Jordan Morehead

Dr. Angela Mitchell

UWRT 1104

11/02/2017

How the over-affiliation of politics is ruining democracy

We live in a day-and-age where people view their political parties as something theyre

bound to, rather than something they agree with. This may not seem like a problem at first but

over time it develops into a society that votes not on morals or opinions but based on the party

that have chosen. It no longer becomes what is good for all people but what is good for my

party, and whilst this may not be everyones opinion, it has become more and more obvious over

the years that it is a majority of politicians opinions. This has become even more prevalent as of

recently, mainly due to this recent presidency where it seems more than ever that this country is

divided. There is no real permanent solution to this problem of the over-affiliation of political

parties, no, its more like there are certain steps that we can take to lessen it. The two main

problems that have been growing more and more are: media bias, and political identity. Media

bias is a very broad term and encompasses many issues: the issue of false and spotty reporting,

the issue of news networks giving news that appeases their audiences, and the issue of reporting

news that really isnt news. Then we have political identity which may be the most harmful

problem of all. Political identity is the concept that you side with one party over the other, and

whilst this may seem harmless at first the problem arises when a person changes their opinion to

fit their partys compared to what parties are supposed to do, which is to adapt to their

constituents.
 Biased news is a problem that has been around forever, its something that has always

happened, will always happen, and will doubtfully never go away. Whilst weve always had

problems with this, it has become worse over the past few decades mainly due to television.

Television networks like CNN, Fox News, NBC, etc. all have certain audiences that they pertain

to, which leads to different news being reported depending on who their audiences are. So inside

of hearing both sides of the story, you usually hear the side of the story that they want you to

know, depending on the news station your tuned into. Another issue with television news

networks is the whole 24/7 news programs, what happens is that the same story is repeated every

hour because surprisingly there isnt enough news to have a different news story every hour. So

a few problems come out of this: firstly people become desensitized towards current events, such

as mass shootings, crime, etc. due to them seeing it on the news all the time, secondly you have

news anchors reporting on things to fill the hour and these stories sometimes arent well

researched, and often seem as though they are grasping at straws just to report on something. The

desensitized problem is directly related to politics, especially when we speak of presidential

campaigns. With the constant reporting on the presidential candidates people start caring less

and less about what the candidates are saying and start caring more about what political party

they belong to. If you are watching a news network that leans more conservative, they are not

going to report negatively on a republican candidate due to it not being what their viewers want

to hear. In the article Has Television Personalized Voting Behavior? the author, Danny Hayes,

goes in depth on how television has affected the way we view politics, and one particularly

interesting thing he talks about is the difference between how the personal characteristic of a

candidate has affected the way a person votes over the past couple of decades. He brings up

when John F. Kennedy ran for president, 39% of voters said that his personal characteristics had
an effect on their vote, this data has not held true over the past decades, with the percentage of

voters saying personal characteristics effecting their vote decreasing (Hayes 234). His

conclusion was that the over saturated coverage of candidates has led to this decrease. His

conclusion definitely seems accurate if we look at this recent presidential election. Donald

Trump was not perceived in a good light by the media and he said and did many things that did

not reflect well on his personal character, yet he still won the presidential election.

Political identity is the most problematic part when it comes to the over-affiliation of

political parties. Political identity is a concept that a person associates themselves with a group

that express a particular political opinion and beliefs. Now at first glance this doesnt seem that

bad, it actually makes sense; you identify/want to associate yourselves with people that think and

believe in the same stuff as you. The problem we have now is that once a person identifies with

a certain group they tend to stick with it for life. With this comes the identity that a person

creates with a party, when someone considers themselves to be part of a party, such as a

democrat, they sympathize more towards that party. Registered Republicans interpret the news

and see the world in a way that's sympathetic to Republican views and hostile to Democratic

ones, simply because their Republican registration becomes part of their identity (Fisman). This

becomes a problem when it comes to things such as legal matters or matters when someone does

something wrong. If a party member makes a mistake they may not be held accountable due to

the fact that the other party members sympathize towards them. So maybe a person doesnt

identify with a political party so that they dont have to feel tied to them, lets say they want to

be an independent. Well political parties have found ways to force independents to register for

one party or the other, through caucuses. NPR gives a little bit of information on this But many

states require voters to affiliate with a party in order to take part in presidential primaries and
caucuses (Sago, Markus, Joffe-Block). This is an issue especially with the increasing number of

independent voters, particularly in the millennial crowd. Younger people tend to be less likely

to affiliate with parties than older people, said Jocelyn Kiley, a researcher with the Pew

Research Center. But "this is as pronounced as it's ever been. (Sago, Markus and Joffe-Block).

As a millennial myself I see more and more of my peers considering themselves independent

voters, which I believe to be a good thing. But it is not very democratic when a person is

required to register with a party to vote.

So how do these two things correlate, how exactly is the over-affiliation of political

parties ruining democracy? Well, I believe there to be several reasons it is. Firstly we have the

problem of having only two main political parties; I talked earlier about how when a person

identifies with a party they stick with it for life. One of the reasons this is, is because a person

likes to be part of a group, we as people like to be around people that share our ideologies and

we want to be able to have something we identify with. But with only two main parties a person

is left with only two choices, so even if they dont agree with all the concepts that that particular

party does, you still have to stick with them, forcing you to maybe vote for a candidate that

doesnt share all your ideologies. Secondly with biased media comes ignorance, which is not

only plain harmful in general but even more so when it comes to politics. Ignorance can be is

sometimes based on lack of information, sometimes due to wrong information, and sometimes

due to lack of care. When ignorance comes into politics we see a lot more hate and mistrust

amongst politicians, politicians who only care about a certain group of people and look out for

just them, rather than the whole population of the U.S. Ignorance is also harmful in that it can

lead to people having misguided feelings on certain issues, seeing things in black-and-white

rather than seeing things from the multiple points of view that exists in politics. Thirdly it leads
to discrimination, for example: There has also been a significant decrease in non-Hispanic

whites in the Democratic party over the past twenty-four years from seventy-six percent to fifty-

seven percent (Maniam). This is a statistic from the Pew Research Center and there are many

others showing that certain races and genders side with one party of the other. Women and

people of color lean more left than right, whereas men and non-Hispanic whites lean more right.

When parties start to get identified with races it can lead to discrimination from other parties.

Take the voter restriction laws/gerrymandering in North Carolina, we are under investigation by

the Supreme Court for our governor passing laws that make it harder for African-Americans to

vote. This is a huge issue and one that is sad to see still exists today. The over-affiliation of

parties is something that is unfortunately unlikely to go away, it seems to be growing day by day.

And in a country that is already so divided it seems like politics is going to be thing that may

divide us even further, we need to take notice of this issue and work on fixing it. If we dont

then we will see less and less bipartisanship and more and more, my party is better than yours

attitude.