And we kind of stay there for some time. Why did it wane . Look at drug patterns. They remain there about 15 or 16 years and a run in 20year cycles. The crack cocaine cycle is no more. There are still people who use crack cocaine. It is nowhere near where it used to be. In the absence of that driving the violence, and then we are down in the 200 range and we got stuck there for a long time. Even when i took over in 2007, in 2006. 69 one hundred 81 in 2007. We are persistent with yang violence. And violence was born accelerated during the crack cocaine. Even when the crack cocaine one away, the gangs didnt. Coming down from the 186 down to where we are now, about a 54 drop in murders. It has been constant focus on end guns, the high offenders and bring the community into work with us. That is been key in dropping at that last 54 . That was a portion of a presentation of q a. You can see the entire program today at 7 00 eastern here on cspan. Some news to share with you today. Just. S. Population rose 0. 7 from last year. The Census Bureau estimates a population of more than 316 Million People for the u. S. It was the lowest rate in more than 70 years, which could affect the future u. S. Economy. California and texas continue to be the most populous state. This week as he visits the region, john kerry is expected to unveil a peace plan for the middle east. Will meet with Benjamin Netanyahu and mock mood abbas toock mood address several issues in the conflict. Peace talks resumed in july with both sides already making concessions. Last month the university of akron hosted its seventh state of the parties conference. They focused on National Party polarizations and the changing american electorate. It is two hours. My job really is to keep time. We have four papers to be presented, which means we will give about the team minutes to each. We hope you will see a weaving together of the topics. We hope you will have great interest in the things they present and what have great questions. We have three authors on this paper. I will let you take it from there. Good morning. We are delighted to be here. Such a great meeting and such a great panel and we thank janet to help us get back and home. Audience, icspan plan to have a 24hour filibuster and talk until the meeting is over. Everyone has interesting things to say with excellent papers. Projectr is part of a that we have been working on dealing with how the way American Public opinion is react to the way the elite structure of the preferences and as we begin thinking about the state of the Political Parties and the futures, we begin looking at some contemporary takes on parties from the new york times. Wrote there will be a serious Third Party Candidate with a Serious Movement big enough to affect the outcome of the election. He followed up and noted a former u. S. Comptroller general might be that kind of candidate to ignite the radical center. So the lack of president walker aside, the day after the election, we now entered and obama realignment and it might not last beyond the next president ial election. What strikes us about the way these folks are thinking about american Political Parties is the expectation is for major dramatic change. People who are looking for that kind of change are going to be waiting a while. Make threetry to empirical points. The first point is that self aretifying moderates actually in a lot of way polarized from each other. The second is that the parties are constrained in their abilities to make major advances toward voters. Match the they do not preferences, it makes it difficult for the major parties to outflank each other and try to grab these voters. Just focusing on your course of voters is not a strategy that is likely to make ever either party a viable majority. We begin with evidence from others that congressional elites are divided along a righte dimension, a left dimension. Not so divided but divided along two principal dimensions. One dealing with questions of moral right and wrong. T dimension leftrigh to them. What are the consequences in the political system when you elites are divided along one dimension and the public is divided along two . We make the argument that there are some folks who have orthodox issue preferences. They are either liberal or conservative on economic and social issues. They behave as though they are divided like members of congress. These are the folks that are polarized partisans. They make your vote choice early. They consume partisan media. They do not split their tickets when they vote. A larger group has they might be liberal on one set of issues and conservative on another said of issues. It might the libertarian. Folks who are conservative socially might be considered populist. Those in the middle might be considered moderates. Q folks are folks that were dissipate less, or more unstable , do not partisanship consume partisan media and split their tickets at a higher rate when they vote. This is the 2012 American National election study. Every dot is a person. The further to the left you go, the more liberal you are economically. Socialxis is the dimension. Conservatives are quite obviously polarized from each other. These are the people who are becoming divided in the american electorate and are more likely to participate. A nontrivial size of voters are libertarian in their view. There is a fair amount of people with expressed preferences in the middle. They are all likely to call themselves moderate when asked to place themselves on a standard ideological scale. If you are conservative economically, you are a moderate. If you are just the opposite, you are a moderate. That makes it difficult for a thirdparty candidate to corral both of these groups of voters. We argue it will be difficult for a thirdparty to appeal to these voters who are different from each other. To give a sense of how this might try to operate, we went ran to 1992 when ross perot as a fairly successful thirdparty candidate. He came in second in utah and maine in the election. Groups, where did his support come from . Analysis thatan we talk about more in the paper. Ill figure provides the predicted top ability that a member of the groups voted for ross perot. Around 26 servatives for perot. Liberals at 20 . 35 . Tarians, over perot ran as a prochoice kind of candidate. Not surprisingly the libertarian voters were the most likely to support perot. He was giving these voters exactly what they wanted and yet the likelihood a libertarian would cast a vote for perot was only 35 . The likelihood of a vote wasnt so high. Is something we should not worry about too much. This leaves parties with a couple of different options. How do we sustained a durable majority over the long haul . You can imagine they might say tomight to try to appeal folks that have some set of issues where they see things our way. Papery on a formula on a to try to estimate how much support candidates get from particular kinds of groups at how much they turn out. Those are the key elements of the formula. Same formula to our ideological groups. This shows the percentage of contribution to the vote totals 1970 two until 2012. Conservatives provide the lion share of support. They have really jumped up in the amount of support they provide for their voters. Re else can conservatives all republicans go to increase aeir share to try to become durable majority . The short answer is libertarians. They have been a larger part of the coalition. They turn out at a higher rate than populist and moderates. There have they have been more likely to support the Republican Party. That is the place where republicans ought to consider votes. That is not surprising. The Economic Issues correlate most highly with peoples self purported ideologies and their vote choice. Perhaps not so surprising. If conservatives have a hard time going after these goes upians, the line and down and it is not a very large group. Party might think lets just try to grow our course of voters. Conservative,ore then maybe we can win an election. Among analysis, turnout conservatives is close to 80 . 86 of the conservative vote in 2012 when to romney went to romney. They are not likely to increase their margins very much. Moving along to democrats. Liberals make up the largest share of democratic vote choice from 1972 until 2012. Back on the republican side, the scale is up to 60 here and 50 here. Liberals make up a smaller portion of the democrats overall coalition then conservatives make up for the republican coalition, which is something democrats need to keep in mind. Group. S are high turnout 95 voted for barack obama. Democrats are not going to appeal to that last five percent of liberals. Libertarians are more likely to identify or vote with the Republican Party. Moderates seem to be the best option for democrats to make their case in the future as they try to appeal to different kinds of voters. Have beenve for or likely to favor democrats. I can find in my notes moderates have given a majority of their votes to democrats. And 60 . the democrats have done a more job of solidifying moderate support. It is neither of these strategies that get either party above 50 . And given the way these numbers fluctuate, the parties ought not to be confident they can try to flank. On blicans tried to appeal that is a very difficult argument to do when you get 80 support from conservatives. If youre abandoning some of the policy positions of your core group, you risk alienating some of those votes. Voters andafter the do so in a systematic way . If they do not, they cannot rely on their own core supporters. Partiesthe state of the are highly polarized at the you the level and that leaves ofties adrift in a small sea uncertainty for the future. That is a good point to stop. Alan. I am waiting for the there we go. I want to thank john and the institute again and the staff for organizing this meeting and for inviting us here. Thank you for coming. I will talk to say about a phenomenon i found interesting in recent american electoral politics and that is polarization in the american electorate. Will start off with the facts my junior colleagues are always talking about the stylized facts. I will talk about something i think that is happening in american politics. I guess that would fall under facts. D i do not think i need to work hard to convince you that that is the case. Just in case youre not so sure about that, a few things we have seen that show this trend is happening at the elite level. Growing ideological divide between the parties and we have seen evidence of that. Ecline of comity the kind of language that is whenon the floor and also our political leaders talk in just about any for him these days. And the growing frequency of confrontations over the budget and president ial appointments that have been going on with the Government Shutdown and debt ceiling crisis that we had last month. Lots of evidence of that. What about the public . There is some evidence of growing intensity of partisan preferences and partisan conflict among some segments of the public, the kind of people who shop for tea party demonstrations, comparing barack obama to osama bin laden. Actually did not start with obama. We saw this when bush was in the white house as well. The comparisons with hitler, not just obama but bush was compared with hitler. I percent that victor on the right to some of my democratic friends and their responses that is true. [laughter] how representative or typical of these folks . People are turning out and demonstrating. Has there been an increase in partisan polarization in the American People . Divideplains the party in the American Public . We have seen a couple of different answers in the literature of local science. The republic is not more divided. Partisan dollarization has not really increased significantly. Approach interesting that has been offered by some been an is there has increase of affect of polarization. Peoples feelings about the party have become more divided. That does not mean the party is more divided the way you leads elites are. I am going to tell you what my findings are going to be. If you do not want to be surprise, close your eyes and cover your ears. Everybody warned. There has been substantial increase in affect her polarization in the american electorate. Almost all that is due to negative opinions by partisans of the opposing party. This rise can be explained by an increase in policy and ideological polarization. They are very closely connected with each other. Here is a puzzle. Visually. Hand, look at Party Identification and tracking over time, measuring , gostrength of party i. D. Back to the 1970s and it is pretty stable. It is not becoming stronger in the american electorate. Party loyaltyand, has increased. Party identification is not getting stronger. We are seeing more loyalty in voting. We are seeing a big increase in Party Loyalty in voting. 1972 was an amazing year. Over 40 of democrats voted for nixon. Data are quite striking. 2012, i am using only the facetoface interviews. I excluded the internetbased portion. If you use that, it is even higher. There are some differences between the components. Very high level of Party Loyalty in 2012. We also see a big decline in ticket splitting. We have the lowest rates of ticket splitting in the histor. , very low ticket splitting there. A lot of strict ticket voting going on. How can we solve this puzzle . One answer may be from looking at this other measure. Affect of polarization. Over thek at that, last 30 years there has been a pretty big increase in the divide between the parties and the difference between the rating of the parties on the scale. That is almost entirely due to more negative ratings of the opposing party. Look at partisans and you find the average rating of their own party has been pretty stable, around 70 degrees on the scale. We give the other party and more and more negative rating. That is why the divide is opening up. This does make a big difference in the distribution on the scale. This is what the distribution look like in 1978. You can see there were a lot of people in the middle in 1978 who rated the parties equally and not very many who strongly preferred one party or another. Minus five or plus five means you rated one party higher than the other on the scale. This is what 2012 looks like. There has been a pretty big change, a lot fewer voters now in the middle. And more who strongly prefer one party to another. Thater thing we find is the divide as you go up the , and this case im measuring a bite campaign involvement, about half of the electorate, you see the more involved people are more divided with their evaluations to the party. People who care about politics and do the most really like one party a lot better than the other party or really dislike one party than the other party. Affects matters. This is a feeling thermometer difference. This is for 2012. It has a stronger effect than Party Identification, even though both have a strong effect and that is true for every single election but it has gotten stronger over time. Why is this happening . As one of my students wanted to know. I will argue that this growing polarization is largely a result of growing ideological polarization. Parties in the electorate are moving apart. We measure ideological difference from the parties lie with placement of the parties on the liberal conservative scale. What you find is that the average distance between voters , voters aren party much further away from the opposing party, further and further away from the opposing party. You can see how that affects the percentage of voters who have a strong profession preference. It has been going up over time and the percentage who have no preference or a week preference has been going down over time. There is a strong relationship between ideological self placement this is not just saying projection. It is very strongly related to where you place yourself on the ideological scale. 86 , whichion is is about as close as you can get. The distance has increased as is the feeling thermometer difference. The trend seems to be moving together. We are seeing the feeling thermometer difference scale is correlated with ideology and with policy preferences. Social issues and Economic Issues are increasing the. Orrelation over time they are more correlated over time than they were [indiscernible] relationshipe between the distance and the feeling thermometer difference in 2012. The correlation is. 8. How you feel about the parties is very much a function of your relative distance from the party. When we do a multiple regression analysis and a whole bunch of predictors, the strongest predictor is relative ideological difference from the parties. It kind of overwhelms everything else. There are some other predictors but that is the strongest predictor. If you break the electorate of 2012 down, if you do not refer either party, this is what youre feeling thermometer scale looks like. You are in the middle, for the most part. If you have a preference for three plus, this is what you look like. 15 of voters who place themselves in coolly distance from the parties on the ideological scale and this is how they came out on the party affect scale and they are in the middle. They look like the voters in 1978. Almost half of the electorate who rated one party three units closer than the other in ideology and i would call that polarization. Conclusions are that parties have been moving apart. Democrats moving to the left. Republicans moving to the right. Is the growing divide that explains the polarization and there are consequences the voters are less likely to cross party lines. We are getting a declining ticket splitting because of this growing divide between the parties. The opposing party and the candidates are becoming increasingly unacceptable candidates. We fail overall about the same but we dislike the other party. One implication is that attacking the opposing party may be the most effective way of energizing ones supporters and turning out the vote. We had one of the most negative campaigns in history in 2012 if you look at the content of the political advertising. It was much more negative overall than 2008 or earlier elections. Shiftk this reflects this that we have seen toward increasing negative perceptions of the other party within the american electorate. Can expect to see more of the same in the future. Those who live in ohio, expect to see more attack ads in 2012. Great. Thank you, alan. Joel . Thanks, linda. I want to thank john and janet for the wonderful sta