“Gone with the Wind”
Ideological consistency is a beautiful and rare thing. So rare in fact that I could easily imagine Indiana Jones searching for it in an ancient Lost temple… which I’ll include for your enjoyment.
I didn’t invoke Indiana Jones with
the title of this blog though, I invoked Gone with the wind, and here is why.
Even though the average person may not be the most consistent, they tend to
change positions slowly. There’s a gradual shift from one belief to the next.
The winds of today’s political climate though seem to be carrying people from
one position to the next with increasing rapidity. To illustrate this, I’ll
provide an example from my recent Facebook feed.
This meme and others like it are a
pretty common part of the current political culture, and they seem to represent
a striking ideological inconsistency. For context, this meme was posted by a
conservative friend and a diehard republican. Where in the past, this
individual would have championed the right of any businesses to do whatever
they want on their property, suddenly the mask issue has become so important
that the rights of businesses don’t matter. If any person were to ask him about
his positions on private property rights, then he would undoubtedly uphold he
would and still does uphold private property rights and the rights of business
while on company property, not realizing the hypocrisy of his posts. This issue
isn’t just cropping up among conservative either. My friends on the left have
been just as guilty of these shenanigans.
Expressive Partisanship
The example
above highlights a political science concept known as expressive partisanship.
As a little bit of background, there are two forms of partisanship that are
relevant to this discussion. The first is Instrumental Partisanship, and the
other is Expressive Partisanship. Instrumental partisanship is a form
of rationality-based relationship to the party. This way of looking at a voter
behavior explains party loyalty in terms of ideology, policy preferences, and
candidate options. A person that acts based on Instrumental Partisanship would
stay with their party because that party shares their goals, or because the
party is effective at passing legislation that the individual supports. They
would also be likely to cut ties if the party were to abandon the principles of
the voter. The Expressive model of partisanship looks at things differently.
Expressive partisanship represents a psychological, identity-based, or
potentially an emotional connection to the party. For a person that exhibits
expressive partisanship, the party’s short-term positions don’t matter as much
as supporting the team (party) against the evil opposition.
Expressive
partisanship also ties to another political science concept that bears weight
in this situation and is known as “Partisan Motivated Reasoning.” Motivated reasoning happens when
an individual takes in information with the underlying goal of proving their
own position. When tied to partisanship, this results in a mentality that
allows an individual to discount and filter out dissonant information, or at
least recolor it so that it fits the broader narrative of the party. It has
also been shown to have the effect of allowing a member of a party to accept
changes in party position because the voter makes proving the party right their
primary goal rather than finding the correct position to take on an issue.
Although neither expressive
partisanship nor partisan-motivated reasoning represents a perfect
representation of how the world works, both models provide some insight into
what happened with my friend and the many others that I’ve seen posting similar
things. In the heated climate of today’s politics, these friends that have
formed deep ties to their respective political parties are following the cues
of the broader organization. In the case of my republican friend, he seems to
be following the lead of party elites in opposing masks. Although this may have
started with opposition to government mask orders, attacks from the other side
lead the conservatives to take harder and harder stances on masks, to the point
where the conservative ends up arguing that a business can’t regulate the
actions of others on their property. In doing so, he offers us an example of
both expressive partisanship and motivated partisan reasoning.
So What?
Developing a partisan identity is
pretty common. Just think of the last time you said, “I’m a Democrat” or “I’m a
Republican.” The important thing is not to get so wrapped up in your partisan
identity that you lose track of what you actually believe. In the build-up to
the election, the parties have every reason to move between positions and
attack each other in any way they can. If you don’t want to end up accidentally
supporting positions you oppose or fighting positions you support, then a good
solution is to pay extra attention to your goal when learning new information.
Make sure that your primary aim is to get closer to the truth rather than to
confirm your opinions. Otherwise, you may find your that your beliefs have been
swept away by the ever-changing winds of
