Saving Yourself

It occurs to me that when a newlywed conservative Christian says "I love being married!", they really mean "I love having sex!"

One niche within academic American politics is studying how party ideology evolves over time. If you look at the parties in, say, 1900, Republicans would have been seen as more racially progressive and more in favor of strong central government than Democrats. One theory (Miller and Schofield 2003) is that this flip-flopping of relative ideology occurs because politicians make "flanking maneuvers" to pick up voters who are clinging to the edge of the other party, ideologically speaking. So, imagine a two dimensional issue space, with one axis labeled "economic liberalism" and another axis labeled "social liberalism, creating something that looks like a cartesian coordinate plane with four quadrants. The two parties have to locate themselves in one of those quadrants (socially liberal-economically liberal, socially conservative-economically liberal, socially liberal-economically conservative, socially conservative-economically conservative). Therefore, there is always some group of voters within a party that is not happy with their own party's stance on one of these issue dimensions. As a consequence, the leaders from the other party have an incentive to moderate some of their ideological positions to try to pick up some of these disaffected voters. This "flanking" creates a perpetual cycle that drives partisan change (again, according to this particular theory).

Oddly enough, after Bill Clinton's move to the right on economic issues, we haven't seen much of this from either party. Instead, we have seen what Carsey and Layman (2002) have deemed "conflict extension." Basically, this theory goes, the ideological consistency of the parties is driven by the primary system and by party activists. That is what keeps the parties from simply adopting the position of the "median voter." These two factors exert a force on politicians that resists their flanking maneuvers. So, according to Carsey and Layman, the really odd thing is that party activists representing the various different issue dimensions (economic/social/race) have become consistent with each other over time. So, over time, the Christian conservatives and the Rockefeller republicans have come to actually agree with each other's issue preferences. So, now, a typical party activist on the right is likely to BOTH favor tax cuts and oppose gay marriage. And on the left, a typical party activist is likely to both favor affirmative action and support abortion rights. The means that it's going to be even harder for politicians to cater to moderate voters, even though policy moderation is generally a good electoral strategy. In order to do that, they have to fight the pull of their own party's base and their activists.

In a nutshell, that's party polarization. Meanwhile, the median voter is still pretty much just as moderate as ever.

Why am I writing about this? Um...I don't really remember. Oh yeah! I remember...religion. Basically, I was just thinking about the fact that there is nothing about Christianity per se that would imply support for laissez faire economics, so it's odd to me that the marriage between religious conservatives and economic conservatives has worked out so well. Carsey and Layman's explanation is a pretty compelling one.