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Summary
Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of the way Congress functions, yet US politics seems to grow ever more polarized. Research shows the role that social media may have played in worsening the rupture between Republicans and Democrats.
Americans seem none too impressed with their polarized politics. Big majorities disapprove of the way Congress is working—or not working. Yet the system shows remarkably little capacity to heal itself. Why is this?
One plausible answer is that elected politicians are simply responding to voters who have themselves become more polarized. Demand-side polarization, let’s call it, might indeed be part of the problem. But it doesn’t readily explain the numbers on disapproval, and it’s unlikely to be the whole story.
The latest polling says that 86% disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job. Democrats disapproving of a legislature controlled by Republicans is expected—just 3% of them say they approve. But only 20% of Republicans say they think Congress is working well. Roughly one in 10 independents agree. Public sentiment towards Congress, Gallup concludes, is as bad as it has ever been in 50 years of polling.
This strong consensus on the legislature’s poor performance isn’t what you’d expect if voters were as deeply divided as their politicians, with views aligned accordingly.
The numbers suggest at least the possibility of a wide middle of disaffected less-partisan types who’d like Congress to focus on solving problems. But if that’s true, and the polls are a demand-side signal to that effect, why don’t more politicians adopt more moderate positions and move away from performing cultural and ideological opera in favour of advertising their willingness to cooperate with the other party?
The standard answer is that politicians have to choose between energizing their core supporters and appealing to less committed centrists. The first approach is often more likely to garner more votes. But as voters’ disgust with their politicians rises, this answer gets harder to accept. Something else must be going on. A new study sheds light on the polarizing power of social media in modern politics.
The paper by Tito Boeri et al uses AI to analyse 3.4 million tweets from 367 political leaders across 21 Western democracies between 2013 and 2022. They’re able to compute a measure of rhetorical polarization—in effect, the statistical ‘distance’ between the words used by politicians categorized as populists and non-populists.
They confirm that this measure of polarization has generally increased as elections approached and then subsided afterwards.
More surprisingly, they find that the effect is stronger in two-party and presidential systems (according to standard theory, these systems ought to be more amenable to pre-election tacking to the centre).
They also show that polarization works through a variety of channels: choice of issues (climate change as opposed to immigration, say); how the groups frame the same topics (illegal as opposed to undocumented immigrants); and the groups’ respective rhetorical styles (formal, technical, and ‘elite-coded’ as opposed to informal, direct and emotional).
More disturbing than what this reveals about populism and non-populism is the role that tweets and other social media are playing in modern politics. Few would deny that social media increases what we’re calling demand-side polarization by creating echo chambers. But it appears they also drive supply-side polarization—that is, the eagerness of politicians to perform for their core supporters rather than the less committed.
Social media shapes and strengthens such groups and makes them vastly cheaper and easier to reach. This has changed the calculation that politicians make about how to gain votes at the margin.
Social media’s supply-side and demand-side effects reinforce each other. Centrists like me want to believe that the pendulum will swing back—that the disabling effects of polarization will drive approval of Congress and its politicians so low that setting aside cultural and ideological shibboleths and advancing pragmatic answers to pressing problems will again become a winning platform. Yet there’s precious little sign of that. If anything, the situation is getting worse.
In the US, at least, the pendulum still has plenty of room to swing further in the wrong direction. Aggressive partisan redistricting is underway. Next might come abolition of the filibuster and packing of the Supreme Court, ideas that more than a few politicians in both parties support.
As it stands, the system already produces violent shifts in policy from one administration to another, making settled solutions to long-term problems—not least the country’s eventual fiscal collapse—next to impossible. This trend has yet to turn.
Who cares, right? Check your feeds: Neither party, neither set of core supporters, prefers pragmatic centrism over crushing the enemy. Social media isn’t the only thing driving the politics of mutually assured dysfunction (MAD), but it’s clearly one of them. ©Bloomberg
The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering economics.
English (US) ·