Institutional Biases Enable Republican Rightward Shift (2021)

The Biden administration notched up an early victory with the passage of the USD 1.9 tr COVID relief bill (aka American Rescue Plan). In spite of the new administration’s professed desire for bipartisanship, Congress passed the stimulus package along party lines. Bipartisanship is not going to break out anytime soon, and certainly not before the 2022 mid-term elections. The Biden administration will therefore find it difficult, if not impossible, to pass the American Jobs Plan (AJP), let alone the American Family Plan (AFP), combined worth more than USD 4 tr, with bipartisan support. Despite continued negotiations, Democrats and Republicans disagree on virtually all aspects of the plans, including its size, its content and, especially, its financing. Other major Democratic reform proposals, including voting rights, immigration, gun ownership and, have even less prospect of garnering bipartisan support, -and they cannot be passed without Republican support given the Democrats’ lack of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. By contrast, large parts of AJP and AFP can, in principle, be passed with the help of simple majorities.

Deep-seated partisan differences continue to characterize both public opinion and congressional politics. Republicans, poised to win the House and the Senate in 2022, see little political benefit in finding an agreement with the Democrats if it compromises their long-held political positions. Meanwhile, the Democrats, mindful of the prospect of electoral defeat, are understandably eager to “go big” reform-wise. They also believe that a large spending program will prove politically popular (at the very least among their electoral base) and help them do well in the elections. After all, domestic political and economic reform will come to an immediate and complete halt, should the Republicans win the majority in the House and/ or the Senate next year. Taken together, this sharply limits the scope for bipartisan compromise. 

Public opinion remains deeply polarized, even though it has overall turned more optimistic (Morning Consult). The split between those believing the country is headed in the right/ wrong direction was 40%/ 60% in 2020, and only 20%/ 80% in early 2021 (at the height of the pandemic). Today it is closer to 50%/ 50%. The partisan Democratic/ Republic split is 75%/ 25%, effectively a flip compared to last year, when the majority of Republicans were optimistic and Democrats pessimistic. Last but not least, Biden’s approval/ disapproval rating at 55%/ 41% is higher than Trump’s at this stage of the presidential term. (Interestingly, Biden’s floor is at roughly the same level as Trump’s ceiling, pointing to “hardened partisan fronts”.) But Biden’s approval ratings are quite low, historically speaking. All post-war president had significantly higher approval ratings, except for Trump. All this of suggests just how polarized American remains.

Continued polarization also helps explains (largely) absent bipartisanship in Congress. Republicans, rightly, believe that they have little to gain from bipartisanship. Meanwhile, Democrats are reluctant to make significant concession in pursuit of bipartisan compromise, particularly where the possibility of passing legislation without Republican support exists (e.g. American Rescue Plan, AJP, AFP). Neither side believes there is much to gain by reaching a compromise with only a few, exclusively foreign policy areas excepted (e.g. China, Russia). While Democrats are unwilling to pass up a unique opportunity to pass their partisan agenda given unified control of congress and the presidency, for Republicans there is little to gain electorally. Given how far to the right the median Republican lawmakers and how much narrower this has made the Republican electoral base, it is somewhat surprising that the GOP remains to competitive. Here is why.

First of all, history favors the Republicans in the mid-term elections, as the presidential party tends to lose congressional seats. The GOP is poised to win the House and/ or the Senate in 2022 – if history is anything to go by. Democrats have wafer thin majorities in both the House and the Senate, affording them to lose only three seats in the former and none in the latter. In 17 out of the past 19 mid-term elections, the presidential party lost seats. The loss averaged around 26 seats in the House and 4 in the Senate. Furthermore, presidents with an approval of rating of below 50% lose an average of 37 House seats, compared to 14 seats if the rating is above 50% (Gallup 2018). Biden’s approval ratings are ever so slightly above 50%. Nonetheless, the Republicans stand a better than even chance of retaking both the House and the Senate – and that is not taking into account changes to the electoral regimes pursued by Republicans at the state level.

Second, Republican electoral prospects are further enhanced by the reapportionment of House seats. The 2020 Census will lead to reapportioning and redistricting (Census 2020). Democratic-leaning mid-western states as well as California and New York will lose seats, while solidly Republican or Republican-leaning states like Texas and Florida will gain seats (in addition to North Carolina, Colorado, Oregon and Montana). While reapportionment does not mean that the seats will necessarily change from Democratic to Republican given that demographic change in the expanding states tends to be driven by liberal-learning urban and suburban counties, redistricting very likely will. In Texas (gaining 2 seats) and Florida (gaining 1) as well as North Carolina (gaining 1) and Montana (gaining 1), Republicans are in charge of redistricting. In Oregon (1), the Democrats are in charge, while, while in Colorado non-partisan commissions redraw electoral districts. Therefore, redistricting alone could help Republicans gain five seats, enough to wipe out the Democratic majority in the House, where Democrats currently hold only a six-seat majority. More generally, gerrymandering has moved the median house seat to the right in the past few decades, thereby favoring Republican electoral prospects in the House.

Third, these days Republicans benefits from an inbuilt, structural advantage  in terms of representation in the Senate (Greenfield 2020). (This should give the Democrats pause before eliminating the filibuster.) No wonder the Republicans are not going to allow the Democrats to elevate Washington DC or Puerto Rica to statehood, thereby creating two, maybe as much as four additional Democratic or Democratic-leaning seats in the Senate. This bias is due to the fact many of the smaller, less populous states lean Republican. Regardless of population size, states send two senators to Washington. For example, Democratic California with a population 70 times larger than Wyoming’s sends the same number of senators to Washington. This feature favoring Republicans at the moment also provides them with an edge in terms of electoral college votes. It is no coincidence that in the past two decades Republicans won the presidency twice while losing the popular vote (2000, 2016). 

Fourth, the US political system has a fairly large number of actual or potential veto players, namely the president, the two houses of congress and the supreme court. Thanks to the Trump administration’s success in stacking the supreme court with conservative judges, the Republicans or at least conservative ideas hold greater sway than electoral support suggests. Similarly, the minority party – whether Republican or Democratic – is well-positioned to punch above its weight given the need for a super-majority in the Senate (aka filibuster). In other words, not only are the Republicans well-positioned to retake the House and the Senate, and possibly the presidency (not least given the structural bias in their favor in terms of electoral college votes). Even if they lose at the ballot box, they tend to be well-positioned to obstruct the Democratic agenda, thereby denying the electoral majority their say. This is not meant to turn into a normative argument. Rather, it is meant to demonstrate that the Republicans can afford to move to right of median voter and nonetheless win majorities.

Moving to the right of the median voter and relying increasingly on white, blue-collar workers may look likely a self-defeating long-term electoral strategy. And it probably is given demographic trends. Two decades, a famous book called The Emerging Democratic Majority (Judis & Teixera 2002) argued that demographic trends would favor Democrats. This may come to pass. (Then again, Trump made significant inroads among conservative Hispanic voters.) But the institutional peculiarities of the US political system provide the emerging Republican minority (if it ever comes to pass) with a bit of a buffer (apologies for the somewhat incongruent metaphor!). Certainly, in the short run Republicans’ electoral prospects are pretty good at the federal level, and their electoral success in largely rural, conservative and sparsely population states provides them with disproportional political influence and power. They control 27 out of 50 governorships.

Presidential elections - vote distribution

The Republicans can afford to move way to the right-of-center and maintain a reasonably good chance not just of blocking Democratic policies but even of regaining political power at the federal level. Add to this micro-level incentives for individual legislators and politicians to align themselves with Trumpism (aka right-wing populism) – largely due to the former president’s ability to mobilize an increasingly narrow and partisan electoral base while threatening to punish "anti-Trumpers" – and both Republicans and the Republican party act perfectly rationally by moving to the right. In other words, Republicans can afford to move to, or be pulled to, the right without suffering the equivalent of an electoral wipeout. Quite the contrary. At least, this is true in the short- and maybe medium-term. Given that the Republicans are betting on a narrow, if at present highly mobilized electoral base (white, blue-collar voters) that will become less demographically important over time, Republicans’ electoral strategy is self-defeating in the longer term.

Relatedly, some observers are deeply worried about the stability of the American political system (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2019). And the January 6 attacks on Congress have done little to alleviate such concerns Sometimes historical perspective can be helpful – even though historical analogies and precedents are to be consumed with requisite caution. Here Richard Hofstaedter (1963) is worth reading and re-reading. A millenarian and anti-government streak has characterized American politics since its very beginning, as has anti-intellectualism, various types of “populism”, antipathy towards urban and financial elites, anti-clericalism. Names like Jackson, Goldwater and McCarthy come to mind. Similarly, the political volatility brought about by civil rights movement, the opposition to “forever wars” (Vietnam) and a pervasive sense of economic malaise (Carter) are all things that are not really new. This is not to suggest that the past is surefooted guide to the future. But no analysis of present US politics can afford to disregard a close reading of American political history. 

Long story …. short. US elections are won, or at least can be won, to the right of the median voter. It is precisely this feature of the political system that allows the Republican party to move to the right while relying on a demographically narrowing electoral base and yet win federal elections. Nonetheless, this is unlikely to prove a successful strategy in the long term. Only major and sustained defeats at the ballot box will the Republican party back to the center. In view of a possible, actually likely Republican victory in the 2022 mid-terms and at least a possible victory in the 2024 presidential election, it may take quite some time for the Grand Old Party to become a center-right party again. Until then, polarization and occasional volatility may well continue to characterize US politics.

The Pitfalls of Strategic Pessimism and the Role of Beliefs in International Politics (2021)

Declinism, or the belief that a country or society is in a state of significant, possibly irreversible decline contrasts with (the, I am making this up, neologism) “ascentism”, or the belief that one’s ascent is inevitable, pre-destined, unavoidable, even divinely ordained. It is not difficult to see how such beliefs, if shared by a country’s senior policymakers, will tend to have real-life consequences, for beliefs are surely bound to affect strategic and sometimes tactical decisions.

The related rise and decline model or narrative/ metaphor/ model is very popular, perhaps because of its intuitiveness. Biological processes and the second law of entropy point suggest that things “rise” and “fall”. Jacques’ Seven Ages of Men speech makes this point very memorably in the case of humans. Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire makes this point powerfully in the case of political entities. Regardless of what drives decline (and ascent) – and there are many potential explanations even in the socio-political realm (Tainter 1990, Kennedy 1987, Diamond 2011) – the belief in decline and ascent informs and is bound to affect foreign policy decisions, whether or not such beliefs are actually warranted in reality.

Decision-makers may view their country’s decline and/ or an opponent’s rise as equivalent to the closing of a “window of opportunity”, thereby in principle creating an incentive to strike the rising power militarily, geoeconomically or diplomatically. Interestingly, preventive (as opposed to pre-emptive) wars appear to be relatively rare. More frequently (though I have not come across any reliable statistics), the declining state becomes more risk-taking or willing to engage in military action – even in the face of long odds – when its position is already precarious or outright unfavourable, for fear of facing even more difficult circumstances down the line. This may explain, or help rationalise, why the Japanese leadership decided to attack Pearl Harbor. (The Japanese attack can also be explained with the help of the “sunk cost effect”. The US demanded that Japan pull out of China in exchange for sanctions relief and improved relations. Prospect theory suggests that decision-makers are prepared to run great risks to recover costs and/ or restore the status quo ante. Much depends on how a foreign policy decision is framed, of course, prospect theory suggests.) It may also help explain why Wilhelmine Germany was willing to run the risk of a broader European war in 1914 by providing its Austro-Hungarian ally with a so-called “blank cheque” in its stand-off with Serbia. German policymakers felt that Germany was being “encircled” and that French and Russian military and/ or economic modernisation would make it soon impossible to win what was likely going to be a two-front war on the basis of the very offensively-oriented Schlieffen plan.

When a country is in decline or perceived to be in relative decline, the costs of not acting are often perceived to outweigh the costs of taking risky action. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why deterrence sometimes fails, as it did in 1941 or in the case of 1973 Yom Kippur War or the 1982 Falkland War (Jervis, Lebow & Gross Stein 1989). A country would often be better off opting for retrenchment rather than a high-risk policy with potentially devastating consequences. (Again, here it would be useful to have a representative sample of cases where countries opted for risky policies options rather than strategic retrenchment and compare the outcomes systematically.) Japan would surely have been better off not attacking the US, and Wilhelmine Germany would have been better off avoiding World War One – again, in retrospect. (Yamamoto, known to be a gambler and a betting man, for one was clear-eyed about the prospect of Japanese strategic success in case of war with the United States.) 

Add power transition theory to the mix and the risk of military conflict goes up in case decline is taking place in the context of a roughly even military balance – on the assumption that power transition theory is empirically valid. A central hypothesis of power transition theory is the following: “An even distribution of political, economic and military capabilities between contending groups of states is likely to increase the probability of war; peace is preserved best when there is an imbalance of national capabilities between disadvantaged and advantaged nations” (Organski 1958). Incidentally, this may explain why dominant powers rarely launch preventive war and almost always seem to wait until it is too late and declinism begins to play a more salient role in the previously dominant state’s foreign policy. A rough military balance of power combined with the perception that things are changing in your opponent’s favour creates significant incentives to pursue a risk-taking strategy, including military action.

Wilhelmine Germany perceived the European balance of military power to be shifting against her (and her allies) in the years leading up to World War One (Hamilton & Herwig 2004, Copeland 2013, Lebow 2018). This was true at least in the sense of making it very unlikely that the offensive Schlieffen plan would be successful and that the failure of the plan would lead to a war of attrition that Germany could not win. At the same time, Austria-Hungary’s struggle to maintain its position in the Balkans in the face of Russian backing for Serbia was seen by Berlin as weakening its main ally and, by extension, the its own geopolitical position. Allowing Austria-Hungary to fight and lose a war against Russia over Serbia would have been very detrimental to German interests. From this it does not follow that Germany’s best option was to provide unconditional support for Vienna. On the contrary, it should have reined in its ally and hope that Austria-Hungary’s position in the Balkans would stabilise while avoiding a military confrontation with Russia. Following the logic of power transition theory and how beliefs in declining states inform or affect foreign policy decisions, it is nonetheless not surprising that Germany effectively encouraged Austria-Hungary to take an uncompromising stance, even if this risked a broader European war. Better risk going to war now than in 1917 or 1920. Germany had every incentive to prevent a further weakening of its main ally, and If war was inevitable, better have it now than later (aka closing of window of opportunity). This is certainly how Germany’s military leaders perceived the situation.

Naturally Germany should never have had to find itself in this impossible geo-strategic position. At this point, however, the European powers were locked into zero-sum security competition with little prospect for accommodation and reconciliation given tightening alliances, including increasingly inflexible war and troop deployment plans (“war by timetable”) (Taylor 1974). In fact, all parties feared losing their allies they had to come to depend on and therefore were inclined to back them more forcefully than they would have done, had the military balance not been so precarious (aka fear of abandonment). Both the geopolitical Grosswetterlage (untranslatable, but close to general meteorological situation) and the existence of only one (unfortunately offensive) military plan deprived the German leadership of the desirable political-strategic flexibility necessary to adopt a less aggressive diplomatic posture. Going to war in 1914 proved an egregious mistake, not least because such a war was always going to be perceived as a bid for German continental hegemony that would necessarily draw Britain into the war, regardless of whether Germany was going to violate Belgian sovereignty or not.

What about the ascending power? The rising power has time on its side and, if the theory is correct, should seek to dissuade the declining power form launching preventive war. At the same time, the ascending power will have an interest in establishing status, prestige and “reputation”, for all three matter in international politics. All three are closely related to the concept of credibility. Credibility often allows states to realise their objectives at a lesser cost than would otherwise be the case. However, establishing credibility typically involves costs. And in order to establish credibility in the eyes of the dominant, but declining power, the ascending power needs to be willing to incur costs in the face of the dominant power’s opposition. Establishing status while reassuring a dominant power that perceives itself to be in decline is a difficult balancing act.

Conventional wisdom has it that China became more assertive following the global financial crisis of 2008. The crisis allegedly led some Chinese policymakers to regard the United States as a declining power and China as irreversibly ascendant. (It is impossible to attribute causal force to the US crisis. All we have is correlation and at best anecdotal evidence of senior Chinese policymakers voicing such views.) The fact that China did become more assertive is more difficult to refute. That said, China has a long history of border disputes with its neighbors as well as a history of recurrent wars – and Taiwan has always been a critical issue from Beijing’s point of view, at least rhetorically. That said, China was not willing or able to forcefully or credibly challenge the United States, its neighbors or the regional status until recently. Today Beijing is much better positioned to do so, and it has sound reasons to pursue many of the objectives it is pursuing – though how sensible this pursuit is strategically is another question altogether given the opposition it engenders (Luttwak 2012).

Staying on the issue of perceptions and beliefs. China often refers to the so-called “century of humiliation”, while the United States talks about leading the “free world” (or its rhetorical equivalent, such as Joe Biden’s “Alliance of Democracies”). Such narratives are rarely the drivers of policy or strategy, and much more frequently instruments aimed at mobilising domestic political support and establishing international legitimacy. This does not mean that such rhetoric does not matter; just that it is typically subservient to strategic interests. Wilhelmine Germany’s “place in the sun” or am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen is not wildly different from America’s “manifest destiny” or “free world” rhetoric or France’s mission civilisatrice. (The fact that Luxembourg is, to my knowledge, not given to similar rhetoric supports this claim.) This is not to suggest that policymakers do not ever believe in such concepts and narratives. Rather, the logic of international politics nudges a state’s policy in such direction even absent justificatory narratives. Interestingly, China does not seem to tout such high-minded ideals. Then again, claiming to provide material economic benefits rather than cultural benefits may just be a variation of this familiar theme, whereby rhetoric accompanies policies without driving it. In reality, it is the combination of, first, security and, second, economic interests that drives policy and strategy, not grand narratives or let alone altruism. Again, this does not mean that nobody among the senior leadership believes in such narratives – just that the logic driving policy is more readily and easily explained by expanding interests and in particular the quest for security (Posen 2014).

Sometimes beliefs and cognition matter in international relations – and can be demonstrated empirically to do so. At other times, they are largely epiphenomenal. It really depends what aspect of international politics one seeks to explain. Joseph Stalin’s belief that Nazi Germany would not invade the USSR in the summer of 1941 in spite of overwhelming intelligence pointing in this direction is an example of where prior beliefs and perception mattered. (An alternative explanation has it that Stalin’s “failure” to anticipate the attack was due to his desire not to be seen as provoking Germany to attack.) Surely, American decisionmakers’ assumptions and beliefs led them to fail to anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. On the other hand, the primacy of power and interests is nicely illustrated by presumably apocryphal reply by Stalin after being informed by Molotov that the Vatican objected to the Soviet diplomatic position: “How many divisions?”.