July 16, 2018
Lee Drutman wrote a review for the Washington Monthly about the new book "Uncivil Agreement" by Lilliana Mason.
I was pessimistic before reading Lilliana Mason’s new book, Uncivil Agreement. I am even more pessimistic now. Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, has written an extremely important analysis of the social psychology of what happens when the political world gets divided into two warring tribes, with no overlap. The central contribution of the book is to show that partisan sorting isn’t just a consequence of identity—it also creates identity. This is critical, because, as Mason observes, “identities themselves have psychological effects of their own.”
Mason draws on a tradition known as social-identity theory, which explains how we construct our sense of self based on group memberships. Humans need to both fit in and feel special. Affiliating with a larger identity group—a religion, a race, a profession, a class, a hometown—gives us both an us and a them. In normal times, this is fine, because we have lots of overlapping identities and, as a result, a wonderful mess of things to agree and disagree about. But when all our identities line up, and we divide into two opposed teams based on them, ugliness follows.
Group theory was a staple of an earlier tradition in mid-twentieth-century political science, when the discipline was more grounded in sociological approaches that treated citizens as members of communities—Catholics, Protestants, union members, farmers—who made sense of the world by talking to each other and deciding what was good for “people like us.” In that era, writes Mason, “social divisions between Americans over party, ideology, religion, class, race, and geography did not align neatly, so that particular social groups were friends in some circumstances and opponents in others.” As a result, many more Americans weren’t sure which party represented them better. They were what political scientists call “cross-pressured voters.”
Individually, these voters were far from ideal citizens. They rarely followed politics and were poorly informed. They switched back and forth between the parties, voting based on whims, or not at all. But, collectively, they formed a kind of pragmatic center, flexible enough to allow broad swings in response to changing conditions and candidates. “Democracy needs these voters,” writes Mason. “Not only are cross-pressured voters a source of popular responsiveness, they are also a buffer against social polarization.”
Today, there are far fewer cross-pressured voters. Mostly, Republicans live surrounded by other Republicans, and Democrats live surrounded by other Democrats. Partisanship is now a “mega-identity.” And this has big consequences.