Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…My understanding is that policy polarization at the state level actually has gone up quite a bit, and certainly partisan polarization, I know, in state legislatures has gone up a lot. One of the tricky things about this conversation — and people will kind of hear it going on — when you say the word “polarization,” you could be referring to a bunch of different things. Are we talking about how legislators vote in Congress? Are we talking about how people feel about the other side? Are we talking about issue outcomes? So, the question, a little bit, is what dimension of polarization we’d be looking at there. Different ones probably have different answers. But say what a state government does — again, abortion aside — but if 80 percent of the voters more or less support it, and then when a change of government comes, you don’t notice a change in the budget. I would say that’s not so polarized in terms of policy, though the opiate of the affective polarization clearly is going on. Yes, no? I’m trying to think about it. I’m not sure. One question is about the budget here, and I take your point on asking this in terms of GDP. I would have to do a level of looking into that that I haven’t done. So I’m not sure I can give you a good answer on that. I think it’s notable to say “abortion aside” because there’s clearly been a very strong level of polarization on the abortion issue. Let’s call it here, because I think what we’re talking about here is, basically, policy divergence. This is what you’re talking about. I am not sure that I think the right way to measure what polarization does, at any level, is policy divergence, and here’s why: To a first approximation, what I think polarization tends to do is make it harder to pass anything because most of the American political system, both at the state and the national level, is built on requiring reasonably high levels of compromise to work. So, if what you assume polarization does in its first dimension is make it much harder to get compromise, what you’re going to do is simply reduce the ability to make very high levels of policy change at the state level. I think what you’d want to do here is you’d want to look at states that have extended periods of unified governance, trifecta governance, and see whether or not they’ve diverged, and if so, how much. That would be an interesting thing, and I just haven’t done it. But my guess is that, for most states, what you’re seeing — just like you’re seeing at the national level — is probably a little bit less getting done, if anything, because what polarization does, again, make it harder to make anything happen, and make it harder for anything to stick.…

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