Political calcification in the US presidential elections – 01/28/2024 – Marcus Melo

In one of the most influential analyzes of the 2020 presidential election, Lynn Vavreck, Cris Tausanovitch, and John Sides argue that the US political system is “calcified,” not just polarized. Calcification is based on four pillars. The first is that the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans has widened greatly, increasing the cost of changing the vote for the reader, as I have already discussed here in the column.

The second is that internally the parties are increasingly more homogeneous in demographic terms (religion, age, race, rural x urban, etc.) and programmatic. Starting in the 1970s, for example, the white population of southern states, which was massively Democratic, migrated to the Republican Party, in a growing overlap of social characteristics and partisanship.

The third is that the dimension that underpinned the political dispute since the New Deal and revolved around the size of the state, tax burden and social policy gave way to identity issues. The fourth is the new and unprecedented parity of forces between the parties, converting the elections into very competitive elections, in strong contrast with the Democratic hegemony in the Chamber of Deputies in the post-war period, which lasted for 40 years, as I showed here.

These last two aspects form the hard core of calcification. Identity issues do not admit compromises, they are foundational. The competitiveness of elections, in turn, prevents losers from revising their positions to adjust them to the changing preferences of the electorate. The losers almost won the elections; They therefore not only have incentives to crystallize their programs but also to interfere with the rules of the game, after all small changes can lead to victory. Thus, volatile voters, without a strong party identity, and who are persuaded to change their position in elections are disappearing. There were only vote changes from one party to another, in 2022, in around 5% of the electorate, the lowest percentage since 1940.

The strongest evidence for calcification, the authors say, is that it has withstood exceptional disruptive events like the pandemic and Trump. If this is true, the 2024 election will be the same as the 2020 election. Hyper-partisanship will prevail in a framework of calcified preferences. And also spatial segmentation, in which poor towns and rural areas will vote for Trump and higher-income states for Biden (which is an inverted image of the voting map among us).

In a new book (which will be the subject of a specific review in the column), Felipe Nunes and Thomas Traumann argue that the Brazilian electorate is also “calcified”. We already know that Congress is not: the vast majority of parties that supported Bolsonaro now also support Lula. Who is calcified? The electorate, activists, parliamentarians?

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