My understanding is that part of the reason our government is apparently so dysfunctional is that the electoral system is biased toward polarization.
While I think better voting systems would be better (score voting or approval voting seem like clear improvement over the status quo), the electoral system has been this way for a long time, but polarization has increased dramatically recently. That suggests to me it’s not downstream of the voting system, and simple fixes to the voting system won’t solve it.
Note also that politicians will strategically choose to be less polarizing, if being less polarizing is the recipe for electoral success. (Or less-polarizing politicians will be the ones who succeed and become prominent contributors to national conversation.) And people take cues from politicians, they don’t just elect politicians who agree with their fixed opinions. So anyway, I guess I’m saying, there isn’t a clean upstream / downstream flow, I think...
I think you’re probably right, but I’m also not sure how much can can infer from the analysis as stated. Maybe you need both First Past the Post and Facebook for things to get this bad, and fixing only one of those things is sufficient.
I guess one way to check would be to compare to other countries with better electoral systems. Are they suffering from the same extreme Left-Right polarization as the US?
This also leaves me curious. Do other countries have the equivalent of Fox news (ie news specifically for one side of the tribal divide, constantly attacking the other side)?
To be clear, the so called “Liberal Media” / “mainstream media” also contains a lot of tribal narrativization, but Fox news is special (I think?) in being the only major TV news outlet that deviates, and pushes an opposite and antithetical narrative.
Have a look at Poland—in a way, the late 90s is an exercise in failures of a multi-partisan system, whereas the current state (mid-2020) is an exercise in failures of a bi-partisan system (that Poland seems to be hurtling towards). We’ve recently (as recent as over the last decade) seen an emergence of media outlets that tend to be rather clearly biased—enough that, at this point, the general population is often quick to associate a particular TV station with a particular party, even.
Obviously, there have always been divisions in this regard, where a media outlet was considered “leftist” or “rightist”, or whatever… but it feels as though it hasn’t been much of a debate in 2008, and in 2020 it feels as if it’s mentioned in every conversation. It has gotten to the point where both sides will accuse you of reading “fringe media” if you opt for something neither side has their (perceived) fingers in.
While I think better voting systems would be better (score voting or approval voting seem like clear improvement over the status quo), the electoral system has been this way for a long time, but polarization has increased dramatically recently. That suggests to me it’s not downstream of the voting system, and simple fixes to the voting system won’t solve it.
Note also that politicians will strategically choose to be less polarizing, if being less polarizing is the recipe for electoral success. (Or less-polarizing politicians will be the ones who succeed and become prominent contributors to national conversation.) And people take cues from politicians, they don’t just elect politicians who agree with their fixed opinions. So anyway, I guess I’m saying, there isn’t a clean upstream / downstream flow, I think...
I think you’re probably right, but I’m also not sure how much can can infer from the analysis as stated. Maybe you need both First Past the Post and Facebook for things to get this bad, and fixing only one of those things is sufficient.
I guess one way to check would be to compare to other countries with better electoral systems. Are they suffering from the same extreme Left-Right polarization as the US?
This also leaves me curious. Do other countries have the equivalent of Fox news (ie news specifically for one side of the tribal divide, constantly attacking the other side)?
To be clear, the so called “Liberal Media” / “mainstream media” also contains a lot of tribal narrativization, but Fox news is special (I think?) in being the only major TV news outlet that deviates, and pushes an opposite and antithetical narrative.
Have a look at Poland—in a way, the late 90s is an exercise in failures of a multi-partisan system, whereas the current state (mid-2020) is an exercise in failures of a bi-partisan system (that Poland seems to be hurtling towards). We’ve recently (as recent as over the last decade) seen an emergence of media outlets that tend to be rather clearly biased—enough that, at this point, the general population is often quick to associate a particular TV station with a particular party, even.
Obviously, there have always been divisions in this regard, where a media outlet was considered “leftist” or “rightist”, or whatever… but it feels as though it hasn’t been much of a debate in 2008, and in 2020 it feels as if it’s mentioned in every conversation. It has gotten to the point where both sides will accuse you of reading “fringe media” if you opt for something neither side has their (perceived) fingers in.