Voting at the Political Fault Line "ss2.32"

The Meaning of Moderation

The programmatic threat raised by this tendency of candidates to adapt to the expectations of their primary constituency occurs because the policy preferences of moderates vary by party: Democratic moderates are measurably more liberal than Republican moderates; GOP moderates are measurably more conservative than Democratic moderates.^[29] Consider the data in table 14.5, which presents the mean preferences of moderate Democrats and Republicans in four issue areas, stratified by the strength of their ideological commitments.

Measures. Ideological commitment is measured by the "strength" of the individual's preferences on two political issues (health care and the proper role of the government in addressing problems in the society) and the intensity with which they identify as liberal or conservative.^[30] This formulation allows respondents to share preferences on policy questions, but vary in the strength or intensity of that preference; and it is the strength of the preference that distinguishes a moderate.^[31] Those who express a strong preference on both issues and also describe themselves as "strongly" liberal or conservative are categorized as having a strong ideological commitment.

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TABLE 14.5 Political Preferences of Moderates
	Moderate		Weak		Strong
Ideological Commitment	Rep.	Dem.	Rep.	Dem.	Rep.	Dem.
NOTE: Table entries are issue-opinion scores. The most liberal score is 0; the most conservative score is 1.0.
Social spending	.32	.19	.26	.19	.29	.15
Policies aiding minorities	.55	.40	.57	.36	.57	.32
Active government	.66	.39	.64	.35	.66	.29
National health care	.63	.44	.71	.40	.55	.31
AVERAGE	.54	.36	.55	.33	.52	.27

A person who did not express a strong preference on either issue and did not identify strongly as a conservative or liberal is regarded as a moderate. All other response patterns are characterized as a weak ideological commitment.

The social spending measure is a summary index which measures the respondent's general preference to have the government spend more money on education, child care, the environment, poor people, and African-Americans. The index of policies to aid minorities is an additive measure based on support for affirmative action, a general feeling about the government's responsibility to assure equal opportunity to minorities, English-language requirements, and bilingualism in general. These indices were evaluated with a factor analysis, and their suitability for a single index was evaluated by Cronbach's alpha. The "active government" measure is a single item that asked the respondent's feeling about how active the government should be in dealing with problems. The national health care measure is a single question that asked whether the respondent felt that the government should be more active in ensuring adequate health care for all.

Results. The consistent result in the table is that differences between partisans of different parties far exceed issue preference differences among partisans. Republicans are more conservative than Democrats at every level of ideological commitment. The interparty differences increase with the strength of ideological commitment, but the change is small. The substantive opinions of Democratic moderates are almost as liberal as those of strongly committed Democrats; self-described Republican moderates have issue positions that are virtually indistinguishable from those of ideologically committed Republicans.^[32]

Table 14.6 displays this fact by calculating the average pairwise difference in two ways. The first column reports the average issue difference

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TABLE 14.6 The Partisan Meaning of Moderation
	Average Issue Distance
	Between Party Identifiers	Within Party Identifiers
NOTE: The between-party differences are significant at or above the .05 level by a onetailed test that expects Republicans to be more conservative than Democrats.
Social spending	.11	.03
Policies aiding minorities	.20	.03
Active government	.31	.04
National health care	.25	.10

between Democratic and Republican identifiers for any given level of ideological commitment. The number in the cell is the average difference, for each issue, of the issue scores of moderate Democrats compared to moderate Republicans, weakly committed Democrats compared to weakly committed Republicans, and strongly committed Democrats compared to strongly committed Republicans. The second column reports the average difference among partisans of the same party for any given intensity of ideological commitment. It reports, for each issue and among those who identify with the same party, the average issue-score difference between moderates, those weakly committed, and those with a strong commitment.

All of the differences within party identifiers hover just above zero. The between-party differences are noticeably larger. On average, for any given level of ideological commitment, Republicans are 11 points more conservative than Democrats on the social spending index, 20 points more conservative on the minority policy index, 31 points more conservative in their attitudes toward the appropriate role of the government, and 25 points more conservative on the question of the government's role in ensuring health care.

The consequences of this pattern are illustrated in figure 14.2. Because they are "moderate" in the intensity of their beliefs, they seem able to support a "moderate" candidate in the other party. But the "moderation" that makes a crossover vote easy for them brings to the winner's coalition a more programmatically heterogeneous constituency than would exist for a candidate selected within a closed primary. Crossover voters who find a moderate candidate more programmatically acceptable will create an incumbent with a nomination and reelection constituency that is significantly less liberal (if the incumbent is Democrat) or conservative (if Republican) than the constituency of a candidate elected in a closed primary. Figure 14.2 indicates what that might look like. Four positions are plotted. Each point is the average of the four issue positions discussed above.^[33] The arrows in the bottom half point to the observed averages for Democratic and Republican

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Figure 14.2. Projected issue positions of electorates in closed and blanket primaries.

identifiers. Presumably these scores would represent the issue constituency of a Democrat and Republican, respectively, in a closed primary. The top half of the figure calculates an issue score for a nomination constituency that is one-third partisans of the other party. For example, the nomination constituency of a "moderate strategy" Democrat in a blanket primary is approximately one-third Republican, and the issue preferences of this electorate reflect the size of the GOP vote and the issue positions characteristic of Republican identifiers.

It is pure speculation to assert that candidates elected under a blanket primary would shift as far to the center as the preferences of their voter's shift when a blanket primary produces crossover voting. However, as Adams's (1996) data demonstrates, a system that reduces a need to consider the preferences of opposition voters does create a more programmatically cohesive legislative delegation, and the blanket primary does the opposite. If the policy averages did move as much as the data in figure 14.2, it is easy to understand why crossover-elected legislators might cause policy cohesion within the parties to decline and issue conflict within the parties to increase.