what you want. Because of the trade offs, we want information, we want accountability. In the Supreme court, what we have is audio recordings. And most people, most regular Americans don't just go listen to the audio recordings of oral arguments in the Supreme court. But presumably there are lots of journalists that do that and they write about interesting things that happened.

Anthony Fowler:

And so I do want to say something about you're right that the fact that moderates are more likely to win makes it all the more surprising that it's so hard to get them to run. I agree with that. It is worth pointing out that the fact that moderates are also more likely to be influential in office, that makes it all the more surprising as well, although that could also cut in different directions. I mean, given that Congress is so polarized and given that party leaders in Congress often have so much authority, very often moderates might feel like they don't have a lot of power at all, except in the rare scenario like we're seeing in the US Senate where there's exactly 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans and Joe Manchin, all of a sudden is quite pivotal for lots of important things that are happening in the Senate. But barring that pretty rare scenario, a moderate might just feel like they have very little influence in office because even their party leaders don't listen to them. Of course the other party doesn't want to listen to them either. They're just one vote out of many. They don't get important committee positions because they don't go along with the party leaders and so on.

Anthony Fowler:

So, I mean, you might want to think about what reforms might you enact to make it so that a moderate can be more influential in office, but given the current polarized system that we have with influential party leaders, I could imagine lots of moderates thinking, I don't want to bother. I'm not going to [crosstalk 00:27:30]-

Will Howell:

[crosstalk 00:27:32] I don't have influence. I may once have but no longer.

Will Howell:

Hey, if you're getting a lot out of the research that we discuss on this show, there's another University of Chicago Podcast Network show that you should check out. It's called Capitalisn't. Capitalisn't uses the latest economic thinking to zero in on the ways that capitalism is and more often than not, isn't working today. From the debate over how to distribute a vaccine to the morality of a wealth tax, capitalism clearly explains how capitalism can go wrong and what we can do about it. Listen to Capitalisn't, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Can I push back a little bit on something that it's sort of reasonably assume that people come with types? I am either moderate or a conservative and there's nothing I can do about it. I can see how that's probably true. Intrinsically, I have my type and I'm not going to change my preferences at a whim, but I can change how I present myself to the constituencies. And clearly Mitch McConnell or Bernie Sanders or AOC, there's no way for them to really change how they portray themselves because people would just believe that. But if you are a first time candidate, wouldn't it make sense, given all this data that we now have, wouldn't it make sense for you to try to pretend that you're moderate during the first time that you're running and then once you get in Congress, you unleash yourself. If you run because you're extremist and you want to be in the spotlight, knock yourself out, be in a spotlight. If you think you are more influential or if you really won't care about those extreme policies, go ahead and try to implement them.

Wioletta Dziuda:

It's seems to me that we should see a lot of these things happening at the beginning of the careers. And I wonder whether we do have any research on that or doctorally whether you think this is not happening.

Anthony Fowler:

My sense is, I mean, you're probably right that a has happened and I'm sure you could find rare cases, interesting anecdotes along those lines. My sense is that it's not very common. And if I had to explain why it's not very common, I mean, there's a few different explanations I would offer. One is even if you haven't previously held elected office before, there's still a lot of information about you. There are still ways to infer something about your positions, right? You've written op-eds before-

Wioletta Dziuda:

You've you were on the podcast.

Anthony Fowler:

... depending on where you worked before and what you did-

Wioletta Dziuda:

You were on the podcasts for two years.

Anthony Fowler:

... Exactly. Right, exactly. I mean, sure, how many people have lost their jobs because we went back and looked at their old heard their old podcast recording and we figured out what they really thought deep down?

Anthony Fowler:

So so there's that. There's still a lot of information about you. Two, I think another argument is you probably just can't help yourself. I'm guessing there's no way if your AOC, you can't pretend to be moderate for a whole year while you're running for Congress. You're you're true positions are going to come out one way or another.

Anthony Fowler:

And then the third possibility is also something that Andy and I talked about in the interview, which is that for a lot of these people, they might have very skew views about what the public actually wants and thinks. They might be the case that all of their friends are extremist people in the political world, and all the people they talk to are political fundraisers and party insiders and journalists. And so they actually have this very skew view they might actually be convinced that they're in touch with the general public, even though they're not. If I had to guess, I suspect there's some combination of all of those going on.

Will Howell:

I want to try a slightly different take on what might be going on it. It's got more than a passing resemblance to the stories we've been telling as far about why moderates aren't running, but it emphasizes slightly different factors. What if we think about moderates as being more pragmatically oriented? If that's true, then rising levels of dysfunction in government that is, it's not about party leaders exerting more influence and taking discretionary authority away from moderates, it's a story about just the inability to get much of anything done in Congress. That increasingly that's true for all kinds of reasons. To the extent that that's true, then people who are moderate look upon that scene and say, that's not for me. I'm going to there, what am I going to get done? Whereas extremists say either I don't care about getting anything done today because I'll have this platform on which to, again, derive all these reputational benefits or expressive benefits or to try to shift a conversation about say entitlements or climate change so that I'll get this extreme policy that I want 10 or 15 years out.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So it's interesting. So you're saying some sort of initial increase in polarization actually breeds polarization?

Will Howell:

Yeah. To the extent that the polarization is the cause of the dysfunction. But you could think about other factors as contributing as well for why Congress is just... It's a disaster as a policy making body.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I like the story, although I think the truth is that actually lots of things is still being done in Congress and there's still a lot that you can affect. Yes, it's increasingly maybe less and less, but on the other hand-

Will Howell:

It's all at the margin.

Wioletta Dziuda:

... All the stories that you said previously. How was it moderate? I am more likely to actually... And moderate policy makers actually more likely even in this dysfunctional Congress to get something that they like than an extremist. So, I can see the story and I actually like it a lot, but I can see how it could go the other way.

Anthony Fowler:

I'm more or less by the story too. I mean, I think it's interesting. And we had this debate on our podcast about the filibuster. And I essentially was saying, I was on the other side of this debate and saying, "I don't know, guys, I'm scared. If you get rid of the filibuster and you got all these extremists in Congress, look at all the crazy things that are going to pass." And your response was, "No, maybe you wouldn't have some many extremists if you didn't have a filibuster." And that's a risk but maybe we disagree about how really we are to take that risk or not.

Anthony Fowler:

But I certainly agree that if we could somehow change institutions and the dysfunction in Congress so that an individual member can do more, on the margin anyway, that should make a moderate more willing to run. That would pre-generate the prediction that we should get a lot more moderates running for governor, for example, than for Senate. And I think that is true. I think you do get relatively more moderate governors than you get senators. But nevertheless, you still get lots of extremist, crazy governors too. And so that's kind of the trade off that if you make each one of these people more powerful, still some of them are going to be extremists. So there's that trade off in that filibuster debate.

Will Howell:

But look, the broad story over the last 50 years in Congress is yes, rising levels of polarization. And so, two, I think there's a broad sense of rising levels of dysfunction to the extent that they get any thing major done, it's through reconciliation. And that as a way to attend to marginal policy changes that we need to do in light of learning about the failures of past policy or the possibilities of good new policy is, I mean, it's a disaster, it's a mess as a way to proceed. When we think about what does it mean to be a moderate, I think it's about, well, I'd like to do some good. I'd like to do some good at the margins, as I'm able to today with a very pragmatic orientation about what's possible in this moment, not playing either a long game or just screaming and hollering because you like it. That's what moderates are about. Congress is not, especially... I'm not sure it was ever especially well designed to attend to those kinds of sensibilities, but it's gotten worse.

Wioletta Dziuda:

In a sense you can think of Andy's theory as a theory of how it all got started. And I guess it would be nice to look a little bit into this question, not to go back in time and see how actually prioritization is sort of hard exercise, but how the changes in polarization over time also affected than the future desire of the model or inclination of the moderates to run and whether you can connect those two issues in a nice way.

Will Howell:

Yes. Like are we in this awful spiral.A little bit of polarization once it gets going, right?

Wioletta Dziuda:

You know how you have the pictures, this famous graph of polarization in the US Congress and then the price of butter now over time? And that way we can have the picture of the raising polarization and the decrease in the fraction of moderates running. And it'll be equally convincing probably. But we have a better story though, better theory.

Will Howell:

No, but this is a little bit different. No, no, no. I think you're onto something if I hear you right, Wioletta, which is not relating polarization to butter, it's to say, once you get, for some idiosyncratic reason, a little bit of polarization, that creates a set of dynamics wherein the attraction of the job for the moderate declines.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes.

Will Howell:

Which then leads to greater polarization, which then exacerbates the problem even more so. And so there's this internal logic to the expansion of the rising levels of polarization and why moderates are running less and less often.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes.

Will Howell:

And so if you could go back to that original moment and just that little dash of polarization that we got for some idiosyncratic reason ended up ultimately taking us to a place where no moderate's willing to run.

Anthony Fowler:

So this suggests, I mean, we're going to really go off the deep end here, but this suggests that a solution, I mean, there's a coordination problem. There's all these moderates-

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes.

Anthony Fowler:

... around the country. And again, our producers going to get mad at us that we're not providing really compelling evidence but it's true. I mean, there's lots of public opinion data that shows that public is their way to the right of Nancy Pelosi and their way to the left of Mitch McConnell, the vast majority of Americans.

Anthony Fowler:

There's all these moderates around the country, they would all be better off if they could somehow coordinate right. I mean, you might even imagine a third party basically popping up, a moderate party. I don't know what the right name for them is, but a moderate party popping up. If they could coordinate and they could recruit candidates in every congressional district and raise money and field a serious race, you could imagine that actually being worthwhile for all of them to do it, but the moderate candidate in our district only wants to do that. If everyone else is doing the same thing around the country, and now there's going to be a meaningful... They're going to win at least 50 congressional seats and they're going to be a pivotal voting block and they're going to actually have a ton of influence or something like that. Then it's all of a sudden worthwhile, right?

Anthony Fowler:

So we've got this coordination problem and it's interesting to think about why nobody has done that. It's a good idea. I think somebody should do that. Somebody should get together and raise some money and go out and recruit a slate of moderate candidates and field a moderate candidate in every congressional district or every congressional district, they think is viable

Will Howell:

And fully fund them so they don't have to get-

Anthony Fowler:

Why not?

Will Howell:

... those things that Andy talks about as disincentives for moderates to run. We can attend to that, right? It's a set of actually I think reasonably straightforward things. Rationalize procedures within Congress such that policy making can become possible, karma. Reduce the burdens on legislators to fundraise, karma. Reduce the media, and this is not a straightforward one, but reduce the gaze, the level of scrutiny that people who run for a office subject to.

Anthony Fowler:

Especially a scrutiny on non-political, non-policy things, right?

Will Howell:

Yes.

Anthony Fowler:

I mean, yes. I mean, we actually we might like more scrutiny on their policy positions...

Wioletta Dziuda:

But we can have full transparency by just looking at how they vote and what business they sponsor and what kind of fundraising they get and what kind of lobbying they subject to. We don't really need to listen to them all the time. We don't really need to follow all their rallies and so on to get information. I don't think I'm getting really a lot of information from what AOC is saying at some event that she's attending. I'm getting much more information about who she's and how much I'm going to like her in Congress, if I just look at her voting record.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I don't think it's doable, but I think in theory, you would like to completely shut down this sort of non-informational let's be in the media and talk about what just some other politicians said and how I respond to that story. But we would like to just look at the voting record and the sponsorship record and that will be now.

Will Howell:

So do you, Wioletta, have a bottom line on this book?

Wioletta Dziuda:

I think it's a very impressive book. It's just that the sheer number of different empirical analysis that give us interesting stories and the conduct and put in the book is just impressive. And it all know comes together into a coherent story. And I think we put forward a lot of alternative explanations and a lot of alternative stories and I think, I think all of them have a little bit of ring of truth in them, but I think what is more compelling than the story he put forward. So I would put my fingers say, I believe his story. I believe that his story can explain quite a bit of what we are seeing in the data, and quite a bit of the polarization that we see in Congress. I really think that this is an excellent book that should be a little bit more maybe featured in the public discussions by pundits and the commentators of political polarization.

Will Howell:

So we're trying to do our part here at the-

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes.

Will Howell:

... not another politics podcast by featuring it?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes.

Will Howell:

Yes. Anthony, what about you?

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, I think this is a great book. I think this is a great contribution to the field of political science and to this big conversation that we're having about political polarization in America. Most political scientists tend to focus their study, like there's a group of scholars who just study voters and they just analyze survey data and they think about how can we change voting behavior and how do they respond to you, things like that. And then there's a pool of people who spend all their time studying what happens inside Congress, for example, or what happens among elected officials? Let's look at everyone's roll call votes and so on. And I think if you just did either of those two things, you wouldn't actually learn a whole lot about what's going on with political polarization today.

Anthony Fowler:

And Andy's telling us we should really spend a lot more time thinking about who runs for office to begin with, and what choices are given to voters. That seems to be where a lot of the action is. And that is of course harder to study that, in the sense that they can't just go download the data set of all the people who are considering running for Congress or something like that. But so I think we've got to be pretty clever and innovative going forward and thinking about how we're going to make progress on those questions, but that's, I mean, I'm more or less convinced by the book that that's where a lot of the action is. If you really want to understand polarization, we need to think about who runs for office and how can we change the incentives for those people to actually get people who are perhaps more representative running? So I buy the story, I buy the book. I think it's a great contribution. I think we should think a lot about it going forward as we continue to study these topics.

Will Howell:

I completely agree. I mean, I would say we can and we should tie it to more than polarization. That is when we think about proposed reforms to our politics, to our elections, to the internal organization of legislatures and so on. Most of the conversation fixates on, well, what does this mean for the incentives of people who are already in office? Sometimes there's then a shift to, well, what does this mean for the willingness of people to vote one way or another, but we should have regularly in the mix instead of consideration, etc. On the willingness of different kinds of people, extremists versus moderates. But then you can imagine again, along on other dimensions. High quality, lower quality, different kinds of people from different kinds of communities, their willingness to actually come forward and run for office because the health of our democracy, ultimately, I mean, I think really quite persuasively bears upon our ability to draw out people who are broadly representative of the larger public. And it has been a puzzle that there has been such a disjuncture in terms of what people want and think, and the choices they're actually having to be made and Andy just does a great job of saying, well, a big part of it has to do with who's willing to run. So there we are.

Anthony Fowler:

Thanks for listening to Not Another Politics Podcast.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Our show is a podcast from the Harris School of Public Policy and is produced by Matt Hodapp. Thanks for listening.