James Adams
Description: James Adams is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Davis. His research examines affective polarization—the deepening divide and hostility between political parties. In this episode, we discuss the growing polarization in the U.S., particularly in comparison to other Western democracies, and explore the economic and social factors behind this rapid division. We also cover the complex relationship between citizens' anger, political violence, and misinformation, and discuss the dangers of politicians using polarization to their advantage. As we wrap up, Professor Adams highlights research showing that more women in political leadership can bring a balanced perspective, less hostility, and may reduce polarization.
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Show Notes:
[0:03] Introduction to Politics and Academia
[4:13] First Political Memory
[8:25] Academia's Political Leanings
[9:58] Candidate Evaluation Metrics
[14:06] Notable Political Campaigns
[22:11] Measuring Effective Polarization
[23:55] Anger and Political Violence
[30:29] Factors Driving Polarization
[35:52] Cultural Issues and Political Identity
[43:19] Political Identity and Personal Beliefs
[46:08] Societal Trust and Political Anger
[51:53] The Role of Women in Politics
[56:35] Conclusion and Advice for Students
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Brent:
[0:00] Welcome, Professor James Adams. Thank you for coming on today.
James:
[0:03] Oh, I'm delighted to do this.
Keller:
[0:05] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit more about your story. What got you interested in studying politics and how you ended up at UC Davis?
James:
[0:12] Well, I've always been interested in politics ever since I was a teenager. Really, the two main interests in my life back then and still now were sports and politics.
James:
[0:24] And back then, I followed politics almost the way that some people followed sports. Whenever there was an election, I was always interested in what the public opinion polls seemed to show about who was ahead and who was behind, and all of the talk about the candidate's tactics. Well, boy, this candidate ran a very effective campaign commercial. This candidate made a mistake in who they say nominated as their vice presidential nominee. Boy, this candidate did well in the debate. The other candidate, though, had this terrible flub that may well cost them the election. So I followed presidential elections almost the way that you can follow professional sports, which team is winning and which team is losing. And just like in professional sports, I was interested in the identity of the winner, but also the tactics that they used and the strategies and what seemed to work and what didn't seem to work. Um, so that's where my interest in both politics and, um, sports comes from. How I wound up at UC Davis is a bit more of a roundabout story. So I graduated from college. I worked as a salesman for a couple of years and, um, I was not good at it, which explains why I went back into academia. Honestly, when I was a dismal failure as a salesman, the good part about that is I thought, well, I can't succeed in business.
Keller:
[1:49] So I can cross off about 80% of the jobs in the world that I can't possibly do.
James:
[1:54] And I thought, well, what can I do? And I honestly did think, well, the only things that I really enjoy are sports and politics. And I actually considered, should I try to go into sports broadcasting? And what I thought was, well, I honestly think I could do that job. But my understanding was that a lot of who gets those jobs is based on connections and luck. And on the other hand, with respect to politics and studying it from being a professor, I come from a long line of professors. My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all professors. I saw my father's life, and it looked very pleasant. He seemed to spend a lot of his time lying on the floor playing solitaire.
Keller:
[2:39] That's why they used actual cards.
James:
[2:41] Well before computers. And I would say, Dad, what are you doing? Aren't these working hours? And he would say, I am working. I'm thinking while I play solitaire. I thought, well, I can do that. And when it came to deciding what to actually specialize in, there I came back to my interest in politics. I thought, well, I've always really been interested in politics. I'm also interested in history and other things as well. But politics was one of the things that I always followed very carefully on newspapers and television broadcasts. And I thought, I better study something that I really enjoy and I can see myself doing for my whole life. So I went to graduate school, and then I came out of graduate school and was hired at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where I started as a professor back in 1994. And I worked there for 11 years, and then I moved up to UC Davis. And part of that has to do with the fact that Davis has a terrific political science department that I was delighted to join, but also because I grew up in Northern California. My father was a professor at UC Berkeley. So I love Northern California. I wanted to be closer to my family. So I joined UC Davis in the fall of 2005. So I'm starting my 20th year at UC Davis. So anyway, that brings us up to 2024. And now here I am talking to both of you.
Brent:
[4:11] Well, congratulations on the 20 years.
James:
[4:13] Thank you.
Brent:
[4:13] Thank you.
James:
[4:14] Yeah, I'm delighted. Have loved it.
Brent:
[4:16] What was the first election you remember? Yeah.
James:
[4:19] The first election and one of the things that got me so interested in politics was 1972. And in that election, President Nixon, who was the incumbent, was running against George McGovern. And I remember my parents being very interested in this race. I was 10 years old at the time. And George McGovern had an absolutely terrible time as he ran for president. He succeeded in getting the Democratic nomination, but then he made all of these mistakes while he was campaigning. And my parents were simply tearing their hair out about it. And so they talked about it a lot, and I was really interested. They were saying, you know, why can't he make up his mind about this? Or why is he fibbing when he talks about this? And it's just – it's terrible, and it's terrible for the campaign.
James:
[5:09] The other thing that was interesting, and I'll bet a lot of people in my age bracket, and I'm in my early 60s, would tell you the same thing. And I think it's one reason I became interested in politics was that Richard Nixon was a fascinating person to follow as a president and as a candidate. He, almost to the same extent as Donald Trump today, absolutely polarized people. You had people who loved him, but you had people who absolutely hated Richard Nixon.
James:
[5:39] And the other thing about Nixon that was just interesting to watch, and you could sense it, even though I was 10 years old at the time, is I never saw a human being who would achieve so much. He became president, after all, who appeared less suited to being a politician because he almost always appeared sort of ill at ease. He couldn't interact confidently with voters, and he just didn't know how to project himself. You would literally see these things where he would be interviewed, and Nixon just sort of naturally – he didn't have a scowl, but he had sort of a naturally sort of a solemn frown. And so you'd hear him talking with this sort of solemn frown on his face, and then you could see the light bulb go off like, oh, that's right. They told me I need to start smiling more. And all at once, this horrifying smile that looked more like a grimace would seize hold of his face. He almost looked like the Joker, no matter what he was saying at the time. You know, he could be saying, well, you know, we need to talk about the tragedy later. 100,000 Americans per year die of cancer with a huge smile on his face. He would say, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. So he was a fascinating person to watch.
James:
[7:01] He strove so hard to appear dignified and presidential, and he was usually pretty good at it, but occasionally you would see the anger and the rage just come out, especially when he was dealing with the media, because he felt, I think accurately, that much of the media distrusted and despised him. And he despised the media in turn. He felt they were out to get him. And again, there were times when he simply couldn't control himself and he would say these extremely nasty things. So anyway, that's a very long way of saying that I remember that particular race. And then the figure of Richard Nixon, who less than two years after the 1972 election, resigned in disgrace following Watergate. I followed Watergate as well, which was the famous political scandal of that era. And following that and watching Nixon desperately try to hold on to his presidency and watching all of these revelations come out and seeing how people were reacting, the fact that there were many Americans who were just shocked. My God, we can't believe that we would ever elect a really bad person to be president. We might elect somebody unwise. We might elect someone who is not a strong leader. But someone who appeared to many people to just really have a bad character and bad motives was a shock.
James:
[8:20] That was my formative experience growing up. It riveted me even though I was a little boy. And ever since then, I've been fascinated by politics. Yeah.
Brent:
[8:30] And then one other thing before we jump in, let's tell it that your actual research, since your parents were all like your family has a long history within academia, would you say like academia, like during their generations was still as like predominantly left leaning as it is today?
James:
[8:44] I think it probably was. Now, my dad was at UC Berkeley. He was in the philosophy department. He actually did mathematical logic. They didn't know what department to put him in. And my grandfather was a historian. So they weren't political scientists. It was probably about as left-leaning as it is now. One difference is that politics were just a lot less salient. To so many people now, which is getting into some of the things I study, People, their own party affiliation, Democrat or Republican or liberal or conservative, pro-Trump or never-Trump, has become the central part of their identity. People harshly judge those who are not part of their camp, whether they know them well or not. It was just very different back then. But to answer your question, yes, my impression is that academics were certainly more left-wing or liberal in the general population back then, just as they are now, at least in the social sciences. Note that it can be somewhat different if you go to the hard sciences, you know, physics or engineering or chemistry.
James:
[9:54] But I think in the social sciences, that was true then and it's true now.
Brent:
[9:58] Yeah.
Keller:
[9:59] Yeah. And going with the sports analogy, do you have, like when you're presented with a new politician, let's say in an electoral race, do you have a set of things you'll look at kind of to scout them to gauge their success? I know there's like, Ben talks like the beer question of whether you'd sit down with that person and actually enjoy their company and different kind of metrics people look at. Do you have your own just personal view of things?
James:
[10:21] I do have a set of metrics in my mind. And the interesting thing is how difficult it can be in advance to figure out who is going to be a good candidate. You look at the candidate and before you really see them campaign, well, you look at the general things. Are they well known? Having high name recognition is certainly helpful. Have they already held some high elective office that gives them some claim to have the credentials to hold whatever office they're going to compete for next? Have they succeeded in raising a lot of money? do the people who have worked with them seem to be impressed with them are they receiving favorable news coverage and then there are other things as well you know just look at them you know some people frankly are more pleasant to look at than others some are better spoken than others uh and uh some have have more charisma than others so you look at all these things and sometimes in advance you'll say wow that candidate has a lot going for them and this other candidate not so much. Then they start running for president or whatever the office is, and you have to vastly revise your judgment. I'll give you one current example where I and most of the people who study these things have been wrong twice, is Kamala Harris. When she ran for president back in the 2019 and beginning in 2019 for the 2020 presidential primaries, a lot of us looked at her and we thought.
James:
[11:47] Now she has a lot going for her. You know, she did have a favorable image. She appeared well-spoken. She appeared to be confident and commanded the facts. She had high name recognition, had raised a lot of money.
James:
[12:01] On paper, she looked great. In the view of most of us who followed this, she did not run an impressive campaign. She didn't seem to be able to really cut through and capture people's attention. Her campaign certainly had the reputation of not being well organized. There was a lot of infighting in her campaign. Well, when you see that, you may ask yourself, well, if this person can't even run their campaign, can we trust them to run the country?
James:
[12:27] So those of us who watched this were surprised and underwhelmed by Kamala Harris in 2019 and 2020. Fast forward to 2024 when she now has emerged as the Democratic candidate for president. A lot of us thought, based on what we saw before, that she probably will not be a very strong candidate. That was also enhanced by the fact that early the first year or two when she was vice president, a large number of fairly negative news stories came out about, again, chaos and dissension within her staff, the fact that she was not always well prepared. There were allegations, usually anonymous, and she won't take responsibility when things go wrong. She always blames someone else. Based on all these things, a lot of us were skeptical that she would be an effective candidate. In the case of most of us, she has been distinctly more impressive and effective than we expected, that she has been well-spoken. She has appeared competent, but also confident. And she has projected a relatively warm and winning personality. Many of us also believe that the way she has chosen to take on former President Trump and the way she's chosen to attack him on some things but not others differently from how Joe Biden was running his campaign, that her tactics have also been distinctly more favorable.
James:
[13:56] Give you just a couple of other examples of sort of candidates who famously had everything on paper, and then they just – they were like a little balloon
James:
[14:04] that got pricked as soon as they start running for office. Back in 2016, when Jeb Bush was pursuing the Republican presidential nomination, he had it all. He was the governor of a large state, Florida. Had a wide reputation of being competent and effective. And, of course, he had the famous Bush name going for him, which his brother, George W. Bush, the president, and his father, George Herbert Walker Bush, had also had. We all thought he was going to be very effective. And then he fizzled. To go back even farther, well, take another name that will be familiar to your listeners, Rudy Giuliani. Familiar now in a different way. When he ran for president, he seemed to have everything going for him because he had been mayor on 9-11, and he was famously viewed as America's mayor because the view was he had really rallied the city and demonstrated effective leadership and reassured people. People thought when he runs for president, he will have a lot of charisma. People will be fascinated. He ran, and essentially nothing happened. People looked at him and said, well, I don't really see much here.
James:
[15:10] And Barack Obama would be the opposite. He ran in 2008. People thought there's no way he can win the Democratic presidential nomination against Hillary Clinton. Far more famous with a far more impressive resume and, of course, with a husband who had been president. He was an example of someone who vastly exceeded his press clippings, unlike the others who do not match what they looked like on paper.
Brent:
[15:36] Yeah. Do you think media played a large role in switching the narrative for Kamala Harris? Once she got the nomination, because prior to, like you said, the first election she was in did pretty poorly. One of the worst rated vice president in history or whatever. And then the second she gets the nomination, it all flips and she becomes the superstar.
James:
[16:01] Yeah. So how much did the media have to do with it? You know, I honestly don't know. That's something where my colleague, Amber Boydston, who studies the media, would do better. I will say this just to give you my own opinion is that she has been a more effective campaigner than I expected independently of the way she's portrayed in the media. Some of what you see is filtered through the media, but others of it, I see her campaign speeches. I saw her performance in the presidential debate against.
Brent:
[16:31] Former President Trump.
James:
[16:32] I've seen her interviews. And it seems to me that she objectively has been a lot better than a lot of us thought. Is it possible the media has amplified that? I'm sure that some portions of it have. I'm certain that on MSNBC and CNN, they tend to project the best of Kamala Harris, just as Fox News tends to project the parts of Kamala Harris that are less ideal.
Brent:
[16:58] Definitely.
Keller:
[16:59] And then pivoting a little bit towards your actual work on polarization, I guess starting in on that, could you give a definition of affective polarization?
James:
[17:07] Yeah, effective polarization refers to citizens' feelings of anger, contempt, fear, and even hatred towards political opponents. And it's typically talked about among the mass public. How do rank-and-file Democrats feel about Republicans and vice versa? Of course, politicians as well may be very angry at their opponents. Unfortunately, those of us who study this, we don't have any way to really reliably measure it, you know, because we suspect that some of these politicians who claim that they're outraged and disgusted by the other side, they are merely performing outrage or disgust. With ordinary citizens, we can have them take surveys and we think, well, they have less of an incentive to dissemble, whereas politicians, some people would argue, are constantly calibrating the image that they're presenting, not thinking so much about how do I show what I really feel, but instead, how do I convey what I want people to think?
Keller:
[18:11] And is the United States currently, do you think, more disproportionately polarized than other Western democracies?
James:
[18:18] Yeah, and here you're getting exactly into my research, and I and my co-authors, Noam Gidran and Will Horn, have this book we published a few years ago called American Effective Polarization in Comparative Perspective, where we compared levels of effective polarization in the United States to the publics in 19 other Western democracies, basically all of Western Europe, but also Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and so on. And here I can give you good news and bad news.
James:
[18:47] The good news for the United States is that compared to all these other countries, and if you look back over about 25 years, which is the length we looked at, the United States scores about average and effective polarization. In particular, we appear far less effectively polarized, that is far less angry and distrustful and hostile, than countries such as Greece, Portugal, and Spain, albeit a lot less effectively polarized, a lot more effectively polarized than countries like the Netherlands, where there seems to be a great deal of mutual respect and tolerance. That's the good news so to people who say wow it's it it couldn't possibly get any worse in the united states according to our book oh yes it could and it is in other countries, The bad news is it's clearly getting worse and more angry in the United States. I told you before that this was based on basically the last 25 years. If you just look at the last election in 2020, and by the way, the way we measure this are based on these surveys that are typically conducted right around the time of elections. That's when we have these very high quality surveys that we rely on. If you just look at 2020, then in fact, the United States looks extremely angry. Much angrier than it looked in many of the preceding years. And we would move up from being about in the middle among the 20 publics to being one of the three or four most effectively polarized.
Brent:
[20:14] So our rate of polarization is increasing faster than like most or if not all others?
James:
[20:19] Yes. And indeed, that's one thing that we looked at. Clearly, we're getting angrier in the United States. One question we looked at is, well, are people getting angrier systematically across Western publics, there's no clear trend. There are some other countries where people are getting angrier. There are other countries where people appear to be getting less angry. And in many countries, things appear relatively stable. We're one of the countries where anger has increased most sharply over the last 40 years or so.
Brent:
[20:49] And when you're running these polls, you're doing the general populace and their views towards the opposite side?
James:
[20:56] That's right. We ask people typically in these surveys, well, first, we try to find out what party do you support? And we typically try to find out how strongly, how close do you feel to your party? And then what we generally rely on to measure the amount of anger or bad feelings towards the other side is we say, okay, so suppose you're a Republican. Now we're going to ask you how you feel about the democrats and we use something called the thermometer scale that goes from here's a scale going from zero you feel very coldly towards the democrats to 10 you feel very warmly towards the democrats and five is neutral where would you place yourself on the scale um and you know if you're saying we'll give the democrats a zero or one or two that's strong dislike you've given a seven or whatever that's liking and so on what we find in the United States over the last 40 years is that back in 1980, which is the first year for which we have this particular question, on average, Democrats and Republicans were giving the other side, a neutral score, right around five. Now, the average score in 2020 was between two and three, about two and a half.
James:
[22:07] So people have gone from feeling neutral towards their opponents on average. I mean, there were still people in 1980 who hated their opponents, but they were balanced by others who felt somewhat warmly to a generally, you know, relatively strong feeling of dislike.
Brent:
[22:22] And then do you delineate between when you're saying like the other side being, Is it the politicians or citizens who identify with that party?
James:
[22:31] And that's a great question because that's one thing we worry about.
James:
[22:35] I think the way the question is typically asked is how do you feel about the Democratic Party or the Republican Party? Raising the question, if you say you can't stand the Republicans, are you saying you can't stand Donald Trump? Are you saying you can't stand Republican politicians in general? Or are you saying that you dislike and despise people who support the Republican Party?
James:
[22:56] And that's a problem. This is a really blunt instrument, and the question does not specify. However, one of the things that I and my co-authors have started to do just in the last few years is, because we're worried about this, is we ask some more specific questions trying to figure out, well, how much do you dislike the other side's politicians? How much do you dislike the other side's supporters? The good news for us that allows us to still use those questions from earlier is that there's a strong connection. People who can't stand the other side's politicians generally dislike their supporters. If they feel fine towards the other side's politicians, they generally feel fine towards their supporters. The one exception, which is a complicated thing understanding America over the last eight or nine years, is there are a non-trivial number of Democrats who expressed absolute contempt and even hatred for Donald Trump,
James:
[23:50] but who express much more neutral feelings towards Republicans in general. But in general, there's a very strong connection between people's feelings towards the politicians of their opponents and the rank and file supporters.
Brent:
[24:05] Interesting.
Keller:
[24:06] And is anger necessarily tied with violence? And earlier, you mentioned very briefly that you also study political violence. Do those two go hand in hand necessarily, or is that contingent on other factors?
James:
[24:16] They certainly tend to. That if you ask which people are more likely to, for example, state that, I agree with the statement.
James:
[24:26] It is legitimate to use violence to keep the other side from winning. People who have indicated they have greater anger towards the other side are more likely to indicate that they also support violence. They're also more likely to agree with the statement, it is acceptable to bend the rules to prevent the other side from winning. So these things tend to go together as much as we can tell. Just one problem, which may be less interesting to your listeners, but it's a real problem when you try to study these, as you can imagine, is comparing different people's responses. If you give some political party a four on a scale and I say, well, I rate the party a three, does that mean I dislike the party more? Or is that you interpret what the number four means in a different way than I interpret it? And so there's a real problem in looking at two different people and saying, well, you're angrier towards your opponents than you are. It's not a problem if in other countries where there are several political parties and you ask them, well, here are the three political parties you oppose? How much do you dislike each of them? If someone tells you, well, I feel more coldly towards this party than that party, you can trust that because it's the same person giving the rating and interpreting the scale. But comparing between people, it gets very, very tricky. This is one of these measurement issues, which is not necessarily fascinating for your listeners to hear about, but it's one of the things that's a challenge when we're trying to measure people's feelings.
Brent:
[25:51] Yeah. I know food science has talked about it with trying to get baselines for what a flavor actually is. So that would be a similar thing. Here's examples of what a two or three or four means.
James:
[26:03] Yeah, and those are the issues we struggle with. I mentioned earlier that the United States, compared to over the last 25 years, scores about in the middle of how angry we are, and that countries like Spain and Greece and Portugal scores much more angry. This is entirely based on these numbers people are assigning, thermometer scales. You know, we're giving our opponents a two or a one or a three. Here's the problem. Maybe people in Portugal interpret that scale differently than people in the United States. So maybe it's very, very dicey to make that kind of comparison. For that reason, my co-authors and I, and other people as well, have tried to devise alternative questions that we think, well, so we're not just relying on these numbers. One that we used for this 10-country survey we did is we asked people, okay, think about people who support this other political party, one of your opponents. And what's the closest social relationship you would be comfortable having with this? A member of your family, a roommate, a neighbor, a coworker, or they can live on your street, or I don't want them in my country. You'd be shocked how many people don't even want their opponents in their country. Um, but we've, I don't know if that's a better measure, but at least there are words attached to what it means. And you and I would understand what it means to have a roommate in the same way, whereas you and I might not understand the number four or the number two in the same way on this scale.
Brent:
[27:31] Yeah. That'd be interesting to see like two, because I know personally speaking, like one side of the other, it doesn't matter to me nearly as much as like how emphatically you support one side of the other.
James:
[27:42] Yes. And that's a really great point. Right. And you know, some political scientists, not me, have started to explore that. And so you'll get people, they say, I don't want to have a Republican for a roommate, or I don't want to have a Democrat for a coworker. And then if you say, okay, but this Republican or this Democrat, they don't really care much about politics. And then it's like, oh, totally different thing. So that's a very valid point.
Keller:
[28:08] And looking at polarization, what are some of the things that are driving us to be more polarized today?
James:
[28:14] Yeah. And that is the $64,000 question from my perspective. Because it's one thing to understand, measure, and say we are angry, but we need to figure out why we're angry. And that's basically what I study in my research. The reason being that I want us to get out of the mess we're in. I don't think we can get out of this mess until we understand how we got into it and what's causing it. So I'll tell you, first of all, some of the things that my research and all of this is with Professor Noam Guidron and Professor Will Horn. Some of the factors that my own research identified, then I can talk about some additional factors. So one thing that we find is that economic conditions are related to how angry people are. that when the economy gets worse, people get more angry. And in particular, we look at how the level of unemployment, which is closely tied to the overall health of the economy. And we find that within countries, unemployment goes up, people tend to get more angry, unemployment goes back down, they get less angry.
James:
[29:20] Something else, which is related to some of the debates we have in this country over the 99% versus the 1%, to take Bernie Sanders' terminology here, is income inequality. And again, this is something that Bernie Sanders and Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and many other prominent politicians, especially those who label themselves progressives, have argued as a real problem in this country, that the rich have the affluent and the rich have too much and the less affluent have too little. And the question is, does this make people angry? Note this is very relevant to the United States because the United States has the highest level of income inequality of any western democracy and it's not close um so we look and we we our research suggests that indeed income inequality makes people angrier now we're a little less certain about that part of the reason and the main reason is this.
James:
[30:19] If you look across countries some countries have are more or less unequal and
James:
[30:24] the u.s has is more unequal than, say, Sweden or the Netherlands, unfortunately. And so what we find is that the countries that have higher levels of income inequality also tend to be angrier, all else equal. The problem is the level of inequality within countries is surprisingly static over time. We went back to about the mid-1990s. And what you find is that the level of income inequality in the U.S., it's practically a straight line with high income inequality. It's practically a straight line in Sweden with low income inequality. So because of that, the only comparison we can make is across countries. You can probably see intuitively why you have to be careful about making an inference. If I say we're more unequal in the U.S. And we're angrier in the United States than we are in Sweden, and that's evidence that inequality causes effective polarization, you're likely to say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. In case you haven't noticed, Professor Adams, the United States and Sweden are different in about 100 different ways.
James:
[31:31] And so why on earth would you say that this one way is what's actually causing it? But anyway, we do find evidence that countries that are more unequal economically do have higher levels of income inequality. We also find that the voting system that's used to elect our representatives is also related to that. The United States uses a system often called the winner-take-all voting system, or plurality. Presumably, your listeners are all familiar with this. In a given district, a number of candidates run. Everybody votes once. the top vote getter wins. There's one winner. The winner takes it all. None of the others get anything. A lot of other countries, most Western democracies, don't use this. They use some form of voting that's typically labeled as proportional representation, which is where the seats are divided up in a sense more evenly, and the winner does not take it all. We find that countries like the U.S. that use winner-take-all also tend to display higher levels of anger and hostility, all else equal.
James:
[32:35] And we suspect that the reason is that when the winner takes all, then the election becomes this cosmic struggle where one side is seen as winning it all and the other side loses it all. It's either going to be Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. There's going to be a winner who's going to be the president for the next four years, whether they win by one electoral college vote or 300 electoral college votes. So that's another factor. And finally, policy disagreements are also related to people's level of political anger. We find that both disagreements over economic issues, things like what should the tax rate be, how much should government regulate the economy, those tend to make people somewhat angry. In addition, debates over these cultural issues, things like abortion, gay marriage, immigration, building the wall. Also tend to make people angry. One of the findings, I'll give you two ways that this is related to the United States. Number one, you're trying to explain why things are getting so much more angry in the United States, whereas in many other countries, they're not. Across all Western democracies, we find that.
James:
[33:54] Disagreements over cultural issues have become more intense over the last 25 years, more so in the U.S. than any other Western democracy. Hard as it may be for your listeners who tend to be young to believe, but back in the 1990s, we were arguing mainly about the economy. Things like tax rates, things like gay marriage were not really on the ballot. Abortion wasn't really because there was Roe v. Wade and everyone assumed this was settled. Immigration had not become this hot cultural issue. Whereas nowadays, sometimes it feels like it's all cultural issues all the time. So the US has had the biggest increase in a focus on cultural issues relative to economic issues. A related thing we found is that increasingly it is cultural issues that make people angry, not just in the US, but across Western democracies. 20, 25 years ago.
James:
[34:49] On average, you would say, you know, on average, it seems like economics are making people a bit angrier than cultural issues. Now, it seems the cultural issues are making people somewhat angrier than economic issues. As to why, well, one way of formulating this is to say, you know, economic disagreements are disagreements over who gets what. And you and I can compromise over, well, you think the tax rate should be higher, I think it should be lower, or vice versa. We can meet in the middle. Cultural debates are about who we are. If you and I find out we have different positions on abortion or gay marriage or building a wall, we may look at each other and think, you know, we're just from different planets here. There's no way to meet in the middle and compromise on these issues. So we find that both types of issue debates are associated with people being angrier. Increasingly, it seems to be these cultural debates that are making people extra mad, which is highly relevant to the United States, which is now dominated by these cultural issue debates.
Keller:
[35:52] And why do you think people care so much about these cultural topics? And I guess with that, do you think it's been used more recently as a tool to get political favor because it's easier to change your perspective on a cultural topic than it is necessarily an economic topic?
James:
[36:08] Yeah, so as to why people care about cultural issues, well, the first thing is, if you just ask, why do they care, period, it kind of makes sense. You know, if one person says, you know, according to my religion, abortion is murder. And the other person is saying, according to my perspective, a woman has the right to control her own body. You can sort of see how, to both people, these feelings can touch the gut. And so you can see why people would care about this, and it could engender emotions.
James:
[36:39] But as to why people seem more angry about this now than was the case in the past, I honestly don't know. And I don't know of anyone who's actually studied this. I feel, and maybe your question was heading in this direction, it's because more and more politicians are basing their campaign around this.
James:
[36:59] And it could be that what's going on here is the effect we're seeing is that politicians are increasingly politicizing these cultural issues. As a way of gaining support, but in a way of perhaps demonizing or focusing anger towards their opponents. I should mention that almost no one has studied that to date. So you can imagine it's very complicated. You have to have some way of analyzing, well, when people or when politicians are talking about this, how much anger is being projected by their speech now compared to in the past? That's complicated to do. It certainly seems plausible as one reason why people are so angry. And I've mentioned so far the things that I and my co-authors have studied. Let me mention some other things as well, though. Some people would say it's the rise of the internet in general and social media in particular because people will say things or write things online. They would never say to your face and look online, especially if you're writing it anonymously.
James:
[38:01] And that can be very difficult to study, as you can imagine, because social media sort of became available to everyone in the United States at about the same time. If we could say, well, in this state, they didn't get it until 2008, but here it was 2004, then you could say, was there a big uptick in anger in the state where they got it first? The same thing is the same problem cross-nationally. Everyone in Western democracies got social media in the same time. Makes it hard to study. There are some studies and some experiments that do suggest that this is making people angry.
James:
[38:36] Other people say, when you're talking about anger and hostility and what creates it, please do not forget one name, Donald J. Trump. And there is certainly a case to be made that former President Trump, the way he speaks, does tend to foment anger and hostility in his supporters towards the Democrats. But that in turn, Democrats loathe former President Trump, as a lot of them do. There are some studies looking at this that do seem to suggest that when President Trump issues a new angry tweet or when he said something particularly controversial, there is a bit of an uprise in anger. One thing I'll note about this, though, note in the United States, there's clear evidence we've been getting angrier and angrier at each other for almost 45 years. Donald Trump only came on the political scene nine years ago. So perhaps his presence can explain some of the anger and increased anger over the last nine years, leaving about 35 years of increasing anger that we have to explain in some other way.
Brent:
[39:48] Yeah. And then one area that I've always found interesting was people who care so deeply about cultural issues that they don't identify with. Especially if you look at college campuses last year, really upset with Palestine protests. I would probably argue a lot of them didn't know Palestine existed a couple years ago. Have anyone been able to look at why nowadays people feel so deeply about issues that aren't relevant to them or directly relevant to them?
James:
[40:20] It's an interesting question. And I should say to begin with what you're saying sounds plausible. It's difficult, of course, to know what people really care about. And, of course, almost impossible to say, but you should care about this. Or, you know, this is objectively should be important to you and this shouldn't be important to you. But on the larger question, something that's clearly happened in the U.S. Over the last 45 years is people's partisanship has become a much more central part of their identity. You don't think of yourself first as an American or a San Francisco Giant supporter or a Los Angeles Ram supporter or as a farmer or a teacher or an accountant. People more and more first seem to think of themselves as, no, I'm a Democrat or I'm a Republican. And more and more when people think of themselves this way –, There's psychological pressure. If I'm a Democrat, you find out here's what the Democrats believe, and you take on all of the beliefs. If you're a Republican, this is what the Republicans believe. You take on all of the beliefs. And so you have people in the Democratic Party who may care about some issue where you say, really?
James:
[41:34] Is that really very important to you? And all of you Democrats have the same position on this issue where you maybe never even thought of it until five years ago. And the same on the Republican side as well. And so it comes to the point where if someone is publicly disagreeing with your side's official position, because most sides basically often have official positions, you take it not as, well, this is a disagreement where we see things differently. But you are challenging my core identity because you're saying that my side might be wrong about this and if they're wrong about this they might be wrong about everything my entire identity will shatter because my identity is based on the fact that mine is the good side my side is wise my side is well informed my side is right and my side is righteous and the other side you know no they're terrible they're ignorant they're delusional and they have bad motivations so a debate over something like uh the the current middle east situation for example i think in some people's minds becomes a proxy war where it's you attack this you're attacking my side and you're attacking my fundamental identity one additional point about this as to how extreme it's become.
James:
[42:52] In recent years, in these public opinion polls, if you ask Democrats and Republicans to agree or disagree with the following statement, the other side is not merely mistaken. They are actually evil. Well over a third of Democrats and Republicans agree with that. Well, you can see then why if someone questions your side, because then they're sort of implicitly saying, well, the other side's right about this.
Keller:
[43:19] You may not.
James:
[43:19] Necessarily sort of objectively consider the facts and the arguments. You're saying, no, you're supporting evil. And your immediate reaction is to go into an angry defensive crouch. And you don't listen to what the person says. Instead, you're angry that they're even saying it and bringing up anything that could make you question your side's rightness, which in your mind is tied up with their righteousness. Yeah.
Brent:
[43:44] We're going to touch on that after this. I just thought of one other thing. Do you think a lack of, like, the decline in faith, which is typically, like, a person's core identity, could be attributed to some of this political polarization? Because if politics are increasingly becoming a more central-rooted part of someone's identity and faith is actively declining as well, like, that swap could be part of this.
James:
[44:08] Yeah, and that's a way of saying something that you hear commentators say sometimes, that, you know, being a Democrat or a Republican has become more like a religion. Than like a partisan identity. I think that is certainly true. One general point about this is, you know, we're talking about this all in terms of politics. Is this okay?
Brent:
[44:30] No, no, sorry. Okay, that's all right.
James:
[44:32] Yeah.
Brent:
[44:32] We'll do stuff like that. Like, we're very much paying attention still.
James:
[44:36] Okay, no, no, I didn't know if there was some technical problems going on, yeah. And, you know, we're talking about this. Oh my gosh, we're all getting so angry. Things are getting worse in politics. Note that to the extent one sees this increase in anger and distrust as bad, it's not just politics. You can look across society. And if you look, for example, at the proportion of Americans who say that they trust other people to be generous, it's declined. If you look at the proportion of Americans who certainly exhibit the signs of being self-absorbed or selfish, it is greatly increased. You see this not just in politics, but you see it in economics, you see it in culture, and you see it in society. To give one example from way back in the day.
James:
[45:24] In the 1970s, which in view of a lot of people is when things sort of started to maybe get a little bit more polarized, that was called the me decade, the decade when people not only were self-absorbed, but they were clearly self-absorbed. I'm looking out for number one. It's all about me, and it's not about you. And you heard people use a lot of words like I and me and less often talking about we and us. So you see this in all sorts of facets of life. One thing I've often wondered, but I just haven't gotten around to studying it because it seems like it would be a very daunting challenge, is are we maybe missing the boat when we try to explain this political development
James:
[46:07] strictly in political terms? Or should we be looking at the wider society and just why are people less generous? Why do they give less money to charity? Why are they less likely to be on some neighborhood group or to want to coach Little League or to do things to help other people? Maybe we need to move outside of politics and look at the society as a whole but i haven't done that and hardly anyone has done that.
Brent:
[46:31] So far as i know yeah definitely an interesting.
Keller:
[46:33] Question to solve yeah and then another question we had and we kind of like briefly touched on it before is it seems like the people that are the most polarized typically seem to have the most surface level understanding of the topic because they're normally just repeating what they're being fed Have you looked at all into degrees of individual polarization towards another side in either IQ or levels of political knowledge?
James:
[47:00] We have certainly looked at it related to political knowledge. We haven't looked at an IQ because we can't administer intelligence tests, sadly.
Brent:
[47:10] You're not allowed to?
James:
[47:12] I don't know if we're allowed to. I've never asked. It's hard to keep people's attention through a survey anyway. If you had him first do this long intelligence test. Uh, anyway, so far as I know it hasn't been done, but it's an interesting question. So far as I know, and I should mention this is not something I study, but I believe if you look at the correlation between how they do on political knowledge and effective polarization, those who score is more knowledgeable also score is more effectively polarized for the simple reason that those are the ones who are really into politics. If you don't care about politics, you don't know about it, but you also aren't angry at the other side. Heck, you may not even know who the other side is.
James:
[47:53] And nevertheless you know the people who know it all you know who are constantly watching fox news and msnbc or on their on their you know they could recite to you probably a hundred members of congress uh from memory etc and they're the ones who are also likely to be most enraged so in that sense knowledge is correlated with um political anger at the same time there is vast amounts of misinformation out there and note the people who are good on factual knowledge yeah i can name you the vice president or the secretary of state or whatever, my governor or something like that, often have terrific misperceptions about what the other side is like. For example, there is persistent evidence that both sides see the other side in an exaggerated form of what they are. And what I mean here is, for example, if you ask a Republican, yeah, how many Democrats want to take away everybody's guns? They'll probably say 90%. And then it's probably more like 50%. And if you ask Democrats, well, how many Republicans support building a wall along the border? Again, they're going to say, oh, they all do.
James:
[49:05] It's a lot closer to 50% than you would think. There have been some experimental studies where you first ask people for their impressions of what the other side is like and what they believe, then find out, and how do you feel about the other side? Then you inform people about the true facts, what percentage actually believe this, and then you ask them again, how do you feel about the other side? You do find persistent evidence that if people are given the right information, their anger goes down, presumably because their stereotypes go away. But note that it's not clear if that's correlated with being able to name the vice president or the governor or whatever, because the same person who knows, you know, can recite from memory every important elected official may be getting all of their information from Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity. And of course, Rachel Maddow, the only time a Republican is on is to spout some bizarre conspiracy theory. And every time that Sean Hannity has a Democrat on, they're probably burning the American flag and, you know, babbling about something that makes them look bad. So sometimes those who seek out more information are also seeking out more biased information. And whether they're more knowledgeable or not depends on how they define the term knowledge. Say, I should mention, I need to wrap this up in about 10 minutes.
Brent:
[50:27] Yeah. Oh, perfect. Yeah. Yeah. No, just like finishing up that thought.
James:
[50:31] Sure.
Brent:
[50:32] There's some funny videos where people like give a quote, like who said this? So-and-so and so-and-so. And they always attribute to the opposite side of which they identify with. And it's like, nope, that was actually the person that, yeah.
James:
[50:44] I've seen those. It's hilarious. You know, who and so said this? Well, that sounds like Adolf Hitler.
Brent:
[50:48] Yeah.
James:
[50:48] Well, no, that was actually the president from your party who said this or your party's nominee.
Brent:
[50:54] Yeah. Yeah. We've talked a lot about polarization and some of the key factors. Do you think like citizen polarization or like political, like politicians polarization comes first?
James:
[51:06] That is also the $64,000 question, and I'm planning a project on that. The short answer is for right now, we simply don't know. If you ask me to guess, I'll bet it goes both ways. You know, on one hand, people do listen to these politicians and they do get riled up about how awful and terrible the other side is because their politician is telling them you should be riled up and outraged. You know, these are bad people on the other side. On the other hand, if people are mad to begin with, then an enterprising politician can say, oh, wow, there's a real market for anger right now. So I suspect it goes back and forth. But nobody so far as I know has studied this systematically. One of my next projects is that's exactly what I'm planning to do.
Brent:
[51:51] We look forward to that.
James:
[51:52] Yeah, that'll be very interesting.
Keller:
[51:54] So with polarization, it's obviously a very scary topic, and it does seem, as we've covered, to be getting worse, and there might not be a clear outlook for the future. So with that, can women save us all?
James:
[52:05] Ah, right. And this refers to an article that I and my co-authors wrote that was called Can't We All Just Get Along? How Women Members of Parliament Can Reduce Effective Polarization. So briefly to tell you what we did in this study, we looked at the question of whether it might be possible that men and women leaders have different leadership styles and that one style might inflame polarization compared to another that might reduce effective polarization. To get right to the main finding, looking across 20 countries over the last 25 years, what we found observationally was that political parties that had a larger share of women-elected officials –.
James:
[52:54] That their opponents expressed less anger and hostility towards them compared to parties that were dominated by men. So that suggests it might make a difference who, in fact, you elect. Now note that's just an observational association. It doesn't prove that the women elected officials are causing this, nor does it explain why. It might be because women have different leadership styles. And there's some evidence that they tend to be more consensual and cooperative in reaching across the aisle than men and less confrontational. So that could be it. But note it could also be that somehow the media covers women politicians differently. Or it could be that people have stereotypes. You know, maybe men and women elected officials behave the same way.
James:
[53:41] But if people have stereotypes that, yeah, men tend to be more angry and aggressive, then maybe that's feeding into how people are reacting. All we have for now is this observational relationship. And one of the things that I'm planning to do going forward is to study it in more detail. I should mention I went into that study highly skeptical that it mattered how many men or how many women we have. And to give you the example why, before the study, if someone said, you know, if we just elect more women, Jim, then the amount of anger is going to really go down in the United States. You know, I'd say, well, right now we have these vast divisions based on race and based on class and based on cultural issues and based on economics. And we have angry media, partisan media on both the left and the right explaining things. And we've got social media and we have about 75% men elected officials. If we got it up to 50% women, then we would still have divisions on race and culture and class and income and this partisan media, except there'd be 50% women. I just can't believe this one factor out of dozens that may be driving effective polarization will make much difference.
James:
[54:53] But that's why you do the research. So we did the research, and by golly, we found that connection. I went into the research highly skeptical of the notion that gender mattered much in terms of the amount of anger. I'm having to reconsider. I'm halfway towards believing that, no, it really does make a difference, but I really think we need more research before we can say for certain. By the way, to tell one little anecdote that your listeners may appreciate, I wish I could tell you that it had been my idea to study this issue about women and degrees of anger, but it was my wife's idea. My wife, the psychologist. Because basically every time over the last several years when we'd be sitting at the breakfast table and I'd say, oh, it's terrible, all this anger and hostility, where would it end? And my wife would say, you know, Jim, if women were running the world and she'd go on and I was, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard that before, et cetera. So I finally decided, well, you know what? I'm going to actually do the research because I can't wait till the next time she says, if women were running the world, I can say, well, you know what? Nothing would change. Change. I checked. And it makes no difference whatsoever. However, I checked, and the evidence seems to be consistent with her proposition.
James:
[56:15] And I might suggest that your readers might take away the lesson from this, that my wife was completely right and I was completely wrong. Never marry someone who's smarter than you are.
Brent:
[56:26] Folks.
Keller:
[56:26] I did.
James:
[56:27] I actually love it that I did. But boy, was I wrong about this. I think wrong in kind of an interesting way.
Brent:
[56:33] Well, you just will have to be ready to admit you're wrong sometimes.
James:
[56:36] I appear to be very wrong about this, and my wife was right.
Brent:
[56:40] Well, as we wrap up here and looking forward at the election that's upcoming and the future of American politics, where are some areas that you might take comfort, maybe besides the Giants and baseball?
James:
[56:51] Well, one comfort is that comparatively, the United States has a relatively low level of unemployment. And we do find that when unemployment is high, things get angrier. So that's one feature of American politics that seems to be better. The other thing is we've begun to hear in this campaign, particularly in the aftermath of the two assassination attempts against former President Trump, I at least am hearing more people saying, you know, we need to dial down the rhetoric because the problem is that the rhetoric and angry rhetoric on both sides can be the trigger for some nut job to do something terrible. Saying we need to dial down the rhetoric is, of course, very different from actually doing it. For now, it seems like we're mainly paying lip service, but maybe we're paying lip service now, and in a few years, we'll actually take that seriously, and more politicians will begin to dial down the rhetoric. I think that would be a very good start to trying to lower the temperature here in the United States.
Keller:
[57:54] Perfect. And as we wrap up finally, is there any advice you have to students that are looking out, whether they're interested in politics or not, on just how to navigate this confusing time?
James:
[58:03] Well, the one thing I would suggest and that I try to do, not always successfully, is please consider the possibility, when you think about your beliefs and your party, consider the possibility that you might be wrong. I'm old enough to have held hundreds or thousands of beliefs about this is a good policy, this is a bad policy, this is a good elected official, this is a bad elected official. It is stunning how often I've turned out to be wrong. Not, I hope, because I'm especially dim-witted, but because the world is infinitely more complicated than my ability to understand it or anyone else's. I think if we recognize this, we can have some humility. And I think once you begin to be more humble, you become less self-righteous and less harshly judgmental of the other side. We all like to think of ourselves as being tolerant people. I'd simply end by asking this question. If you harshly judge other people on the other side when you don't know them and have made very little effort to understand their point of view, is that because you're tolerant or because you're very intolerant? I think it's worth thinking about.
Brent:
[59:13] Perfect. Thank you.
Keller:
[59:15] Thanks a lot, guys.
James:
[59:17] Very much enjoyed it.