Professional Documents
Culture Documents
UWRT 1104
11/02/2017
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
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
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.