US mathematicians have created a computer model that explains why relations between Republicans and Democrats have escalated in recent years and reveals the "orchestrators" of American domestic politics. Their findings were presented in the journal Royal Society Interface.
In recent years, political scientists and political observers have consistently talked about the growing polarization of opinions in the United States and in other countries of the world, as a result of which cooperation between opposing political forces becomes almost impossible.
A prime example of this was the budget crises of 2013 and 2018, when Congress refused for months to raise the borrowing ceiling due to disagreement with the policies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
As a result, several US federal agencies, including NASA, were shut down for several weeks in October 2013 and winter 2018. The situation developed in a similar way during the last presidential elections, accompanied by scandals and calls to overthrow the new president by both Democrats and Republicans.
Some researchers attribute this to changes in the way the media present information, while other political scientists suggest that they were caused by the economy or deep social changes. Conspiracy theorists assume that all these trends are set “from above” by the secret world behind the scenes, George Soros or other oligarchs, the CIA, “Russian hackers” and other fictional entities.
Shimansky and his colleagues came to this conclusion after analyzing the election results and more than a million results of votes in both chambers of the US Congress, which lawmakers made from the middle of the last century to the last presidential elections.
In their analysis, they relied on a simple concept - in their work politicians are constantly forced to make a choice between two opposing concepts, consensus and conflict. In the first case, they can concede to representatives of other political movements in order to achieve some goals, and in the second, they can strictly adhere to the chosen position and not compromise.
What exactly makes them lean in one direction or another remained a mystery to political scientists and mathematicians. The authors of the article tried to find an answer to this question by measuring the level of polarization in Congress and comparing it with the opinions of voters and events in the political space over the past half century.
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These measurements revealed several unusual phenomena and curious patterns, indicating that the behavior of politicians and voters was not governed by "behind-the-scenes puppeteers", but by mathematical trends and systemic effects.
In particular, scientists have shown that the current ultra-high level of polarization in the United States is not unique - the situation was similar in the 1960s, during the heyday of the civil rights movement and after the escalation of the Vietnam War.
As now, Republicans and Democrats did not agree with each other on anything and took principled positions to the detriment of their effectiveness. Something similar happened after the US Supreme Court allowed large companies and businessmen to financially support politicians' election campaigns in 2010.
On the other hand, in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 2000s, the level of tension in society and politics declined on average, rather than increased. Scientists associate this with the fact that before this polarization had reached a certain critical point, at which it became disadvantageous for politicians and hindered their election.
Due to this, the polarization in the United States until recently periodically fluctuated, just as the rate of currencies or securities in the stock market falls or rises, obeying the same mathematical laws. These trends directly affect the behavior of politicians, forcing them to join radicals even if they initially did not support their ideas, or give way to more successful competitors who won them in elections or primaries.
Such work of the political system, as the researchers note, makes it extremely vulnerable to a kind of "inflation". The value of polarization can begin to grow uncontrollably and very quickly if politicians continue to pump up their electorate, making them even more irreconcilable with the ideas and values of their opponents.
What will happen in this case, what conditions for this should develop and how it can be prevented is still impossible to predict, but scientists do not exclude that this may happen in the near future. In the near future, Shimansky and his colleagues will try to find an answer to the second question by expanding their model to include not only politicians, but also voters.
