The Politics of Policy Expertise: Democratic Deference and Republican Resentment

• In Event: Experts in Politics: Status, Legitimacy, and the Public (Virtual Session)

Abstract

Across the issue spectrum, public policies are increasingly complicated and technical. Even debates over social issues like race and gender relations now commonly invoke academic jargon and require knowledge of many previous policies and rounds of debate. New social problems, from climate change to global pandemics, also inspire the development and use of complex policy tools derived from expert-driven research.

Yet this form of policymaking is a much better fit for the contemporary Democratic Party than the Republican opposition. Democrats prize experts in staffing the Executive Branch while Republicans prefer political operatives and media spokespersons. Republicans have an increasing affinity for amateur and outsider candidates compared to Democrats, who are more likely to demand from their party’s leaders a command of policy details and familiarity with the operation of government. These tendencies reflect and reinforce the growing “diploma divide” now apparent among the parties’ voters and activists, with Democrats much more likely than Republicans to be college-educated, elite college alumni, and the holders of graduate degrees.

In this paper, part of a larger original book project that serves as a successor to our Asymmetric Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016), we explore the causes and consequences of the parties’ swiftly diverging attitudes towards expert-driven policymaking. We find that Republicans and allied conservative media are increasingly hostile toward educational institutions, professors, and students. Traditional venues for conservative intellectual discourse have lost influence to more populist and conspiratorial platforms. As a consequence of these developments, Republican voters no longer trust mainstream media and research to deliver non-partisan information, preferring to accept and promote the claims of overtly ideological alternative sources.

But there have also been important changes on the left. Intellectual opinion journalism has become more influential among liberals, exemplified by new online ventures and increased permeability between media and academia. Democrats now see themselves as the educated, informed, science-trusting party, defending media institutions and universities as pillars of democracy. They look to these institutions for leadership on controversial issues and for bringing about social diversification and cultural advance. The information environments on each side thus reinforce their diverging electoral and governing trends.

Drawing on a mix of quantitative and qualitative evidence, we track these developments at the party leadership and mass levels, finding increasing divergence in trust of non-governmental elites and experts and in information-producing institutions. That in part reflects real change in these institutions: media and educational institutions have moved leftward along with their educated consumers and producers. But it also reflects an increasing alignment between traditional partisan politics and a populist vs. technocratic ideological dimension. This dimension has been a source of dealignment in other countries, but in the U.S. it has quickly aligned with conventional left-right divisions, further polarizing our politics.

We document how each policy area is increasingly dominated by complex proposals from liberals accompanied by conservative suspicion of expert-led governance. Uniquely in the rich world, the Republican Party has fused its traditional conservatism with populist skepticism without changing its opposition to redistributive policy or offering a new agenda to solve problems for its newest constituents. Policy knowledge and evaluation capacity have become increasingly tethered to the Democratic Party, with believably non-partisan expertise now in short supply. Social movements have also come to reflect the increased incorporation of college graduates into the liberal coalition by increasingly choosing well-credentialed leadership; justifying their causes by citing intellectual concepts, authorities, and research; and prizing representation in high-status institutions.

We conclude that these changes, though increasingly impossible for political observers to ignore, have often been subject to misinterpretation. Democrats have been blamed for abandoning the party’s traditional working-class adherents in favor of snobbish professionals, while Republicans have been accused of manipulating their supporters to vote against their economic interest. But we view Democratic leaders as increasingly deferring to the agendas and ideas of the educated rather than shifting their economic positions to the right, and Republican leaders as opportunistically echoing and promoting the dominant sensibilities within conservative media and activist circles rather than engineering a triumph of plutocracy.

Authors

• Matt Grossmann, Michigan State University

• David A. Hopkins, Boston College