I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the now much discussed _enthusiasm gap_ heading into the 2010 midterm elections (see for example “here”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-levine/the-enthusiasm-gap-how-to_b_714292.html and “here”:http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/09/12/another-enthusiasm-gap-liberals-enjoying-the-news-a-lot-les/ ; see “here”:http://www.gallup.com/poll/142892/Parties-Tied-Generic-Ballot.aspx for some actual data in this regard). As a political scientist, here’s the question I keep wondering about: why are all the people who were _so enthusiastic_ in 2006 and 2008 about getting Democrats into office in order to reverse Republican policies suddenly _so unenthusiastic_ about blocking Republicans from getting back into power and instituting these same policies? Moreover, what does such a state of the world have to say about traditional “spatial models of voting”:http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=spatial+models+of+voting&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart?
It seems one (or more) of the following could be going on:
1) The “I Won’t Get Fooled Again”:http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/won%27t-get-fooled-again-lyrics-the-who/761ef79aab42fa9c48256977002e72f9 explanation: Perhaps the Republicans of 2010 have actually changed what they stand for from the Republicans of 2006 and 2008, and therefore it might make sense that people who opposed the “old Republicans”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush might now support the “new Republicans”:http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2010/09/bill-oreilly-on-tax-cut-debate-boehner-was-caught-in-a-tanning-bed.html from a policy standpoint.
2) The “It’s the Economy, Stupid”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid explanation. Here all policy concerns take a back bench to the state of the economy (a viewpoint which has often been presented “here on the Monkey Cage”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/02/the_economy_structures_everyth.html), and the enthusiasm gap is little more than a residual of the fact that the party in power is disliked when economic conditions are poor.
3) The “Red Sox Nation”:http://mlb.mlb.com/bos/fan_forum/redsox_nation.jsp explanation: Perhaps there is just something inherently more exciting about rooting for the underdog. So when the Red Sox first won the World Series in 2004, in many ways it felt like the whole country (save a few people here in NYC) were rallying around them to finally win a World Series. Once they win a number of World Series, though, they are in danger of becoming just another dominating wealthy team. So maybe there is something similar in politics: could it be that it is somehow more exciting to win back Congress than trying to hold it? I’d be interested in any research that has been done in this regard.
4) I don’t have a cute nickname for my final possible explanation, but on the upside I actually have some research to report on here. My final possible explanation is that maybe it is easier for opposition parties to “rally the faithful” because the faithful don’t have to be distracted by what party leaders actually _do_ once in power, and therefore can read anything they want into what the party is likely to do when it gets into power. So for example, Obama’s “Yes, We Can!” might have meant single-payer health care to some, a public option to others, and a more modified version of the status quo to still others. Now, however, some of those prior supporters are bound to be disappointed. They may still prefer Obama (Democrats) to the alternative, but perhaps this can explain the enthusiasm gap.
Here’s a little bit of evidence to perhaps related to this final proposition. In a conference paper we presented at “2010 APSA meeting”:http://www.apsanet.org/, “Ted Brader”:http://polisci.lsa.umich.edu/faculty/tbrader.html, “Dominik Duell”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/politics.meetPhD and I reported on the results of experiments on the effects of party cues on public opinion formation in Hungary, Poland, and Great Britain. Interested readers can download the paper “here”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1644220, but to greatly summarize, the point the experiments was to test whether or not hearing that your preferred party supported a particular policy made you more likely to support that policy as well. When we broke down our findings by party, an interesting finding quickly became apparent: across all three countries, we were more likely to find cues affecting the opinions of supporters of _opposition_ parties than _incumbent_ parties. (NOTE: We only had enough power to look at these effects on the party level for larger parties; see “the paper”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1644220 for more details.)
I’m interested in using this post to get a discussion started on this topic, in part because it fits precisely in with the “mission statement”:https://themonkeycage.org/2007/11/why_this_blog.html of The Monkey Cage (which has been directly addressed in a number John’s “recent posts”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/09/things_political_science_can_d.html) of getting political science research into public discussions of politics. Do a Google News search for “enthusiasm gap” and you’ll find tons of references – what can we as political scientists offer as a contribution to this discussion? Feel free to use the comments section to highlight your own research in this regard, or else email me directly.