Here's yet another thing I discovered recently while looking for something else: an index of partisan conflict maintained by the Philadelphia Fed. Why does the Fed track this? I don't know. But here it is:
If this index is worth anything, it suggests that partisan conflict was actually on a slight downward slope from the Reagan era all the way through the end of the Bush presidency. When Obama was elected it suddenly shot up, and it shot up again when Trump was elected. It peaked during the first few months of the Trump presidency and then plummeted for the next four years, eventually ending up at the old pre-Obama level.
Needless to say, this is not the conventional wisdom. Those of us who follow politics would guess that partisan conflict rose sharply when Newt Gingrich came to power; rose again during the Clinton impeachment; fell after 9/11; and then rose during the Iraq War. But according to the Philadelphia Fed, none of those things had any impact at all. It was only Obama and Trump who had any lasting effect, with brief surges during the fiscal cliff episode of 2013¹ and the attempt to repeal Obamacare in 2017. And conflict has been calming down for the past few years despite two impeachments, a pandemic, an insurrection, and an endless presidential Twitter stream of outrage.
(In case you're interested, the lowest level of partisan conflict ever recorded was in April 2020, when everyone sang kumbaya and passed the first COVID rescue bill. But it didn't last.)
Anyway, this index is based on the frequency of newspaper articles reporting disagreement in a given month. Is this legit? Beats me. But it's certainly an interesting pushback to the conventional wisdom about the era from 1984-2008.
¹This is only barely visible on my smoothed version of the chart, but it's quite noticeable on the Fed's version.
To these Mk I eyeballs the chart remained above the just before Obama era.
What an extraordinarily stupid way to measure something like this.
Beyond sample bias (we know how the media loves to report on conflict and promote false equivalence/give outsize attention to both-sides-isms)... this is just a stupid way to measure partisan conflict.
The polarization and "the big sort" charts we're all familiar with are much better.
. . . based on the frequency of newspaper articles reporting disagreement in a given month.
Seems to suggest it illustrates newspapers' unwillingness to admit there is disagreement, and that cloaked in both-siderism, lest it make wingnuts cry.
Newspapers usually have the same number of pages on a given day of the week and TV broadcasts are usually the same length unless there is a huge catastrophe, and political events do not make for such catastrophes. Newspapers always have politics, just like they have sections for fashion, puzzles, sports and many other things. And the political section is usually about how the parties disagree. So the magnitude of the disagreement is not necessarily something that causes the number of stories to vary a great deal. It would be interesting to know whether the index is based only on news stories, or includes opinion pieces. It's the opinion pieces which have been pointing out how disagreement has increased - to a large extent that is an opinion or may be so regarded by the media.
There are indexes based on Congressional votes which probably give a better idea of the depth of political disagreement.
Hmmmm....sounds like something to study. Would number newspaper articles be a good measure of rancor?
What the actual fuck? That is the stupidest fucking methodology I've heard of in 6 months.
If you take this graph seriously, partisan conflict in the last decade has been all about Obama and his ill-conceived brainchild, Obamacare. John McCain smoothed the roiled waters by turning his thumb down. Moses would have approved.
> Those of us who follow politics would guess that partisan conflict rose sharply when Newt Gingrich came to power; rose again during the Clinton impeachment; fell after 9/11; and then rose during the Iraq War.
There is a difference between partisan rhetoric and partisan conflict. Gingrich et al certainly upped the rhetoric, but there wasn't much by way of actual conflict as Clinton etc moved Right and partnered with Gingrich on a wide variety of policies. Sure there was impeachment, but even that was largely viewed as a sideshow, "the circus" part of the bread&circuses.
Iraq War was another partisan event that resulted in a lot of rhetoric, but not much by way of policy fights. Even Dems elected in 2006 largely gave Bush what he wanted in Iraq and didn't push the country to the brink of insolvency if they didn't get their way.
2009 marked a different era however.
As others have noted, this is a ridiculous methodology. But I'll add - I'd like to know what the Fed is purporting to do with this garbage data.
The paper describing the study including methodology is at https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-papers/2014/wp14-19.pdf?la=en&hash=4636E1FE57D844C4DFECAB88D1CB1D47 It seems to have grown out of a wish to measure conflict's relationship to economic uncertainty, which explains the PA Fed's interest. However it still focuses narrowly on conflict over legislation. Consequently it would miss completely conflict over gay marriage, Supreme Court appointments, presidential impeachments and so on.
i'll just add the the chorus of "the methodology for compiling this partisan conflict index don't seem to be reliable for measuring anything useful".