Berkeley Talks: Does democracy work?

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday.

Also, we have another show, Berkeley Voices. This season on the podcast, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re looking at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at Berkeley. You can find all of our podcast episodes on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Rich Lyons: Welcome to everyone. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being here. My name is Rich Lyons. I’m your relatively new chancellor. Thank you. You didn’t have to do that. What am I? Seven months in? People keep saying it’s still a special time and so I’m excited to be in this role and it is the thrill of a lifetime, as you can imagine, as an undergraduate alum.

Anyways, that’s not why we’re here. This is about faculty excellence. This is about as good as Berkeley gets. When I think about what is the source of Berkeley’s preeminence, the root source of Berkeley’s preeminence is fundamental research. It is. It is and it always has been. That’s why the world knows about us. We’re great at education, we’re great public service, etc. It is that fundamental research and this is what we’re here to celebrate today.

For more than 110 years, Berkeley’s Academic Center has singled out two faculty members each year who embody this excellence to deliver a Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lecture. These distinguished professors have conducted research that has changed the trajectory of their disciplines and of our understanding of the subject they have dedicated their careers and lives to. The lectures shine a light on the essential part of our mission, creating new knowledge. The curiosity and creativity that fuel the quest to learn and understand are at the heart of our commitment to making this world a better place through what we discover, what we teach and the public service we provide.

This year’s lectures represent the continuation of a treasured tradition that has recurred annually, with one exception. In the wake of World War I and the Influenza Pandemic, at that time, the faculty research lectures were suspended in 1919. In 2020 when virtual events were in vogue and Zoom kept us together, these lectures went on.

Being selected to deliver a faculty research lecture is a high honor and rightfully so. To stand out among peers who exemplify academic excellence is no small feat. For students, members of the campus community, and the public, this is a wonderful way to experience scholarly work of the highest caliber.

I’d like to welcome the past recipients who are with us today. Professors, please stand while I read the names of the people who are here. Please hold your applause until everyone has been recognized. Please stand for us and I will read the names, those of you who have been Faculty Research Lecturer recipients in the past. Henry Brady is here today. Henry. OK. OK. I knew we had to do that. Why don’t you just clap after each one?

Carlos Bustamante. Marvin Cohen, Catherine Gallagher, Robert Haas. Martin Joy. Jay rather. Sorry, Martin Jay. Thomas Laqueur. Steven Lindow. Tony Long. Barbara Romanowicz. Randy Schekman. Erica Gruen. William Dietrich. Jan de Vries is here, as well. Thank you all very, very much. Congratulations.

What kind of an instruction is that to hold your applause. I apologize for even suggesting as much. The two individuals chosen to give this year’s Faculty Research Lectures are, as you know, Henry Brady, professor of public policy and this afternoon’s distinguished speaker and Carlos Bustamante, professor of molecular and cell biology, MCB, as we say, also of physics and of chemistry.

Henry Brady is the class of 1941, Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy. He served as dean of our Goldman School of Public Policy, that was 2009 to 2021, and is director of the University of California Survey Research Center from 1998 to 2009. He is past president of the American Political Science Association. Brady studies democracy and democratic performance using surveys and statistical methods.

He is the co-author most recently of Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the New Gilded Age. In another work, The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Real quickly, I got to work with Henry as a fellow dean. We were overlapping deans. I was the dean of the Haas school before that. We have so many remarkable colleagues and one of the things that just sticks in my mind is Henry is a scholar’s scholar. Every time I would talk to him, it’s just the tidy mind and his rigorous thinking and he’s helped me in so many different ways to clarify my own thinking. I just wanted to place that at a more personal level.

Please join me in welcoming professor Henry Brady whose lecture today is entitled, “Does Democracy Work? The American people and their Institutions.” Henry. Thank you.

Henry Brady: Thank you.

Thanks, Rich, for that great introduction. By the way, working with Rich Lyons was a tremendous pleasure. I learned so much from Rich. Glad you’re our chancellor. Thank you for doing that.

Let me, by the way, go back. Whoops, wrong way. Whoops. Still wrong way. There we go. That’s the title. With the new administration’s chaotic first two weeks in office and with a trade war imminent that the Wall Street Journal calls the dumbest trade war in history, we all wonder whether democracy is capable of making good decisions. Tonight, I’ll explore the role of public opinion and institutions in our democracy and why our times seem so incredibly precarious.

With criticism of Joe Biden and Donald Trump so upfront in our mind, another approach would be to discuss leaders and the problem of what’s sometimes called anti-democratic entrenchment. That is to say leaders who are leading us towards an anti-democratic future. I certainly think that’s something to worry about. It’s not my area of expertise.

Instead, I’m going to focus on whether the basic democratic mechanisms of public opinion and institutions can correct our democratic ills. The net result will be to show you that we’ve got problems, I think there are ways out of them, but it is precarious times.

Like many people who study things, I was brought to it because … You’ve already seen this slide. In the late 1960s there was the Vietnam War. I was in college, I graduated in 1969. This is a demonstration in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral where I’d gone as a child with my mother. This is the moratorium. It turns out I helped organize this demonstration. It shut down Fifth Avenue. I’m up front near the door. There’s no way you’re going to pick me out of that crowd. I was in charge of security that night.

What was interesting is there were a bunch of people who wanted to break down the doors of the cathedral. Now, I’m a Catholic boy and the notion that they would break down the doors of the cathedral was profoundly upsetting to me. They wanted to do that because they felt that the New York City diocese, Cardinal Francis Spellman, was in cahoots with the corrupt dictator of South Vietnam. There was reason for them to want to do that. I stopped them. I didn’t allow them to do it, but it made me ask questions about what was the role of protest, what was the role of religion in democracy? Those have been lifelong concerns.

What am I going to talk about? Well, first going to talk about citizen competence. Does the mass public know enough to operate effectively as voters and political participants in their democracy? I’m going to provide a tentative vote of yes for that question, but it’s, as you’ll see, very much up in the air as we’re going to see.

I’m going to talk about the terrain of public opinion and argue that the terrain of public opinion is especially difficult for a democratic society right now. By the way, in ways that implicate institutions like the University of California. We’ve got to prove to the public that we’re not just pointy-headed intellectuals. We’re more than that. I think it’s a real challenge for the university.

Then I’m going to talk about institutions and polarization and talk about how there’s increasing distrust and lack of confidence in institutions like higher education and how this is a problem as well. Then I’ll talk about solutions a bit and go from there.

First, let me define what I mean by democracy. There are sort of three steps in the development of modern democracy. One is liberal procedural democracy. This is things like civil rights and liberties, ensconced in the Magna Carta to begin with and then ultimately the Bill of Rights. This is freedom from government capriciousness. Guarantees that citizens will somehow be allowed to do things like citizens want to do, without getting in trouble with government.

Then there’s electoral participatory democracy, which came later. This is votes and participation. The American Revolution was emblematic of this. It requires that people have something to say and that representatives listen and respond. It’ll turn out that both are problematic. This will be the major focus of my talk today; the involvement of people in the decision-making of democracy and how well they do it.

Then, finally, there’s social democracy, the rise of the welfare state, starting with Bismarck in Germany in the late 19th century and then going on to the liberal and labor parties in England. This was about freedom to do things. A recognition that, in a modern industrial society, not everybody has the resources to participate in politics, it’s a luxury good to participate in politics, and that we had to provide the wherewithal for people to be able to survive in an industrial society. I’m going to talk a little bit about that, because I think inequality is one of the big problems we face in America right now.

Here’s some data from the survey done in October 2024 by the Political Psychology of American Democracy Policy Project at the Goldman School led by our dean, David Wilson. This is a question that was asked; in one word, described democracy. Well, people have trouble with that it turns out.

Freedom is the most predominant word, but really worrisome here is that many of the words are brokenness, the brokenness of democracy, that democracy isn’t working so well. OK. How about government? Well, the government’s not held in high repute either. In fact, corrupt has got the most mentions, but there’s also broken, bloated, untrustworthy, corrupted, horrible, crooked, et etc. A lot of bad words.

Then, finally, most amazingly, ask voters what they think about themselves. Here’s what they think about themselves. Voters describe themselves as ignorant, stupid and lazy. Now, admittedly, this didn’t say, “Describe yourself,” this asked them to describe other voters. But the fact is if they’re all describing other voters as stupid, ignorant and lazy, presumably that holds pretty universally. This is the real concern that many of us have in political science about whether or not this is truly true.

Early in my career I wrote a bunch of books, or had articles in edited books, on studying campaigns, because I was very interested in during campaigns do people learn anything? Are campaigns worthwhile? Are they learning experiences for the general public? These are some of the books I’ve been involved with.

If there’s going to be issue voting, that is to say if the public can really artfully engage in political participation and decision-making, there’s got to be elements of the following in that process.

First, voters have to have issue positions. By issue positions, I mean either judgments about policies, like abortion, or something like that, or judgments about the performance of a candidate, like whether a candidate was successful or not. So those are issue positions. Candidates have to have issue positions. Obviously, in terms of performance, that may be fairly obvious to people since most of them have past histories, although Donald Trump didn’t have much in 2016. But they also have to have policy positions that they put forth like on, again, abortion. Then voters have to evaluate the fit between their issue positions and the candidate’s issue positions and decide who to vote for based upon how good that fit is.

The worry is, is there’s not much of that. The voting public’s very heterogeneous, so probably there’s going to be some people for whom there is a real effort to do this and others for whom that’s not true.

In fact, one of the problems we worry about is: Are there other factors affecting the vote? Could it be candidate traits, looks, lies? Who knows what? If this is so, maybe the voter evaluates candidates and voters not on issue positions at all. That might be worrisome in terms of thinking about what kind of message is being sent by the voters if all they say is, “Hey, Donald Trump, good-looking guy.” Maybe.

I think there is issue voting and we certainly have lots of data to show there’s correlation between issues and how people vote, but correlation is not causation. One possibility is in fact the following, other factors cause people to decide they like a candidate and then they choose to take that candidate’s issue positions and make them their own. Somebody says, “I like Donald Trump. I didn’t use to think that immigration was a problem, but now after listening to him, I’ve decided to adopt that issue position for my own.” This is a follow the leader. My colleague, Gabe Lenz, has written a definitive book on this showing that there’s lots of evidence from follow the leader, and frankly, he doesn’t find much evidence for issue voting. One possibility is people are just persuaded by leaders.

Another possibility, maybe even more problematic, is that voters choose their candidate and then decide that their own issue positions are going to be projected upon that candidate. For example, maybe you’ve chosen Donald Trump and, therefore, you decide that Joe Biden’s presidency was a failure.

When asked about economic performance of Joe Biden, you say, “Well, Joe Biden didn’t do very well with respect to the economy,” even though the facts are contrary to that. This is called projection, psychological projection. These things happen, and I’m sure you know people who have done these kinds of tricks in their minds. What happens? Well, all of these things. This is one of the problems that political scientists face; how do you sort all this out? There’s all at once voice, gibberish, persuasion, projection and so forth.

What do I conclude? Well, it’s hard to be definitive. There’s complex psychological processes going on inside people’s heads. There’s evidence for all possible phenomena, but I think there’s voice, and I could cite all the data for that, but here’s what I think it is from.

First, people know their needs. They may not know their policy positions, but they know what they need. In the last election, I think people knew, at least some people knew, they wanted a change. That’s a real thing. That’s not to be decried. That’s something real. I think they also know something about candidate performance. Sometimes their judgments maybe aren’t the best in the world, but they certainly have some sense of candidate performance. Then, finally, there’s some policy concerns, like abortion, which people actually do have fairly definitive notions about.

You put all that together, I think there’s some real voice out there. Now, there’s also some persuasion, but that’s actually not so bad. There should be probably some persuasion. You would think in a democracy that once in a while a leader who comes along with a good idea that people would be persuaded to adopt that idea. I think public opinion is real and substantial. Not every person in political science agrees with that, and there’s some of my colleagues in the audience who don’t, but I’ll let them speak for themselves.

Let’s talk about the terrain of public opinion and the structure of American politics. Here I’m going to use a word that’s used commonly by political scientists. Its use in polite society was unfortunately ruined by a Time magazine article in the 1950s, which used it to describe something about Marilyn Monroe, I’m not sure what, but something. I’m still going to use the term because it’s a very useful concept. It comes from geology, actually. Darwin used it first. I’m going to talk about cleavages in American politics and the terrain of American politics.

In an article I wrote as my presidential address to the American Political Science Association in 2009, I talked about how in fact we should develop maps of American politics. You’re going to see a lot of maps tonight. I love this way of thinking about American politics and I think it’s visually helpful. Why did I think this was useful to do? Well, in my article I argued there’s actually good reasons to believe people have these maps in their heads. As human beings, we had to develop physical understandings of the world we were in, and so we have physical maps in our head, but we also have sociometric or sociological or maps about our relationships with other groups and peoples. There’s real maps there. You’ll see some of these maps give you a sense of what that might look like.

I also thought that they were a theoretical device, like supply and demand curves in Economics, that could help us understand American politics. I’m going to show you, I think, places where you can learn about American politics by looking closely at these maps. Then, finally, I think they’re a visual device to sort of capture a whole lot of information all at once and to give you a sense of American politics.

By the way, I use this Calder Gouache in my article and you can see that he predicted, actually, the polarization of American politics in 1967. What you have here is the Democrats who are usually described in blue on election night maps, the Republicans who are described in red, and then this cleavage, this line between them. This is his artful prediction. I’ll show you later that, actually, if you do a little esoteric rotating of the picture, it even looks better.

Let me talk, instead, immediately about the New Deal cleavage, which has dominated American politics since the 1930s, maybe even since William McKinley became president.

These are data from the American National Election Studies. What they show is there’s two dimensions. One is people’s positions on abortion and women’s rights. That’s along the vertical axis. Then along the horizontal axis is economic government jobs and aid to Blacks, economic issues. I’ve located the parties where their average member is located on this map. We take all the people on our survey, they say they’re a Democrat, we look at their positions, we average them over all Democrats, then we locate them on the map. Same thing with Republicans.

In this period notice that basically social issues didn’t matter. The two parties were at the same place. What mattered was the New Deal cleavage. That’s not surprising because the New Deal cleavage, since the 1935 Social Security Act, which created social security, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which created a framework for labor management relations in America, since those bills, and then culminating probably in 1964 with Lyndon Johnson creating the Food Stamps Program and in 1965, the Medicare and Medicaid programs, that’s been the terrain of American politics, economic issues.

Now, the neat thing about economic issues is they’re about a dollar, about dollars, about splitting dollars. You can come to compromises over these things. By the way, this was also the period when unions were strongest in America. About 30% of the American public were unionized. The unions helped make sure that management provided a fair share to workers. It was also a period of some of the lowest and least inequality that we’ve had in our history.

Since 1970, inequality has increased because unions have gotten weaker and, as I’ll show you, other things have happened. In fact, with the passage in 1964 of the Civil Rights Act and in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act and also by the way, the Hart-Celler Act, which was about immigration quotas, and that led to the enormous numbers of folks from Mexico, Central America and Asia coming into the United States. Since that time, a new issue dimension has appeared in American politics, and that’s social, abortion, women’s rights, what we call social, cultural, moral traditionalism issues.

Notice what happened by 1992, 2004, according to the American National Election studies. Democrats became quite liberal on these issues. Republicans remained conservative. The new cleavage is not vertical line, it’s this slanted line that means. That both things mattered to voters. By the way, at this time, these two issues were not highly correlated with one another. They were sort of distinct dimensions. So this was the cut of American politics starting really in the 1980s and now and beyond the rise of the moral majority, the rise of the religious right.

If you rotate Calder’s picture in a certain way, you can see this looks exactly like this picture. This is science guys. This is science. You can see what happened with Calder’s prediction.

Now let’s talk about what happened in 2024. Again, I’m using David Wilson’s lovely data from just before the election, October 2024. This is that first New Deal dimension, attitude towards the economy. We find that Republicans believe that hard work leads to success, everyone has a fair shot in America and the economy is generally fair, although it may favor the rich a little bit. Democrats believe that hard work is important, but there’s no guarantee. They’re worried about insecurity in the modern industrial state. They believe you need social welfare programs. They strongly believe the economy favors the rich. That’s one dimension.

The other dimension is attitudes towards tradition. The U.S. is changing too fast, the U.S. past was better and a bunch of other items, and that leads us to Republicans believe that the world is changing too fast, the past was better, and the U.S. is under attack. Democrats on the other hand, embrace change, believe the past was flawed and do not believe the U.S. way of life is under attack. This may be due to basic value presumptions of liberals and conservatives.

There’s work by Jack Glaser of the Goldman School, which shows that, in fact, liberals and conservatives have different basic values, on average. Liberals like change, they like innovation, whereas conservatives generally believe in tradition, conformity and would like the changes to go slower. Basic characteristics of the two groups seem to be at work here.

Now we can plot these on, again, one of these diagrams. On the left is views on social change. This is again that social, cultural, moral dimension and the horizontal dimension is the economy. I’m going to show you a lot of these pictures, so let me just give you a quick index to them.

First, the year will always be in the left-hand corner because I’m going to jump around among years. I also color coded, so different years have different colors, but I just like that. Then the vertical dimension will always be the social, cultural, moral dimension. The horizontal dimension will be views on the economy. Then there’ll be symbols on the diagram which show you how people voted in either the current election or the last election for which we have data. Since these data were collected in 2024 in October, all we have is how they voted in 2020. This is data collected in 2024, but the voting measure is how they voted in 2020. Did they vote for Trump or Biden?

I used triangles for the Democrats and squares for the Republicans. I’ll let you speculate why I use those symbols. Although, for Democrats, you might think of pointy-headed intellectuals, most of you.

Here’s 2024, again. Notice where the Democrats are. They’re down in the liberal liberal position. Notice where the Republicans are, they’re up in the conservative conservative position. The average person is in the middle of the diagram and people who describe themselves as political independents are in the middle as well. Then there’s the cleavage line. Notice that just about goes through the average person, although the average person’s slightly below it because in 2020, remember this is voting data for 2020, people on average voted for Biden. He won the popular vote. We can learn a lot from this diagram already about where people are located.

Now you might say, “What about race in American politics? Isn’t that a master dimension?” You might also ask about foreign policy and things like that. That’s more episodic. I’m looking at the domestic policy dimensions, which persist.

Now let’s talk about attitudes towards African Americans. Here I’m using the Racial Resentment Scale invented by David Wilson. Again, this on this survey. Here you find non-Black, and I just got the data here for non-Black Republicans and Democrats, believe racism and slavery are no excuse for special considerations, non-Black Republicans. Non-Black Democrats believe racism and slavery provide the basis for special considerations for African Americans.

Now instead of trying to give you a third dimension, which would be hard to visualize, and there’s another technical reason I’ll mention in a minute why I don’t do this, I’m going to instead take this measure, split it into four groups: people who believe strongly there should be special considerations; somewhat there should be special considerations; people who feel some racial resentment about that; and people who feel a lot of racial resentment about that. That’s four groups.

Starting down here in the lower left-hand corner, which is not circled, but ovalized, you can see how this maps out. Oops. There we go. That’s to the first group, that’s to the second group, that’s to the final group. You can see that racial resentment runs through American politics.

Now, why didn’t I make that a basic dimension? This is a sort of technical point having to do with linear algebra, of all things. It turns out that views on social change and views on the economy span the space, and actually race is sort of in the middle. That means that race is really insinuated with and involved with both of those other two dimensions in important ways. This is a mathematical fact about them, and it indicates why I didn’t make race a fundamental dimension. Furthermore, if we make race a fundamental dimension of American politics, we forget about economic issues, like the Whiskey Rebellion or debates about tariffs and trade during the 19th century and the New Deal for that matter, which was mostly about economic issues.

If we neglect social issues, we forget about women’s suffrage, feminism, gay rights, and a lot of other social issues which are really not fundamentally about race. So race is a third dimension, it runs through all of American politics.

Now, I want to look at change over time. Thank you, David, for the data, but unfortunately he didn’t collect them before 2024, so I have to go to another source. Those deans, they never do what they’re supposed to do. They’re a problem.

I wrote in 2000 an article about the coalition structure of American politics, and I wrote it in a thing called The Unfinished Election of 2000, and it was called “Trust the People: Political Party Coalitions in the 2000 Election.” I used American National Election Studies data. These are the gold standard for studying American elections. They’re done every four years. They’ve been done every four years since 1948, and so we have a long time series of them.

Here’s for 2000 what I found, the political groups, this is a bunch of political groups, strong Democrats, strong Republicans and so forth. So let’s just go through it. Here’s strong liberals and strong Democrats. They’re on the leftist side as you might expect. They’re the most left, the most liberal liberal. Then here’s strong conservatives and strong Republicans. They’re at the upper part, which is most strongly conservative and everybody else is in between. This diagram looks a lot like the one I just showed you using the psychology and the data from David Wilson.

What can we do with these? Well, there’s the average person. Notice, in this case, by the way, I use a purple dot. That’s because in fact, the average person in this election in 2000, remember it was decided by 537 votes was essentially on the fence between the two candidates, Bush and Gore. That’s what the purple dots are going to mean.

Here’s 2020. Let me do it again. See what you see. There’s 2000, there’s 2020. Anybody notice anything? It looks like the cleavage line has moved. I think that’s probably real, but more importantly, look at how the groups have gone outwards. Whoops. American politics has become more and more polarized. American politics is not centrist so much as it’s extreme by 2020. What’s been happening?

Well, first let’s just do this, put a dashed oval around the 2000 groups to convince ourselves that, in fact, things have changed. There’s where the oval goes in 2020. Notice that almost all of the various liberal, conservative, Republican, Democratic groups are outside the oval. The only ones inside the oval in 2020 are pure independents, moderates and average person. American politics has become more polarized.

At first, I thought this just was wrong and it was an artifact of my measurements, because there’s always problems from survey to survey. I spent a lot of time trying to prove I was wrong. I’m not wrong. This is real. Something’s going on.

Why? Well, let’s look at religion. There I took two questions. How important is religion to you? How often do you attend religious services? I made a scale out of that and broke the population into roughly four groups: Those who have no religion, it’s unimportant to them, they don’t attend services. Then a bit of religion, they think it’s important, but they actually don’t attend services very often. Some religion, they attend services fairly frequently and think it’s important. Then, finally, people who have a great deal of religion, who attend weekly or more and who think it’s very important. Then I added a fifth group, which is white fundamentalist or evangelicals who I thought would be interesting to look at because they’re the core of the religious right.

Here’s what you find with those as you look at a line through them. In 2000 it’s clear that religious fundamentalism, religious attendance, religious importance mattered for the moral traditionalism scale. Notice, it’s essentially parallel to the vertical axis, a little bit to the right, but it doesn’t actually seem to say much about the economic conservatism dimension. Anybody think they know what’s going to happen next? Let’s go to 2020.

Now you might say, “What’s going on here? This is religion. It’s about moral, social, cultural issues, it’s not about economics.” Well, it is about economics. If you’ve read, if Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory, or Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s book with the great title Jesus and John Wayne, you’ll find out that American Protestant evangelicals are increasingly putting together moral traditionalism with economic conservatism. That’s what you see in this diagram.

Well, what else has been going on? Well, how about place? This is four places; city, suburbs, small towns and rural areas, roughly equal sized. You can see in 2000 place didn’t seem to matter very much. Here’s what it looks like by 2020. Place matters. Now, this isn’t a surprise, we’ve shown that religion matters and place matters. Well, it turns out a lot of the folks who are highly religious live in small towns and rural areas. By the way, I could add age and show you that, in fact, young people vs. old people, there’s a correlation there too.

Well, now let me add another dimension or two other concerns: occupation and education. This is in many ways the most interesting story, which says something really fundamental is changing in American politics. I’ve added here occupations and education in 2000. Let me just show you. There’s high school and blue collar. They’re very closely related. They’re not exactly the same groups, but they’re closely related and notice where they are.

But notice something interesting about the blue-collar workers, they’re triangles, blue triangles, and yet they’re over the cleavage line. They should be voting Republican, but they weren’t in 2000, they voted for Al Gore. How about white-collar and some college? Well, it turns out that the white-collar were actually voting for Bush, even though they were over the line in the other direction. Some college were in that intermediate area. Then, finally, professional executive managers and college grads, again, somewhat similar categories and here we find out that executives and managers were voting for Republicans, and yet they were over the line, too, in 2000. This is all 2000.

What’s going on? Well, historically the New Deal cleavage was about labor management relations. It’s labor management relations and the reduced strength, but still somewhat strong unions in America, you’ll see unions are on this too, that led to unbalanced blue collar workers voting for Gore, the Democrat, and executives and managers unbalanced voting for Bush the Republican. It’s labor managed relations. It’s authority relations in a society. Any society has authority relations.

What happened in 2020? Well, crossing the cleavage, the unions stayed Democrat, but the high school people, essentially representing blue-collar workers, went Republican. Some college went Republican and the college grads went Democratic, shifting of these groups across the parties.

Now I wish I had for 2020 the occupation groups, but it turns out that’s behind a privacy wall, and I couldn’t get to that quickly without spending a lot of money and actually going to a safe room and all sorts of complexities. So I couldn’t do that. It’s clear what’s happened here. I’m sure that blue-collar workers have crossed the line. I’m pretty sure that executives and managers have probably crossed the line.

In fact, what it’s led to is now we have a Democratic Party, which used to be those who weren’t so well-educated and have low income, it’s now people who are highly educated, some with low income, some with moderate, some with even high incomes. We have a Republican Party that used to be people of high income and high education who are now really mostly … it’s a party of people with medium to high incomes, but not so well-educated. That’s a real change in American society. It’s the breakdown of the New Deal Coalition based upon authority structures. In fact, think for a moment what it might mean, especially with professionals. It means that maybe the new authority cleavage in America has to do with expertise.

In fact, let me just show you what I think has been happening. Here’s the 72-82 data where I’ve superimposed the blue-collar, high school, white-collar professionals, managers, executives. There you see that, basically, you get a cleavage that is still vertical, remember, at that time. When you connect these, you get this bar across. Then what happens by 2000 is that bar rotates downward on the right side. You can see there’s it rotating downward. See it rotating downward, the black bar? Now it’s rotated even further. Enormous changes in the coalitions of American politics.

Then, finally, race again. I have a measure of stereotypical or what many people call traditional racism. Although, glorifying it with the notion that there’s anything traditional about it is problematic, but nevertheless, it is, I guess, traditional in America. That shows that that’s somewhat correlated. Then there’s another set of items of the American National Election Studies, which are somewhat similar to David Wilson’s Racial Resentment Scale, they’re called symbolic racism. David’s scale is better than this. Yes. Long story, but it’s true. It’s one of the wonderful things about David as our dean, he’s brilliant and he came up with this much better measure, but another story. Let’s show how that goes through American politics. Oops, went too fast. There you can see, race again goes through American politics in 2020.

I still actually haven’t gotten to the most important finding, the one that’s most worrisome, most problematic, and it’s this.

Here I’ve put all sorts of different groups including racial groups, education groups, occupation groups, political groups and everything else for 2000. It’s a very dense plot, but one of the things you’ll notice if you put axes, and that’s the black vertical lines in the middle of the picture, over the average voter, you’ll see that not surprisingly, many of the Republicans are in the upper right-hand corner. That’s the conservative conservative block. Many of the Democrats are in the lower left-hand corner, the liberal-liberal block. Also, there’s a lot of groups that are in the off-diagonals.

That means that, at that time, there wasn’t much correlation between economic conservatism and moral conservatism. It also meant that if you’re trying to make a compromise, at that time, there were actually people in the off-diagonal groups who you might be able to say, “Well, yeah, I know you’re conservative on economics, but you seem to be liberal on the social issues. Can you help us and join us,” and vice versa with respect to other issues.

What happened by 2020? Well, first, let’s just put a little oval around it so we know what we got. This is 2020 and notice things seem to be much different. There’s very few groups in those off-diagonal positions. In fact, if we put ovals around everything we see, the dashed line is the oval from 2000, the oval from 2020 is the continuous line. You can see that, in fact, not only have American political groups been polarized, they’ve also collapsed in some ways towards just one dimension. In fact, the correlation of the dimensions is very high now.

In terms of those who like mathematics, it says that the first principle component, the first eigenvector, is very large of these data. That tells you that that now is the dimension of American politics, not two dimensions, but one dimension. My colleagues Eric Schickler and Paul Pierson have written a wonderful book called Partisan Nation, where they argue that, in fact, the problem we face today is so many overlapping cleavages, that instead of having many cleavages with some liberal conservatives and conservative liberals on them, now we have just one cleavage and one dimension of politics. That one dimension makes it very hard to have compromise. They put together a lot of good information that shows that this has been happening.

This is what I’m most worried about in American politics. I think it confirms the Pierson-Schickler result. They don’t actually have data like this, and I hope they’re going to be happy to see that because it proves that they got it right. Also, my colleagues, Jake Grumbach and Ruth Collier have made an argument about the cleavage structure of American politics being important. They have a somewhat different theory, and I think they might be informed by seeing this, which would indicate that they got it, I think, partly right. I reread their article just the other day, and it’s a really smart article. I think this data shows that they’re worried there are too many cleavages. I don’t think that’s our problem. I think there’s just one now, one dimension of American politics and that’s the difficulty.

What do we got? Well, we got the rise of moral traditionalism and social cleavages. The rise of the religious right, increasing role of place, fall of economic New Deal worker-management authority cleavage, demise of unions, concerns about diversity, inclusion, and who belongs. So two major dimensions. New basic cleavage of less well-educated versus professional elites, which I think really affects us as university folks, and the correlation of moral traditionalism with economic conservatism.

Note President Trump’s brilliant, if nefarious, use of DEI. What he is trying to do is put all those dimensions together. He uses that trope because it puts together race, moral traditionalism and economic issues all at once. DEI, we have now learned, causes airplane crashes. Who knew? OK.

I don’t have much time left, so let me just quickly say I wrote three books on inequality and political participation. I just want to note that this is a big problem in America. Our 1990 data, quite dated at this point, showed that 70% of the dollars in politics came from the top 20% of the population. I’m sure that percentage is even higher now. I have a picture of the inauguration, where a bunch of billionaires sat on the dais and the governors of the two biggest Republican states, Texas and Florida, were in another room, the overflow room because, hey, they’re just governors of states, they’re not scions of industry.

Then, in 2022, along with my long-term colleague, Kay Schlozman, I wrote about loss of trust in institutions. First this shows you that, from the 1970s to 2010s, trust in institutions has declined. The blue bars are for governmental institutions. The pink ones are for essentially every other institution in society. The only one for which it’s increased is the military. Every other one trust has gone down. By the way, since we put these data together, science has fallen, medicine has fallen, our education has fallen.

What’s gone on? Well, the partisan confidence in institutions has become more polarized. Here’s the partisan confidence from the ’70s to the present time in police. Notice that the red line, which again is for Republicans, shows that their confidence has stayed high and, in fact, maybe even increased a little bit. Notice for Democrats, it’s gone down. You all know the reasons for this. We get the reverse, though, for the press, over time. Democratic confidence measured by the blue line is about constant, maybe gone up a little bit even. Republican confidence has gone down. Now we have polarization in trust across institutions, Democrats trusting some, Republicans trusting others.

Now this diagram, it’s a little complicated, but basically we’ve plotted trust on the part of Democrats on the vertical axis, against trust on the part of Republicans on the horizontal axis. If those two numbers were the same, then every institution would fall along the purple line. That is to say they’d be equally trusted by Republicans and Democrats. Maybe not high trust, maybe low trust or maybe high trust … In fact, as you go along the line, trust goes up for the institution on average. Essentially all of the institutions fall inside those dashed lines that I put there, which makes some theoretical sense, except for two. This is the ’70s, remember, labor and business. Anybody guess why? Say, “New Deal Coalition.”

Now, let’s look at what’s happened today. Trust in institutions for almost every institution has become polarized, with some loved by Republicans and some loved by Democrats. Democrats tend to like and trust the knowledge-producing institutions in society: science, higher education, education in general, public schools, TV news, the press. Knowledge and information institutions. Republicans trust the norm-enforcing and traditional institutions: religion, police and the military.

What does this mean? I’m going to skip this slide. So roughly it means this new authority cleavage is increasingly taking over. We’re in a situation where we have not any longer the New Deal cleavage in American politics so much as the less well-educated vs. the well-educated, especially professionals. That’s made science, higher education and medicine a target for the populist impulse in American society. Whereas, it used to be businesses that were the target for the populist impulse in American society. We’ve got to come to grips with that, as a university. I look at Rich here. Solve this problem, Rich. Expect a solution next week.

We’ve got new authorities, we’ve got new structuring institutions. Used to be unions, now it’s the religious right, 25% of the religious right are people who go to church very, very often. In those institutions, they’re being told about politics in a way that’s new and novel, in a way that unions used to tell their members about politics. But there’s not many union members anymore.

We’ve got polarized trust in all institutions, and ultimately democracy depends a lot on the people and we’re not sure about their competence. Money and other forces distort representation in favor of the rich. What can be done? I’ve got a long list, it’s in the handout. If you want to know more about this, read the handout slide on this.

What should higher education do? I think we have to ensure our legitimacy by performing well, being ethical, living up to our cultural standards. We have to reach out. We’re not doing this very well, we’ve got to do better at it. Of course, teaching and research. What will happen?

On the slides, I give you three different scenarios. One leading to illiberal democracy and I think a plausible scenario for that. A second one, which tells you, in the short run, that I think the contradictions of the Republican approach will pile up and cause troubles for the Republicans. Then a third one, which is democracy survives, and that’s a more medium to long-term one. You can read those as well.

Then, finally, I just want to thank my students, my mentors, my collaborators and colleagues, and a special thanks, I really mean this, to UC Berkeley. This has been my home. This has been the place where I’ve found surcease from sorrow. This is a place I’m proud of because of the mission of this university, to be the greatest university in the world and to provide an opportunity for people like me, the son of a carpet salesman, who didn’t go to college, who never expected to be at a place like this. We provide that kind of opportunity. This is a very, very special place. We’re all lucky to be affiliated with it. Thank you.

Thank you. We’ve got time for a few questions. Susan’s got the mic. I want to thank my wife, too, by the way, my daughter, who are here, and my son-in-law who have put up with me all these years, and that wasn’t always easy.

Audience 1: Thank you very much. I was wondering, with the reduction of the influence of religion overall in society and with the move of people from rural to cities wouldn’t that have changed the cleavage over time. What do you expect those influences to have going forward?

Henry Brady: Oh no, I’ve got a thing here.

I think that is true in that one of the big things we’re finding is the growth of what we call nones, not N-U-N-S, but N-O-N-E-S, people who have no religion. That is working against the increasing impact of religious right. But what’s working in its favor has been that it has taken on political views.

For example, for many, many decades after the Civil War, the South was Baptist and conservative in its religion. The Midwest was conservative in its religion. Methodists and Lutheran, they voted Republican. The South voted democratic because of the legacy of the Civil War. That changed in the ’70s and the ’60s with the Voting Rights Acts, they found one another. The religious right has gotten momentum and that’s caused what we’ve been seeing.

Now how that’s going to all end up, you’ve got two forces working against one another and religion has become extremely politicized. That’s the other thing that Tim Alberta really chronicles. It’s very disturbing. I spent a year at a theological seminary. I don’t think religion should be about mammon, but many denominations apparently do think that now. They’re about money and mammon, and they talk about that all the time. Yes, good question.

Audience 2: Hi. Thanks for this lecture. We’re all kind of looking for that one thing that we can latch on to explain things, that largest eigenvector that you mentioned before. As voters, voting that’s the only time we’re able to express ourselves and get our message out there. Using the voting systems that we have, plurality voting seems to cause a natural degradation into two camps. That, to me, seems to make it easy for interest in power to manipulate the average voter onto a one-dimensional axis, like you were saying. I was wondering if maybe you could speak to that a little bit and tell me whether I’m onto something with this idea, or whether I’m off base, and how.

Henry Brady: Right. Well, there are certainly those people who believe that we should get a PR system. One of my students, Lee Drutman, is a big proponent of this and argues we should go to proportional representation in our House races. I think it’s worth thinking about that. I’m a little nervous of unintended consequences. You just never know quite what you’re going to get. If you’re going to get a parliament like they have in Israel where there’s tremendous leverage in terms of the extreme right, I don’t think that’d be such a great thing to get.

I do think there’s something problematic with our voting system. It has more to do with political primaries. In the wake of the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention, where Mayor Daley, remember, had a police that were bludgeoning protesters, there was the McGovern-Fraser Commission, which decided, “Let’s get away from elites making decisions about candidates, let’s go to primaries.” The trouble with primaries is only the most intense voters vote in primaries. That means the people on the far left and the people on the far right choose the candidates. The net result is that’s pulling people apart.

Actually, political science argues that a one-dimensional approach should be best because there’s all sorts of theorems that say that leads to an equilibrium in voting because the candidates will naturally move towards the center. They hadn’t anticipated in this theorem the primaries that would pull them apart. That’s where we’ve got a problem.

Now, I don’t see us getting rid of primaries, but we could do things like the top two primary, which puts both parties into the same primary. There’s some evidence that’s been pushing people a little bit towards the center, but we have to think of other mechanisms like that. That’s the big challenge for political science, thinking of mechanisms that’ll push things more towards the center instead of pulling them apart.

By the way, Nelson Polsby, one of my mentors here, wrote a book, Consequences of Party Reform. That’s a brilliant explication of the bad things that would happen because of party reform in the ’60s. He wrote it around 1980, and it’s just right on.

Moderator: I think we can take one more question. I saw somebody’s hand up over here.

Henry Brady: By the way, one of the things is the Democrats have to get their act together and figure out how they’re going to live with this new authority relationship in America. I don’t think Democrats have come to grips with the fact that elite professionals, just as folks who work at universities in science and medicine and things like that, are part of the problem. We just can’t believe that. We can’t believe that the New Deal cleavage of labor management is deteriorating and there’s a new authority relationship.

Audience 3: Do you think rank choice voting could help bring [inaudible]…

Henry Brady: It could help. I would probably add that, in terms of the top two primaries, as one way to think about helping to solve some of those problems. The trouble is we don’t have a magic bullet. It’s going to be lots of things, and that’s why we’re in a precarious position.

If you read the Schickler-Pierson book, you’ll find out that they’re pessimistic, as well. They don’t think a new issue or cleavage will develop. I’m hopeful that might happen if the Democrats could just figure out how to really deal with this new authority cleavage in America. We, in higher education and medicine and science, can stop getting all in our heads. Well, we’re just folks who care about the facts and people should just listen to us. It ain’t working, guys. Got to try something different. OK, is that it?

Rich Lyons: I think that has to be it. Thank you very much, Henry.

Thank you very much, Henry. Just a couple of very quick comments and I’ll set you free here. Thanks to the Senate and all that we represent here. It’s a wonderful working relationship and it continues to be between the administration and our faculty leadership. There’s so many points I couldn’t possibly touch on here. I guess I did that.

This idea of coalition building, right? This idea that when it was economic issues, it was about dollars, dollars going to be split. There’s compromise. How do you build a coalition when it’s like there’s no space for that? That was really, at least for me, really a quite fundamental point. It’s 20 years. I’m going to declare for all of you, 20 years isn’t very much time. OK. That’s my declaration. These dynamics are really at quite a clock speed here. This is a generation or less, quite remarkable.

AAU, the Association for American Universities, I get to attend those. Carol, of course did before me. Part of it is how do we collectively raise trust and confidence in higher education? This is an issue that people are thinking a lot about. Just a couple of topics I will mention. One is agriculture. The idea that our science feeds agriculture speaks to rural, as well as urban. That’s a pretty potent theme in terms of our science, among others.

Also, new business creation. Look, Berkeley isn’t just about new business creation. What kinds of people are we putting in the civic sector? What kinds of people are we put in the public sector? It’s much bigger than that, but we also happen to be the best university in the world at producing funded new businesses. It’s sort of like, let’s deliver that message into somebody who needs to hear that message. We don’t generally tell that message and we don’t want to overdo that message, but we do need to speak into the listening of the people that haven’t been hearing enough of us if we’re going to sort of shift trust and confidence and play a leadership role in doing that.

Then just a last very quick point. I was asked at a recent, this was an on the record press thing, and this was a month and a half ago or so. It was after the election though. The question was: What do you think about the next administration?, which is a complicated question to answer on the record.

One of the things that I said, and I’ll offer it for you, because I didn’t really mention the administration per se, but I simply said, “One of the sort of trends I think we’re seeing articulated is a trend toward viewpoint diversity. I think for a lot of people, diversity is a very healthy thing.” The marketplace for ideas is open, John Stuart Mill, things that we cherish.

There’s another trend we don’t know which is going to win out or how they’ll compete, and that is a trend toward quashing dissent. That is a very complicated place for society to go. That’s how I answered it. I didn’t say anything about one administration or another, but I think these are the things that we’re all watching.

Look, thank you so much, Henry, for your insights, for all you’ve done for Berkeley. Berkeley is one of society’s most valuable assets. We are supporting this together. OK. Thank you for closing on that idea. I invite all of you to return to this, the Alumni House, at 4 p.m. on Monday, March 3, mark your calendars, for the second of our faculty research lectures. Carlos Bustamante, professor, as I said, of molecular and cell biology, also, physics and chemistry will discuss “The Development of Single Molecule Force Spectroscopy.” OK? Recordings of both lectures will be available to view on the Faculty Research Lectures website a week after each event.

Thank you for attending. You are all welcome to stay for a reception hosted by our wonderful Goldman School of Public Policy. Thanks to you all.

(Short applause)

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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