Most of the polarization currently roiling Congress comes from political parties, as opposed to individual politicians, a study co-authored by University of Miami Business School Associate Professor Chad Kendall finds.
Kendall collaborated with economists Nathan Canen, University of Warwick, in the United Kingdom, and Francesco Trebbi, University of California, Berkeley, to write a paper titled "Political Parties as Drivers of U.S. Polarization: 1927-2018."
Their research has been published by the University of Chicago Press.
"The basic idea here is that we're interested in polarization," said Kendall, a Department of Economics member whose research frequently puts him in proximity to politics. "Polarization means a couple of different things, but in this instance it refers to politicians who prefer different policies. For example, 'he likes redistribution and you don't.'"
"There's also another type of polarization that has to do with, 'I just don't like you!'" Kendall added. "That's not what we're talking about in this paper."
With those parameters in mind, Kendall attempted to ascertain "how much of the way politicians vote is driven by what they think," versus what their political party is "telling them to do."
To tease out that distinction, Kendall and his co-authors studied votes that congressional politicians made during roll calls, then compared those votes with the positions advocated by party leadership.
"The main takeaway is that political parties play a major role in polarizing members of Congress," Kendall said. "And perhaps more concerning, the role of parties has been increasing steadily since the late 1980s. Anecdotally, the more that this continues, and the more that the parties continue to oppose each other — while getting better and better at disciplining their members — the more that nothing gets done. It's getting impossible to pass anything, and this is commonly referred to as 'gridlock.'"
Kendall's research also revealed that a fair number of congressional members would gladly embrace centrist positions if left to their own devices.
"There are Republicans that ideologically look identical to Democrats," he said. "The reason they vote differently is because their parties are telling them to. And if you think of policy implications, the implication would be, well, if we want to undo some of this polarization, we need to think about ways of limiting party power."
Although emotions are running high in Washington, D.C., Kendall's background enables him to monitor political developments dispassionately. "I'm actually Canadian, I'm not an American citizen," he noted. "So, I like to think of myself as an outside observer who's kind of impartially watching things."
