Common Problems

How do shared problems affect politics and policy in a divided society? We examine some common intuitions about preference polarization and policy-making in light of such problems and show that the relationships they imply are fundamentally contingent. When actors’ individual costs from a policy addressing a commonly shared problem differ, their preferences over the appropriate policy respond asymmetrically to increases in the magnitude of the problem. In a broad range of circumstances such increases can give rise to increased polarization, but may also simultaneously yield policy adjustments rather than entrenchment of gridlock. The association of polarization and gridlock is contingent on two underlying factors: how the problem responds to the policy solution, and the location of the status quo policy when the extent of the problem changes. We illustrate the model’s logic by comparing U.S. national policy making in the Progressive Era and the present. Introduction A nearly ubiquitous narrative of contemporary politics is one of despair about polarization. A polarized political system is mired in policy gridlock, with every issue transformed into a partisan battle. The partisan rancor might be set aside if only we were to focus on a pressing common problem: catastrophic climate change, a dangerous real estate bubble, or an out-of-control national debt, for example. While this narrative seems so intuitive as to be nearly a platitude, recent experience clearly belies that hope. In this note, we provide a simple formal account of collective decision-making that suggests that there may be a good reason to doubt both the rationale for the hope and the one for despair. In our model, actors in a polity experience a common harm. A policy can mitigate the harm, but actors bear its costs asymmetrically. A helpful example is air pollution: all citizens may be harmed by sulfur-dioxide emissions, but citizens in coal-producing regions would disproportionately bear the economic consequences of emissions controls. Consequently, citizens differ in their preferred levels of regulation. An increase in the magnitude of the harm will increase the preferred scope of remedial policy of all citizens. However, rates of increase will generally differ across citizens. In a broad and behaviorally plausible array of circumstances relating to how citizens experience the mitigating effects of the policy, the rate of increase in the preferred scope of remediation will be higher for actors who, because they face relatively low remediation costs, prefer higher levels of the policy. The conjunction of these effects has several implications for politics and policy. First, under the circumstances referred to above, a uniform increase in the harm – a common problem – will produce greater polarization with respect to policy solutions, rather than greater consensus. Second, in supermajoritarian settings, that increase in polarization may yet be accompanied by policy innovation, rather than entrenched gridlock. Third, in such settings, the net effect of an increase in the collective harm may be a welfare improvement for citizens in the polity. The occurrence of some or all of these effects depends on three factors highlighted below: the relationship between the policy solution and the experienced