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The Partisan Conflict Index hit 178 in November

Did you know that the Philadelphia Fed tracks something called the Partisan Conflict Index every month? They do. Here's what it looks like over the past couple of decades:

The spikes and one valley (for COVID) seem reasonable, but there's an odd upturn in early 2010. It's not a spike, it's a permanent increase. What caused it?

Two big things happened around then: Congress approved Obamacare and the Supreme Court opened the floodgates of corporate campaign contributions in Citizens United. Did one or both of these things usher in an era of permanently higher political conflict? Are there any other reasonable suspects?

(Alternatively, maybe this is a spike, and the permanent increase comes shortly afterward following the 2010 midterm election. Hmmm.)

As you might guess, the index is built on a computerized analysis of newspaper archives, which might or might not be reliable. In any case, the creator of the index has calculated it going back more than a century:

Generally speaking, the index shows low levels of conflict all the way from the 1920s through the 1960s. Then, almost precisely in 1970, it starts to shoot up. Things stabilize a bit in the 1980s and '90s and then begin to surge again around 2000.

I figure the surge in 2000 is likely due to the expansion of Fox News. But the 1970 surge? I'm befuddled by that one. It begins pre-Watergate and continues well after our withdrawal from Vietnam. What was it about the 1970s that caused a huge increase in partisan conflict? Ideas?

32 thoughts on “The Partisan Conflict Index hit 178 in November

  1. D_Ohrk_E1

    What was it about the 1970s that caused a huge increase in partisan conflict? Ideas?

    Civil rights and the expansion of other rights along those same lines.

  2. Amil Eoj

    "What was it about the 1970s that caused a huge increase in partisan conflict?"

    The Civil Rights revolution seems the obvious candidate--with its long tail, as the party system underwent its extended transformation from from two catchall parties with a large ideological overlap, into two programmatic, ideologically-compact rivals, with ever-shrinking overlap.

    This is the most fundamental change in US partisan politics in the last half century, and it's still working itself out.

  3. Master Slacker

    Toss up between kicking those dirty hippies and racial animosity developing following the overt conspiracies going public beginning with the Goldwater candidacy.

    1. zic

      There was a lot of change in the 1970's;

      - birth control became widely available and so women entered the workforce in every expanding numbers;

      - Watergate and Nixon, on top of anti-war sentiment from Vietnam increased as 1960's 'hippy culture" became pop culture. Men grew their hair long, women stopped shaving their legs and underarms and wearing bras, and everyone began to party;

      - The economy tanked family growth and interest rates went up to double digits for simple things like purchasing a home and car. This event was hidden from economist who were stuck measuring household income instead of hours worked for household income.

      - Civil rights began discomforting the nation's racist population. The Southern Strategy shifted the south from D to R. this change is finally fully formed with Trump.

      - The nation rebelled against point-source pollution, greatly improving the quality of life, particularly in industrial cities.

      But the single biggest change was the drop in family size.
      Boomers who remember large families of their childhood see today's small families as a sign of something seriously wrong with the world.

  4. Bruce

    1970s? LOL. Nixon is the one! Secret illegal war in Cambodia. Kent State. Watergate. Nixon's firing the special prosecutor, and the following GOP payback.

  5. Greg_in_FL

    Supreme Court decision Buckley v. Valeo, 1976. It ratified "money equals speech". It is the biggest single source of today's inequality, and conflict derives from it.

  6. bmore

    I tried to think back to then (yeah, if you can remember the 70's you weren't there) and I thought of the Beatles in the 60's then the long hair on boys, the family arguments about getting haircuts, then the hippies, the Vietnam war, demonstrations, the flag wavers and Gary Greenwood's God Bless the USA. I think that was a start, at least in my area, and it just escalated. Maybe in the South there was more about civil rights stirred into the mix. Later talk radio, Fox News, social media added more fuel to keep the fires going.

    1. Batchman

      ... Gary Greenwood's God Bless the USA ...

      Don't you mean Lee Greenwood (not Gary) -- and that song came out in 1984 so it's got no connection to the 60s or 70s.

  7. JRF

    This graph looks just like lots of other partisan polarization measures. That suggests it's measuring something similar. And the replies above have it right: the civil rights movement and school desegregation in the 1960s — plus the Supreme Court banning school prayer and related big fights of the era -- led to a partisan realignment and a new, much more highly polarized political reality in the country by the 1990s.

  8. skeptonomist

    Republicans oddly did not rely much on racism in the 2008 campaign, possibly because McCain forbade it, although there was some birtherism by then. But then the racism intensified - for one thing Trump picked up birtherism as others had given it up:

    https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-perpetuated-birther-movement-years/story?id=42138176

    Racism and religiosity should always be the first suspects when it comes to Republicans gaining advantage or increasing partisanship (plus anti-LGBTQ, misogyny, etc.). The media do not give a true picture of this as they almost always avoid implying that any of their readers/viewers/sponsors are racist. Of course there were the other issues that Kevin mentions at that time.

  9. rick_jones

    Then, almost precisely in 1970, it starts to shoot up.

    Almost. Maybe. The last trough was more like 1967. And the troughs were getting higher starting circa the mid 1950s…

  10. Altoid

    If we're talking about the rise and higher levels since almost precisely 1970, then I have to agree with Bruce's take that Nixon's the one, but with an addendum.

    Which is that it's also, and maybe more, what Nixon authorized-- does anybody else remember "nattering nabobs of negativism"? Agnew was deliberately turned loose and directed by Nixon to deride and demonize *both* the cultural/political opposition *and* the press. I don't know of anything like it before then. And it was very controversial at the time precisely because he went after the prestige media (and ironic too because iirc one of the galaxy brains behind it was Safire, the NYT columnist-- I think the "nabobs" phrase was his) as well as the draft-dodging hippie hedonists and all that. This is yet another point where we could say the contemporary GOP was born.

    Agnew's role could be especially influential if the index is based on some kind of measures of overtly expressed hostility, because party vs party language is probably a rough constant, but what Agnew unleashed was extravagantly harsh language against cultural enemies and the press, and some in their defense too.

  11. NealB

    Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll left a lot of Republicans behind starting back in the 70s. They've wanted desperately since then to catch up to the hippies, but no luck, so a lot of sour grapes and political strife.

  12. jdubs

    Civil rights era is disruption #1
    Black president is disruption #2

    Staying on theme...

    Black female candidate could be disruption #3?

  13. CFSmith

    The era of low partisan conflict coincides (albeit quite imperfectly) with the Immigration Act of 1924, superceded in 1965. As Mr Drum has pointed out, immigration above a certain level provokes a backlash, so we might expect a period of retrenchment on immigration to promote reduced political conflict. This is not very flattering to Americans, but recent experience should have disillusioned us on that point.

  14. illilillili

    The two items other comments miss are:
    * stagflation
    * the rise of environmentalism

    I was in L.A. in '72 and the smog gave us sore throats. Acid rain was becoming a problem. Partisan conflict is about denying corporations profiting off of damaging the environment. The oligarchs want free rein to dump their garbage anywhere, while society needs to regulate corporations to survive.

    The rising costs of oil in the 70s led to a need for society to use oil more efficiently. That is, regulating car fuel efficiency. That is, socialism.

    The 70s were when population growth and industrialization started to consistently create existential crises, bringing the Chamber of Commerce into conflict with society.

  15. AlHaqiqa

    I lived it. It was Viet Nam. People didn't realize what a murderous disaster it was until a few years into it. The government lied and taunted us about bringing it to an end as our friends and family members died. It was awful. The World War II generation thought it was our turn to fight for freedom, but we couldn't see the point. Major generation gap.

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