Regional Devolution: pathway or roadblock? | Taming polarization: Reforming the American federal republic conference

Thank you.

Thank you for the invitation to participate in this terrific workshop

and the opportunity

of being here.

So my version of the question for the panel is, can evolution help tame polarization? And I'm going to do it in the spirit of Tocqueville, who is the author of the founding text of American politics, while being French, and also wrote a book about the revolution in his own country, in which he wrote that to understand what happened in France, we need to actually look at what happens in the rest of the world and sort of put it in context.

So I want to start by putting the US in a in a comparative context in terms of the nature of the crisis of democracy.

Now, that scary graph is essentially a summary of a quantitative analysis of the relationship between polarization and the likelihood that democracy collapses.

And it basically conveys one general point, which is the risk of democracy and their polarization, and in more polarized settings, increases But that risk actually is muted down or contained by the level of economic development of the society.

That's the general pattern in the comparative context.

And obviously, against that general pattern, the US is a real exception.

The US is a very rich democracy in which polarization is posing a lot of questions about the way democracy works and the risks that democracy undertakes.

And the question is then, why? And part of the answer we already heard yesterday is that polarization has led to a sort of partisan conflict in which sort of the disdain for the other has become part of the foundational identity of each of the political families.

So we have this very well-known graph in which basically the driver of the asymmetric polarization that we heard about yesterday is this idea of mostly hostility to the out party.

The levels of hostility sort of support for your own or candor warmth towards your own party are basically flat, what is driving polarization is mostly the idea that the other is terrible, is borderline unacceptable.

And the idea is what, and we also heard this yesterday and we'll hear it again today, this is basically compound by three things that are going on.

One is these feelings are clustered in a space both for the compositional changes associated with economic agglomeration and ideological sorting in space.

That translates into the very process of elite selection.

The panel to the right in the slide shows basically the share of Harvard graduates by party in the House and the share of Yale graduates by party in the Senate.

And we can see basically that the pattern of political selection by level of education, by institution of attendance, is actually becoming also polarized.

The idea here is that these people do not really walk in the same circles of life anymore, or they do it less and less.

And the risk is that, as a result, these identities have the possibility of becoming intrinsic.

And I will explain why that may matter to understand the question that the panel poses.

So the question is, can devolution help out? And there are many theoretical reasons as to why the answer should be yes.

Decentralization is supposed to help with the balancing of divergent preferences and asymmetric information problems that would lead to the differentiation of responses according to differentiation in the taste of the local population.

There is sorting, there is different types of demands, then different forms of political supply should help with the problem.