By Jonathan Bernstein / Bloomberg Opinion
New political-science research demonstrates just how much partisan media consumption can affect what citizens know about politics, government and public affairs. (I strongly recommend an item from Bloomberg Opinion’s Matt Yglesias explaining it.) But I’m less worried about how such media affects citizens than about how it can affect — indeed, has affected — a political party. Because the influence of Fox News, conservative talk radio and the rest of the ideological marketplace on the Republican Party has been important. And damaging.
Political parties in the U.S. are made up of a variety of party actors, including politicians, campaign and governing professionals, formal party officials and staff, donors and activists, partisan-aligned interest groups, and the partisan media. What almost all of them have in common are strong incentives for their party to win elections. That’s a good thing. Democracies work — in the sense of delivering good public policy — in large part because parties want to win elections and therefore try to please voters. So we want parties to be dominated by those who care about electoral incentives, even if it’s not the only thing motivating them.
So: Politicians care about winning elections because their careers depend on it. They may care about lots of other things, even enough to risk election sometimes for them, but if they care too much they’ll be gone before too long and replaced by someone who does care about winning.
Campaign professionals — pollsters, media specialists, campaign managers, etc. — care about winning because it advances their careers. They may also be strong partisans or care deeply about public policy, but the bottom line is that if they work for losing campaigns, they won’t be around long. Governing professionals, similarly, need the party to win for them to do what they’ve trained to do: run agencies, work on legislative staff, and all the other parts of governing that aren’t conducted by civil servants.
Formal party staffers and officials generally care about winning for the same reason campaign professionals do: It’s good for their careers. As organizations, formal parties (that is, groups such as the Texas Republican Party or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) have a variety of reasons to want to win elections. It usually gives them larger budgets, higher status within the party and perhaps other perks enjoyed by those close to elected officials.
Activists, donors, and party-aligned interest groups all tend to want certain policy outcomes, and without winning elections they can’t achieve those goals. Each of these groups tends to vary between purism and pragmatism; between caring so much about representing policy goals that they’re willing to sacrifice elections to stand for them, and caring so much about elections that they’re willing to give up any policy that could threaten winning. But most activists, donors and even the most symbolically driven interest groups still usually have at least a bit of interest in actually enacting their policy goals.
As for those in the party-aligned media? It’s not just that they have no financial or professional interest in the party winning elections. It’s that their incentives run the other way. In a familiar pattern, since Joe Biden became president, Fox News ratings are up and MSNBC ratings are down. Negative partisanship is crucial for media consumption; nothing gets partisans paying attention to political news more than strongly disliking the president and other elected officials. And while I doubt that Sean Hannity (at Fox) or Rachel Maddow (at MSNBC) actively want their parties to lose, the fact that professional incentives call for just that cannot help but make a difference to what those networks do overall.
All of that is generically true for any U.S. party. What’s different about contemporary Republicans is that party-aligned media has become overwhelmingly important within their party. For one thing, it’s a lot more successful than Democratic-aligned media. The effects of 50 years or more of Republicans successfully demonizing the neutral media might also play a role. But whatever the reason, it’s simply the case that Republican-aligned media is disproportionately influential within the party.
The results are exactly what one would expect. Republicans do fine for the most part in elections as the out-party, because when an incumbent is on the ballot an election is mainly about whether he or she is doing a good job. Without the incentive to win elections, Republican elected officials increasingly have no reason to try to make voters happy (or more precisely: The politicians have that incentive, but the party as a whole does not and that’s what matters).
As a result, their ability to advance public policy atrophies, and eventually they lose interest in nominating candidates who are equipped to govern; or even interested in doing so. More and more, the party is driven by what their media cares about: Finding the things that most activate their most loyal audience, and repeating them as much as possible.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
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