The topic of this blog is to investigate the following question:

Where do people’s political stances come from? Can they change?

Political stances are (probably) the biggest source of disagreement and conflict in societies and families, making this question relevant.

In the US, the Democratic and Republican parties have taken roughly half the votes each presidential election for the past 200 years. This is despite the fact that these parties have changed their policies over time. Indeed, the Republican party chose not to even write a platform (i.e., present new policy ideas) for the 2020 election. This to me hints at the possibility that people’s political affiliation with the parties (or their leaders) is stronger than the specific policies that these parties support.

1. Democratic/Republican parties always divide votes in an about 50/50 ratio. People’s affiliation with political parties appears to be the constant. Not their actual support for certain policies, which do change over time.

Most political parties like to position themselves on a political spectrum. This is a space divided with some arbitrary axes (left-right, progressive-conservative, big governement-small governement, …). A crucial feature of the political spectrum is that the origin is not fixed – neither in time (the conservative aim to preserve the status quo is not what it was 200 years ago) nor in place (the left-leaning Democratic party is a center-right party when compared to European parties). I think the political spectrum is interesting for two reasons. First of all: the lack of an origin means that, e.g., right-wing ideas can seem more “centrist” (i.e., moderate) when more extremist ideas are introduced. This principle can be seen through the eye of the Overton Window, the range of politically acceptable ideas at a given time. It has political consequences when politics are discussed within the view of a spectrum (as they nearly always are).

2. The “centrist” views of politics exist only relative to extremist political views. Even when an extremist candidate/party fails to gain power, they still have the ability to morph the spectrum in their direction, i.e., to move the Overton Window. When person X is not “far-right”, it doesn’t immediately mean they are “left” – even though they are often made out to be such. In this sense, the political spectrum has become a very real entity in modern politics.

Second of all, the political spectrum is treated like real space to occupy. Like a game of Monopoly. Parties want to get the most votes. Parties want to conquer as much usable space on the political spectrum as possible – and steal from the other party where possible. Ideally, this means that you draw up policies that appeal to a majority of the population and then get their support. This is how we traditionally see elections in a democracies, people responding to proposed party policy. But an opposite force exists too, where party policy’s follow the people. For example, parties copy a popular policy idea from another party, and then ostracize them. And there are two more ways of succeeding at the goal of getting the most votes: (1) remain as vague as possible about your actual policies, such that your ideas simultaneously appeal to both extremist and moderate people on the political spectrum, (2) present the other parties’ ideas as sufficiently different, in such a way that their policies appear to take up minimal space on the political spectrum (e.g., by saying they the other parties’ policies are extremist, you may scare people away who do not identify as extremist).

3. An effective way of winning space on the political spectrum is to follow (rather than lead) the people: steal policy ideas from other parties and rally people around vague policies (to appeal to a popular and varied space on the spectrum) and demonize another party about their specific policies (to paint them into a far-away corner on the political spectrum). Having specific policies may be a liability rather than an asset, in this view.

One of the primary objectives of US political parties these days is to keep the opposing party out of power. This is not controversial, and is behavior found on both ‘sides’. Caricatures are the name of the game here. For example, Fox News will tell you that voting Democrat will turn the country into a communist (or Islamist?) nation with open borders, with millions of immigrants raping and terrorizing the people, etcetera. I would also hypothesize that this particular situation appears primarily in winner-takes-all democracies. In a democracy with many minor parties, coalitions have to be made. This is relatively common in Western Europe. Presenting yourself as “vote-for-me-because-we’re-not-the-other-parties” is not unique enough. Voting on party B to prevent party A from becoming too powerful does not stop parties C, D, E, …, to gain power. Protest votes have only a limited appeal.

4. A winner-takes-all electoral system (as found in practice in the US, the UK, …) turns politics into much more divisive us-vs-them elections. In this setting, again, having specific policies is more of a liability than an asset.

Political stances, on average, correlate with (1) geography (e.g., north-south divides, rural-city divides, geological history, …), (2) socio-economic-cultural classes (e.g., rich-poor, black-white-Latino, …), (3) past voting behavior, and even (4) biology and psychology (e.g., see twin-study research, neurological and psychological research, …). What, then, is the point of a political debate, if someone’s political stance is already decided to a large degree? Indeed, a study in 1978 already found no evidence that a presidential debate made people change their minds about who to vote for. And this generally holds true today. Only when a political candidate makes a gaffe (e.g., appearing stupid, unpresidential, not caring, …), there may be negative consequences for a political vote. I thus indeed think that political debates are not very effective as we would like them to be.

5. Political debates are a not-so important factor in changing people’s voting behavior.

Hence, I come to the following opinion I’ve formed on the topic.

People have a feeling of where they stand on the political spectrum (e.g., one may identify themselves as a “center-left progressive big-government with interest in Green issues”). They then look for a party that confirms these choices (i.e., not via persuasion by policy ideas, but via alignment between the party’s place in the political spectrum and themselves). The political spectrum is shaped by the most extreme voices. The position of a political party on the political spectrum is thus relative to these extreme voices, and relative to other parties. Following this argument, we can expect US politics to always be split roughly 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats, because it seems that people are simply split about 50/50 between feeling “liberal” and “conservative”, regardless of the actual policies of these parties.

A scientific study carried out in Denmark further supports this point of view. “[…] we show that citizens’ policy opinions changed immediately and substantially when their party switched its policy position—even when the new position went against citizens’ previously held views.”