Politics Isn't About Policy. Americans Agree.
The election's high stakes are rooted in survival and values, creating an opening for federalism.
With Election Day drawing near and emotions running high, I came across an interview from way, way, way back in 2021 between pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. Anderson works at Echelon Insights, a center-right research firm that produces quality public opinion and electoral analytics. During the interview, Klein highlights findings from an Echelon poll of registered voters showing that only 25 percent of Republicans believe politics is about “enacting good public policy,” while 46 percent say it’s about “ensuring the country’s survival as we know it.” Democrats were comparatively divided: 47 percent believed in “public policy,” and 38 percent chose “the country’s survival.” The remaining respondents in each camp were “unsure.”
Last month, Echelon revisited this question with likely voters: 68 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Democrats now believe politics is more about ensuring the survival of the country. The idea that politics is — or even should be — about policy seems peculiar outside of the intelligentsia. It’s a premise that is axiomatic across media and polling yet at odds with what political science literature has found, independent of what the electorate says in Echelon’s survey. What does that mean for democracy? Doesn’t it require a greater purpose to survive?
The same recent Echelon poll found that just 15 percent of likely voters thought the 2024 election is “about differences in policy ideas, and the country will ultimately be okay no matter who wins.” Conversely, 79 percent believed it to be “an existential decision for the country, and it will likely be irreparably harmed if the wrong candidate wins.”
There is a well-established literature in political science that concludes politics is not fundamentally about public policy but rather driven by group identity, partisanship, and psychological factors. Among them, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, in Democracy for Realists, argue that voters rarely make decisions based on policy preferences, relying instead on party loyalty and social identities, with minimal or nonexistent policy knowledge. Similarly, Philip Converse’s classic work highlights the low levels of policy consistency among average voters, showing that many lack a coherent ideological framework and instead rely on general party affiliations or candidate images. Other research shows that people who cite policy as their reason for voting often align with parties or candidates based on deeper social or identity-based factors, then rationalize their decisions by referencing policies associated with their chosen group — better known as motivated reasoning.
The bigger questions for me are: what do we lose (if anything) when policymaking is not at the forefront of governing? And if politics isn’t about solving problems, then what is it about?
Based on political science literature, it doesn’t appear that a non-policy-centric politics is existentially harmful or a sign of institutional decay, given that the country’s federal election outcomes haven’t been determined by policymaking (for the reasons mentioned) for at least as long as the phenomenon has been academically observed. Even on major public policy issues like economic inequality, there is often a disconnect among voters between the rhetoric to which they respond and the practical ways they evaluate their own economic well-being, which, contrary to media portrayals, is not relative to the wealthiest Americans. Furthermore, when federal lawmakers do come together for nuts-and-bolts bipartisan policymaking, the outcomes are not always stellar: the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, and the Affordable Housing and Community Development Act of 1977, to name a few. Even on the more recent CHIPS and Science Act, which is designed to increase the country’s semiconductor manufacturing, it remains unclear whether, or under what conditions, federal grants to private companies will be implemented, given the bureaucracy and mix of catered interests that often accompanies federal lawmaking.
So if politics isn’t about policy, what is it for? What is the ultimate purpose of all the hand-wringing over democracy? We seem to be in an era of values-centric politics that resists papering over clear divisions to advance federal policymaking.
It’s not hard to see why, for technocrats and journalists alike, values-centric politics is difficult to navigate. For technocrats, the goal is to “tinker” and solve problems, whatever that may mean. For journalists, the goal is to advance a consumable story relying on a linear narrative of progress. What constitutes solving a problem, and what constitutes progress, are ultimately values questions. Whether for the policy wonk or the investigative reporter, there isn’t pure objectivity or dispassion; no mathematical instruments or narratives can answer the question of what matters most. And what matters most to Americans seems regularly at odds with what matters to the people who get to frame what matters most.
For people like Ezra Klein, who straddle the line between technocrat and journalist, much has been made of U.S. democratic institutions as barriers to having a less polarized, more policy-centric politics. But the country is split 50-50. Supposing the federal government were governed by a sweeping and detached nationwide majority without recourse for the minority, it’s not obvious this would temper the political climate rather than further inflame it.
The upshot of living in an era of existential dread over a lack of shared national values is that it creates a vacuum for the American patchwork of states to fill. Seemingly irreconcilable divisions at the federal level, combined with recent Supreme Court decisions against executive overreach, create a wider opening for the states — and by that, the American public — to mediate and even resolve public policy challenges.
At the end of another interview with Anderson from January, Klein laments that election year is his least favorite year in politics because the stakes are too high. “I don’t want the chance of everything going wrong, the entirety, the fate of the world resting on a bunch of completely contingent factors. I mean, it’s terrifying. It’s a crazy way to run things.”
It is a crazy way to run things. It doesn’t have to be this way.
In a political media dominated by national narratives, That Patchwork is the only newsletter about democracy from a decentralist angle. To preserve democratic pluralism means challenging the primacy of national narratives that presume central power knows best.
