Let's Find Common Ground - What Americans Want from Politicians— And What They're Not Getting: Sean Westwood

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

American politics are often dominated by the loudest voices on the left and right. In this episode, we learn the crucial difference between what Americans get from their elected representatives and what they really want to hear. Professor Sean Westwood of Dartmouth College is our guest. As Director of The Polarization Research Lab, he studies American political behavior and public opinion, examining how partisanship and information from political elites affect the behavior of citizens.   "There is an absolute need for common ground," Sean Westwood tells us. The research shows that most Democrats and Republicans "know very little about the other side and have significant misperceptions."  We learn why elites, including political leaders and celebrities, have a powerful impact on public behavior. "When we humanize the opposition and bring politicians together and demonstrate how they can have civil disagreement, you set norms that the public will follow," he says. 

What do Americans want from their politicians and aren't getting? That's what this podcast is all about. Our politics are often dominated by the loudest voices on the left and right. The elected officials who make the most negative or outrageous claims about the other side get the most coverage. In the next 30 minutes, we hear about why political leaders and celebrities have a powerful impact on public behavior and why most Americans have misconceptions about the other side.

If you are to rebuild, respect in politics, it has to start at the top. This is Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Ashley Melntite. And I'm Richard Davies. Our guest is Professor Sean Westwood of Dartmouth College. As director of the Poeurization Research Lab, he studies American political behavior and public opinion. Sean looks at how partisanship and information from political elites affect the behavior of our citizens. He has a lot of data to back up what he's saying, Richard, you kick things off. First question. The 2024 presidential campaign is likely to be highly negative, both the messaging from the candidates and the media coverage as well, is this what the public wants?

The public do not respond to negativity. There's an impression among candidates, there's an impression among those who work for candidates that if you go negative, you'll hurt the other side, you'll persuade the other side's voters to stay home, you'll persuade the other side. You'll persuade the other side's voters to stay home. You'll persuade the other side's voters to perhaps even switch to support in your candidate. But the data just really don't bear that out. To a certain extent, it's the case that negativity is a common play, but a very ineffective play. So what a vote is want instead? The public want their representatives

to provide positive and informative messages throughout the campaign. And they want to be able to use the information that they gain from a positive campaign messages to determine who they're going to vote for. And just relying on negativity, money's the ground. It prevents undecided voters from getting the information they need in order to make an informed choice. One of the most striking findings from your research is that negative political advertising

does not work. So then what should politicians do instead to persuade voters to support them? Because the vast majority do these negative ads. Not only do negative ads not work, but ads in general tend not to work. And that's largely because of the lack of content within them. So in 30 seconds, it's very hard to provide a nuanced, detailed policy platform. It's very challenging to describe your position on any given issue, let alone the entire range of issues that a voter is going to consider when making

her choice for president. So what is effective is not necessarily advertising. It's face-to-face contact. It's getting out the vote. It's engaging with the voters in an attempt to get them to shock the polls. So these kinds of easy moments of contact that we have at the television ad, that's just not the most effective way to reach voters or to persuade voters to actually go over the polls and vote. That finding might surprise many political professionals and it certainly goes up against the campaign budgets of decades of political campaigns. So what do you know from your research that political professionals don't?

Well, so there are really two things the first first of which is an unfortunate fact of the consultant model, but they get compensation from AdVice. So part of the compensation that they get from working with the candidate is by taking a cut of the overall AdVice. So there's an incentive for them to spend money on advertisements. The second thing is that there's a fear of not doing what is expected. So if you're a candidate and you run campaign ads, you're going to look like a regular candidate. If you're a candidate and you don't run campaign ads, suddenly the news outlets will start asking questions. I think we saw this quite clearly in 2016, when Donald Trump was not spending much on advertising,

the media reported constantly on Donald Trump is not spending on advertising. Can he win the election? Donald Trump doesn't have a traditional media profile. Can he win the election? And in 2016, he shocked the political world and he did win the election. What did your research say about how Americans view

election candidates and campaigns? Americans are generally very disappointed in elections. They're disappointed in presidential candidates and they're disappointed with Congress. At the same time, they report that they want to see policy. They want to see compromise. They want to see meaningful action coming from our elected officials. We don't need to exist in a world where we're focused on conflict over policy.

We don't need to live in a world where campaigns are focused not necessarily so much on what a candidate might do for the country, but what they might prevent the other side from doing to the country. So it's important for us to understand that Americans want their politicians to do work. They want Americans, they want politicians to deliver goods and services and policy to constituents. And when they see candidates and when they see elected officials not doing that, it makes them less trustworthy of the system and makes them less supportive of the system and it makes them less positive towards not only the candidates or the elected officials who are running for office, but also to the entire

federal electoral system. Doesn't make them less likely to vote? Doesn't make them most likely to vote, yeah. We did a recent episode with Governor Spencer Cox of Utah and he is the chair of the National Governors Association and came up with this initiative called Disagree Better. Part of it is modeling good behavior by politicians both red and blue, appearing together at public events, even making political ads together. Is that kind of stuff effective? Does that work? So I think we need to recognize that politicians set the norms of the game.

So if you see elected officials engaged in conflict, if you see elected officials fighting with one another, that tells you that that's how politics is done. If you see elected officials engaged in the kind of respectful debate that Governor Cox is so intent on rebuilding a country, that sends a message to voters that that's what politics should look like. So if you want to change how politics is conducted in this country, if you want to change the nature of political conflict. I think one of the most powerful things you can do is demonstrate that politicians don't necessarily need to fight with one another. And politicians can have very different policy positions. Politicians can have very different views on the way in which America should move forward,

but still respect, why not? So it's not so much that this is going to motivate individuals to vote or we'll vote for one of the candidates who's appearing in these kinds of messages over the other, but it's about resetting the norms that politics is subject to. Well, I was just going to say, we know this, if you know your research shows that we, the people don't respond positively to all this negativity, then why people still doing it? Is it just because it's the way they've been doing things for however long? It's the way things have been done. You want your side to win and you want the other side to lose. We've lost the nuance between wanting your side to win and the other side to lose and viewing your side as always superior

and the other side is always inferior. We see so many examples of overtly bad behavior by politicians, especially, you know, cable news and social media. Donald Trump is, of course, famous for his name calling fairly recently. He sort of compared the, you know, I think he called the radical left to vermin, and that's just one example. But did this type of thing have an impact on voters? So it does. The voters respond to the norms they're set by elites. If you are an American and you see

your politicians are now calling the opposing side vermin or inhuman or anti-American or unpatriotic, that's telling you that you should follow suit. If you want to rebuild respect in politics, it has to start at the top. And the kind of rhetoric that we now see coming from elected officials about the other side are not only bad because we don't want

to see our elected officials saying those kinds of things. But it's bad in that it's telling voters that this is how they should be the other side. This is how they should talk about the other side. How desperate is the crisis currently facing the American political system? There are a lot of scholars who think that we're on the verge of the Civil War. Objectively, the data don't support that. So the data show that we hate the other side,

but we're not willing to violate democratic norms. We're not willing to support political violence. So even the most extreme Americans, those who are most inflamed in their views of the other side, do not support the end of the American experiment. They do not support armed insurrection, they do not support the kinds of things that would be necessary to stabilize democracy in this country. So certainly we should be concerned about negativity. Certainly we should be concerned about the fact that politicians and everyday Americans are denigrating other sides so openly and so

frequently, but that doesn't mean that we should feel the end of democracy in our past. We are at a point where things could get worse, but there's not today at a point where we cannot save ourselves or rebuild our country. A few months ago, you appeared at an event organized by the National Governors Association to discuss their campaign called Disagree Better. And that's aimed at fostering open debate and healthy conflict when governors and other political leaders step up and encourage civility in this way, can it make a difference?

To come, I think that what we need to recognize is there's a distinction between attacking the other side and attacking the policy positions of the other side. One is helpful and one is destructive. And I think this initiative isn't about making debate disappear. It's not about making the members of both parties agree on policy. It's about making the members of both parties who are rational discussion about policy. So if you want to challenge a policy, do so on its merits. And just setting that norm of respectful and reasonable disagreement can have substantial effects on the citizenry, right?

If you show them how debate can happen, if you show them how civil disagreement can occur, you're prompting them to follow up in your footsteps. You've said that people tend to model their own behavior on how the people they respect behave, and so far we've been talking about politics, but does this also extend to the broader culture? I think that's something that's lost, I think, and in a lot of the discussions that we have about the power of political elites or elected officials, we are very well aware of the power that celebrities have over culture, the power that they have over what is acceptable and what is not acceptable within society. It's certainly the case that we know that young women and young men develop their worldview

from what they see online, from what they see on see, from what they see in the movie theater. It's the same logic that underpins the connection between elect officials and citizens on politics. So if you see LeBron James acting as a good citizen, if you see LeBron James being a strong male figure, that's going to cue that kind of positive behavior to those who are following LeBron James being a strong male figure, that's going to cue that kind of positive behavior to those who are following LeBron James. If you're an elected official who's engaged in civility, if you're an elected official who's prior kind, it's in policy over conflict, that's going to filter down to those who pay attention to what you say.

It's certainly the case that elites or celebrities drive behavior. And we've disconnected the notion, disconnected the linkage between elected officials and the citizenry, in a way that's kind of allowed elected officials to kind of go crazy and allowed the citizenry to follow suit. We're telling citizens that to be a good Democrat is to hate the Republicans,

to be a good Republican is to hate Democrats. Sean Westwood of the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth. This is Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Richard. And I'm Richard. And I'm Ashley. At the beginning of our last episode, we mentioned that common ground committee co-founder Bruce Bond died just before the start of the new year. Bruce's passion for finding common ground and pushing back against rigid divides is at the heart of everything we do. And we want to share with you a couple of his thoughts about our common ground scorecard. First of all, what is it? Here's Bruce talking about the scorecard in a podcast last spring. card is a tool that we created for voters that allows the voter to see to what degree a candidate

is likely to work across the aisle to make progress as opposed to hold the ideological line. It's a score of 0 to 100. It scores all senators, all representatives and the House of Representatives and governors and also president. And the ideas before you go and vote, you wanna check what the common ground score is for the candidate that you're interested in. By the way, it's not just the incumbents, but the challengers as well. And so you have a sense of the degree

to which someone is going to be bipartisan in the work that they do if they are elected. Bruce Bond on Artek, the podcast he recorded last year with Eric Olson, co-founder of Common Ground Committee. Both of them met with members of Congress on Capitol Hill. Bruce shared a story of what happened during one meeting. We're visiting with a Congresswoman who is a high-score in the common ground score card.

And her staff let us know as we were sitting down that she had a meeting with Secretary Blinken, Secretary of State, immediately following. And we had like, I forget, 20 minutes is the most we were going to be able to do. While 30 minutes into the conversation, her staff is like pulling on her to get the heck out, to go meet with the secretary. She was so engaged in the conversation because we were talking about how we could make progress and the dynamic of bipartisanship growing within Congress. She was so wrapped up in the conversation that she didn't want to leave.

And... The ground was just too compelling. It was too compelling. Exactly. What? Our co-founder Bruce Bond speaking last year. Find out more about the scorecard at commongroundscorkard.org. It'll be a useful tool for voters throughout this year.

Learn how your elected politicians and challenges are rated on how much or how little they work to find common ground. Now more from our interview with Sean Westwood. Sean, how did you get interested in this topic? How do you come to be so involved with this whole world of polarization and difference and people's behavior? So I think what's most interesting here is that politics has grown to the point where we no longer limit our political biases to things that are directly related to politics. So if you dislike the other side, that's going to translate into the kinds of people that you're willing to spend time with, the kinds of people that you would

like to work with, the kinds of people that you would like your children to marry. So I was really concerned about how politics has spread into the eight political world and had wondered how serious that problem is and then secondly is that something that's happening on both sides of the aisle and that's what really got me into looking at partisan animosity. It's not just that it's having destructive effects in the political realm. It's not just that it's having destructive effects in the political realm. It's that it's having destructive effects in the social realm.

I really wanted to understand why that is happening. What sort of destructive effects? So if you were climb to a job and you list experience with one of the two political parties. If your employer is at the other political party, they're less likely to call you back for an interview. If you apply for a scholarship and you list of verbally political activities on your resume, you're less likely to get that scholarship. If you list your political affiliations on a dating profile, you're less likely to

receive matches. So it's dividing the workplace, it's dividing the social spaces where we would look for a life partner, it's dividing how we build our friend networks online, it's divided how we see ourselves in our community. It's the case that partisanship is ever present in people's minds today in a way that it wasn't a very some past. Partisanship is ever present, but are people actually

more interested in politics? So that's an important distinction. Americans today don't know very much about politics. Most Americans cannot describe the policies that are being debated in Congress. But it turns out that doesn't really matter for animosity. Animosity isn't so much about policy disagreement, it isn't so much about principal divisions between the party, it's much more tribal. We're in a world where partisanship and partisan animosity

don't necessarily require that an individual know much about politics. It could just simply be, I'm in this group and I don't like the other group as a consequence. And how does that compare to times past? I mean, like, I don't know, the 60s or 70s, well, we better informed then and perhaps less partisan as well?

We were certainly not, but I'm informed then. It is, unfortunately, the case that political knowledge is something that has always been relatively low in this country. But what has changed is the extent to which Americans view the opposing party as bad or un-American. So in the 1960s and the 70s, things were a lot better in terms of how we view the other side. And since the 80s, we've been on this downward path to present where the majority of Americans don't have a positive view of the other side and a substantial portion have no positive

feelings whatsoever towards the other side. What's changed is that today we have permanent campaigns with a presidency. In the past, when you would get your news, it would come from MULTIR Prankhite, it would come from ABC, your CBS, or NBC, and you would get a more holistic view of the world. Today, people can partitions that they're conservative, they watch Fox News, if they're liberal, they watch Fox News, if they're liberal, they watch MSNBC. In the past, it was very difficult to avoid politics and news. In a world where there were five channels on TV at 11 o'clock at night, you were watching the news, or you weren't

watching TV. Today, people could just tune out and watch the Kardashians or sports or Netflix or whatever they want. People can really build their own echo chambers, and when they do stick their head out, they're watching politicians constantly fighting from the presidency, constantly disparaging of their side on cable news, constantly engaging in the kind of communication that just wasn't possible in the pre-internet, in the pre-twitter,

in the pre-social media error, in the pre-twitter, in the pre-social media error. You mentioned social media has technology, has social media given us all a megaphone to shout from the rooftops, even when we don't have a thought on our heads, or we haven't seriously considered anything, but we just want to vent. It certainly has. It's certainly done that for the average American, but more importantly, it's done it for elected

officials. So, if you were a member of Congress from a district that was relatively unimportant nationally, your constituents are going to hear your daily thoughts, right? You make it coverage in your local newspaper, If you do something that's incredibly important, you make a national coverage. Today, that same number of Congress can say whatever they want on Twitter and reach an audience. If it becomes viral, they might reach a large subset

of the American population. And if it's particularly negative, and if it's particularly attention-grabbing, it might reach the national news. So in the past, you would get news coverage because of accomplishment or because of something that you had done for your constituents. Today, there's this short circuit where if you say something that's particularly aggressive and particularly negative, that in and of itself can become news. that in itself can become news. And speaking of what Americans think of each other

and the influence of the news and social media on all of us, do the red and blue tribes actually know what the other side thinks or are some of their perceptions off. The sad truth is that Americans know very little about the other side and have significant misperceptions. So we don't know who's in the opposing party, we can't accurately describe the composition of the opposing party. We think that they're much more evil, or the faradis when it comes to challenging democracy. And we also think that they're much, much more likely to support political violence than they actually are.

I know that the divide is the most striking. So the truth is, about 2% of the American public would sanction a politically motivated murder. But if you look at perceptions of the other side, it could be 10 or 20 times larger than reality. Most political discussions assume that were either members of the red tribe or the blue tribe, but very large numbers of voters identify as independent.

What about them? The truth is that if we look at independence, most behave like partisans. So if you are to follow up in a survey and ask, so you said that you don't affiliate with the Democratic or the Republican party, are you closer to one party than the other? Most will say, well, I'm actually closer to the Democratic party, or I'm actually closer to the Republican party. So the truth is that only about 8 to 10% of voters, or what we call pure independent, which is to say that they wouldn't say that they

lead towards one party or the other. Independence in a lot of ways are just closet partisans. We have a very small group of Americans who are truly independent. And if you actually look at their characteristics, they're very uninformed. They don't pay attention to the news. They don't really follow what's going on in politics. So you can make a pretty convincing argument that they're not independent because they value political independence. They're independent because they just don't care about politics and they don't care enough

to figure out a third-democratic or Republican. So what do most voters of any stripe care about the most? Overwhelmingly, it's almost always the economy. So if you want to understand the fate of a president, if you want to understand the fate of a congress in terms of party control, the single best predictor is the same in the economy. But you look at media coverage, the economy often gets less attention than something like abortion or the culture wars. The problem with the culture war is that it resonates very, very strongly with people who are loud and angry, and it doesn't resonate with those who are quieter or less willing to express themselves on social media or in comments on news articles or in social

conversation. So you get the false impression that the culture war is the single largest divide in America. Within reality, you just have a very large group of vocal individuals who are trying to focus on culture war issues. It's not what average Americans are thinking. Average Americans today, frankly, are thinking about how am I going to be able to make it to next month, given that I've got $300 in my checking account,

or how am I going to pay for this huge tax bill that I'm getting from the state, or the county, for my home? They're not thinking about whether or not we should allow individuals to compete on sports teams, if they're not currently identifying with the gender on their birth certificate. So do you think that a lot of elected political leaders,

or even the Supreme Court, are they out of touch with what most Americans care about and what they want? I think they are. For the Supreme Court, I don't know if that's a problem necessarily because they're not meant to be a reflection of American political will. They're meant to be a reflection of the law. But for politicians, we certainly have seen incidents recently where their views

are how to align with the preference of America. And I think you can see that on both sides of the aisle. You can see that on immigration. You can see that on the enforcement of minor property crimes. You can see that on abortion. You can see that on access to marijuana. You can see that on a variety of issues where the majority of the public have one attitude. And the politicians who represent that group of citizens are misaligned, and we don't share that. Our show is Let's Find Common Ground,

and we're produced by Common Ground Committee, which is a group that emphasizes the positive aspects of bringing people of different points of view together, very often political leaders. Is there a need to find common ground to help repair the misconceptions that many of us have about the other side? There is absolutely a common ground and what we know is that when you do humanize the opposition, when you bring politicians together and demonstrate that they can have, you know, civil disagreement,

you set norms that the public will follow. It's absolutely necessary. So we may not necessarily be able to have a discussion with somebody from the other political party, but if we can watch our elected officials have that discussion for us or have that debate for us, that can help not only set the norms of how politics should be conducted, but that can help inform us on the policies themselves, the positions of the two parties, of the priorities of the two parties. We certainly want to see individuals exposed to responsible contact between members of the two parties. It's absolutely critical.

Thank you so much for joining us, Sean, on Let's Find Common Ground. Yeah, happy to do it. Professor Sean Westwood on Let's Find Common Ground. Find all of our episodes online at commongroundcommity.org slash podcasts. We also have more about this episode on our show page. If you want to hear more podcasts, help us with a donation larger or smaller. You can use your smartphone. Yeah, text to donate.

5,3,5,5,5, and then type the letters CGC into the message. That's 5355 followed by CGC. You can also donate at our website. That's our show. I'm Richard Davies. I'm Ashley Melntite. Thanks for listening. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. C-group.