Why Now and Why Not Everywhere?

The largely institutional basis of the issues discussed in this paper beg the question: Why are misinformation and affective partisanship worsening now relative to any other time in the nation’s history (or across the world)? Furthermore, if our particular electoral system makes political hostility and misinformation worse, what accounts for the high levels of both in democracies that use consensus-based systems? Brazil, for instance, uses a proportional system but has high levels of inter-party hostility and fake news.

The institutions that govern how the government works have, after all, changed very little in over 200 years. The connection of misinformation with our electoral system that we have laid out does not mean only those with a first-past-the-post system will experience misinformation, just that they may be more likely to because such elections create a zero-sum competition between “us” and “them.” While we would expect to see this less in countries with more consensus-based governments, we cannot rule out the development of high affective polarization in such systems along different cleavages (establishment vs. anti-establishment, for instance), which would then lead to the use of misinformation. Further, we can offer two appealing narratives based on the evidence that might explain some of the particular difficulties in the United States.

First, the sharp growth in own-party versus out-party antagonism has coincided with the sorting of parties along racial, religious, and ideological lines.¹ This has ensured partisans react much more strongly to the perceived threat of opponents and diminished the traditional importance of candidates cultivating personal images tailored to their constituencies—as antagonistic partisanship provides little opportunity for differentiation from the party brand. Thus, affective polarization is a self-perpetuating process, providing little room for even elites to move away from the hostility or lies that are sometimes necessary to endorse to signal party loyalty and win elections.

Affective partisanship may not be the necessary result of majoritarian elections, but it may be the necessary result of majoritarian elections with strictly sorted parties. It is difficult to establish whether the same trends would have happened without partisan sorting over the past 60 years, but from the data it seems likely that the two are deeply connected. Furthermore, there is no easy way to undo this partisan sorting, especially given the fact that the incentive structure seems to necessitate it. With this in mind, moving to a more consensus-based system may represent the best option to move towards a better political culture, even if the lack of such a system was not the sole cause of our current situation.

Alternatively, what we are seeing now may simply be the result of a long-term trajectory caused mostly by our use of first-past-the-post elections, hundreds of years in the making. Under this explanation, we may always have been approaching or near the current level of inter-party hatred or simply have gotten here as a result of transitioning from a disparate and largely autonomous union of cultures into one with unified national political parties and 24-hour news. In this case it is difficult to establish a counterfactual, but we can look to other nations experiencing similar changes in media architecture and demographic alignments and see that the long-term trend of those with similar institutions to ours are more extreme than those with more consensus-based systems, especially focusing on polarization.²

Our current trajectory may reflect a change in both our political culture and the nongovernmental institutions that buttress an effective democracy all without substantive changes to actual governmental institutions. Regardless of the cause, as shown above, there is ample reason to believe that changes to the institutions of government could have a substantial, positive effect.