More #PSFrustration

Jennifer Victor has a very useful addition to the debate. Since people are oddly defensive about the idea that gerrymandering is responsible for polarization, let’s start here:

Gerrymandering does not cause political polarization. The U.S. Senate is the best example here: there is no gerrymandering in the Senate because state lines are not often redrawn, yet the Senate has become increasingly polarized in recent years, just like the house. The causes of political polarization are complex and interactive; redrawing districts may play some role but it is not the boogeyman of politics that it is often made out to be.

That’s pretty much checkmate. Also note that even to the very modest extent to which the House is more polarized than the Senate, most of that is about redistricting, not gerrymandering. Even if districts were drawn in an entirely nonpartisan manner, legislators representing local constituencies would be expected to be more polarized than those represented statewide constituencies.

Gerrymandering is potentially relevant to American politics because it distorts electoral outcomes. It’s not relevant because of “polarization.”

I also wanted to repeat something I said in comments about this:

There will never be a viable third party in the U.S. The number of parties in any democracy is determined by its electoral rules. The U.S. has one representative for each congressional district (rather than many) and the candidate who earns the most votes wins. This combination of rules nearly always produces a system with two parties. Third party movements in the U.S. have a tendency to get absorbed by existing strong parties. Political scientists refer to this as Duverger’s Law.

In addition, even if it were possible to have a multiparty system in Congress — and I don’t think it is given the separation of the executive and legislative branches and the electoral college — it’s never really clear what problems third parties are supposed to solve. From the left, calls for third parties are fundamentally a means ignoring the fact that votes (particularly as distorted by the Senate’s malapportionment, single-member house districts, and the electoral college) just aren’t there. Putting the leftmost members of Congress into a new Magic Pony Party Just For You, The Valued Customer party doesn’t make the median vote in the Senate any more liberal. There’s no problem worth solving that dividing the Democratic coalition into multiple parties would actually solve. Indeed, I think it would probably act as an additional veto point that would make things worse — if you thought that the Democratic Congresses under Carter were too productive, you’d love a Congress controlled by an ad hoc multi-party coalition that had to assemble a coalition for every issue without a strong party apparatus.

We cannot be reminded too much that conflict is what politics is about:

Electing the right person to a position of power in Washington will not “fix” politics. While our politics has never been more divided, the divisions are natural and perhaps “true” representations of differing ideologies, beliefs, and preferences. Our government is designed, in some ways, to foster division and (dis)agreement, and to encourage slow, incremental, and glacial progress. The alternative would leave us all dizzy with constant change and lurching policies. The Messiah being elected president would not change this. Disagreement is a natural by-product of democracy, so we should learn to value it more.

Just so. And, finally, it’s always important to be reminded that “mandate” is a Latin word meaning “bullshit.”

There is no such thing as a political mandate–I don’t care how much you won your election by. This is true for more than one reason, but mostly it’s true because people elect candidates not platforms. Also, Condorcet and Arrow tell us that even when a majority has chosen something, it doesn’t mean that thing is the “will” of the group. This is because a different majority could have chosen a different, just as legitimate, option.

I remember having more than one earnest conversation in 2000 with people who assured me that it wouldn’t matter if Bush won because he wouldn’t really have a “mandate” to do anything. One thing Bush did understand is that it’s pretty much all nonsense.