Divided We Fall IV — Policy Solutions: How business can help depolarize politics & incentivize moderation
The fourth and final Divided We Fall webinar, presented by Business for America and the Niskanen Center, focused on how policy solutions and an overhaul of incentives in the political arena can help mitigate extreme polarization and encourage bipartisan collaboration.
The Niskanen Center’s Kodiak Hill-Davis and BFA’s Sarah Bonk were joined by Katherine Gehl, founder and chair at the Institute for Political Innovation; Greg Orman, an entrepreneur and two-time Independent candidate for office from Kansas; and Steve Teles, a Niskanen Center senior fellow and professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University.
The speakers explored public policy approaches to addressing polarization, particularly around nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting. There was a lively discussion about how our current system incentivizes bad behavior, especially within a two-party system. More choice and competition in politics helps increase voter participation, increases diversity among winning candidates, reduces toxicity during elections, and increases bipartisan collaboration while in office.
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Katherine Gehl asked, “Why in the ‘business of politics’ is it possible for those in this business to be doing so well, when their customers — the American public — have never been more dissatisfied? Something is off with the political structure. Our current system only has room for two competitors. They are guaranteed to be the only two, regardless of what they do or don’t get done. We need the possibility of new competition to drive innovation and new thinking.”
She continued to argue that policy changes such as ranked-choice voting be adopted to encourage more of this competition. “Party primaries encourage elected officials to answer to the most partisan constituents, who become the boss. Plurality presents us with candidates that win without majority support, keeping out competition and creating a spoiler-effect. Changing this wouldn’t guarantee that Congress would get things done but would change the incentives to make progress.”
In contrast, Steve Teles suggested that moderates should exert more control within the current system to combat the homogenization of the two parties. “The key mechanism for moving away from homogenous parties to factional organization is not going to be rule-change,” Teles asserted. “Rather, we need mobilization to create collective action and cultivate power. Politics rewards those that show up. And it’s more likely for people on the ideological extremes to organize through our political parties. Moderates are under-organized at every level of politics. They’ve gotten power in the past through elite institutions. If Howard Schultz had put the same money and effort into building a moderate faction in one of the parties, he would have been more successful than if he had made a third-party run.”
As someone with first-hand experience running as an Independent in the two-party system, Greg Orman provided a more personal take on the impact of polarization on our electoral environment. “This is a systems problem. We’re not voting for candidates who inspire us, we’re voting against people we hate and fear. The reason this works in our politics is because we only have two choices. Polarization is absolutely a systems and incentives problem. You only have two choices, and people now are trained to vote against who they hate the most. We have to change the system of incentives for people running for office.”
From a business perspective, Orman believes that companies and their thought leadership can contribute to finding solutions. “There is much more common ground than we think, and businesses may be a route to find that. We can bring business-level problem solving to politics as a means to change how we address our pervasive political problems — where business can really play a role and influence government’s approach to problem solving.”
