"... it’s long been obvious that liberals and conservatives are not mirror images of each other, and neither are the parties they are most closely associated with."

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COMMENTS: 
*  Bbbbut if they're not all the same, I might have to read and stuff and then I'll have to thinkand stuff and then people will try to get me to vote and stuff.  Can't I just watch tee vee and yell and stuff?
*  You listen to the candidates, their supporters, the conservatives base, and all you hear is people foaming at the mouth, ready for a rabies shot more than anything else.  The "never conservative enough" has been debunked by the Kansas experiment. Conservatism, just like religion, is faith based only and fuels itself with division.  No wonder the GOP only play that card...
*  I thought the whole point of a two-party system was that neither party would go extreme, just center-left-or-right, or go the populist route.
*  The Republicans are worse because they will go out of their way to make life tough for those who lose their employment because of TPP, whereas the Democrats will attempt to get them some safety net. I'd have thought most people have that figured out by now. Both parties are probusiness, because the entire structure of our society, government, etc. is business. But one party thinks winners need more rewards and losers need more punishment, and the other party thinks the opposite. And that's not a negligible difference. 
*  When you hate, when you hold others in contempt, when your "values" are the only values, when facts have no meaning, when rhetoric replaces policy, when you hate using government to help people, well, you have a way of turning off people. Becoming more extreme does not bring them back.
*   When you've dug yourself in a hole, it's wise to stop digging but, that's not the way of the GOP.
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They’ll always move further right: Why every defeat only makes Republicans more extreme

GOP somehow thinks they only lose because they're not conservative enough. That's a recipe for even more losing

By Paul Rosenberg, June 24, 2015

As the 2016 election campaign heats up, one thing seems certain: media coverage will be dominated by a reflexive posture of “balance” between two extremes, which press critic Jay Rosen dubbed “The View from Nowhere” back in 2003. Implicit in this posture is the simplifying assumption that each side is a mirror image of the other, and thus that the parties on each side are mirror images as well. Not in all particulars, of course—that’s where the daily stuff of news comes from—but more generally, in terms of how they should be understood. Hence, any critical coverage of one side requires similar critical coverage of the other, regardless of how well the underlying substance holds up—Watergate vs. Whitewater, for example.

The media is hardly alone in this, as many policymakers, analysts and political scientists also tend toward this view as well. A few years ago, as a sort of exception that proves the rule, two quintessential Washington figures, Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann, openly broke with this view, citing disproportionate conservative extremism in their book “It’s Even Worse than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism” — which was relatively shunned compared to how warmly their work has usually been treated. Yet, it’s long been obvious that liberals and conservatives are not mirror images of each other, and neither are the parties they are most closely associated with.

In 1967, pioneering public opinion researchers Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril published a landmark book, “The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion.” They found that roughly half the population was ideologically conservative, in the sense of preferring a smaller, more limited government, while two-thirds were operationally liberal, in the sense of wanting to spend more on specifically identified government programs. What’s more, almost one-quarter of Americans were both ideological conservatives and operational liberals.

Decades of polling since then has only confirmed and fleshed out this finding (see, for example, “Ideology in America” by Christopher Ellis and James A. Stimson), but its significance and relationship to other aspects of American politics seems to have gotten lost.

But political scientists Matt Grossmann of Michigan State University and David Hopkins of Boston College may be about to change that.  Their paper “Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats: The Asymmetry of American Party Politics” was recently published in the journal Perspectives on Politics, and its clear-eyed view of how left and right differ from one another in American politics could go a long way toward clarifying—as opposed to oversimplifying—what’s going on in our politics, including (but hardly limited to) how the 2016 campaign unfolds.

To understand that picture and what it entails, as well as the evidence supporting it, Salon recently interviewed Grossmann. The transcript has been edited for clarity.

The folk belief in American politics—in the media, and the political classes more generally—is that the two parties are more or less mirror images of one another, with a related belief that objectivity and realism require that one treat them as such: whatever one says about one party, you have to say something similar about the other, or else you’re not being objective, not being realistic; deep down, you’re a partisan hack, or at least you’ve been influenced by them.

But in your paper “Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats”–as well as other writings–you not only argue that this view is objectively false, and there’s a fundamental asymmetry between the parties, but that there’s a long, if obscured, history of contrary voices and data to support them, which goes much deeper and goes back much longer that the relatively recent fracture highlighted by the Tea Party. You write that “Democrats and Republicans are motivated by dissimilar political goals and think about partisanship and party conflict in fundamentally different ways, which in turn stimulates distinct approaches to governing by leaders on each side.”

In simplest terms, what is the difference between the parties that you point to, and–broadly speaking–what’s the sort of evidence in support of drawing this distinction?

First of all, we agree with your characterization that we’re resuscitating a long-held view in both popular political debate and in older political science–and especially more historically oriented political science–that never saw the parties as mirror images, and would note that it’s not necessarily true everywhere in political science. In comparative politics, for example, people who study parties across the world don’t necessarily assume that the parties that in one country are organized similarly or are motivated by similar goals.

Yes, I was speaking in broad terms.

Yes, so we share that generalization. Our simplest way of putting it is that the Republican Party is based on an ideological movement, around conservatism, as a set of broad ideas and principles, and the Democratic Party is much more a coalition of social group that have specific concerns, and usually have particular policy goals that they want to try to achieve. So we think that that certainly plays out in how partisans—both in the public and among elites—see party competition, and it also plays out in campaigns, and in governing. Parties have incentives to reinforce the basis on which they have collected support among fellow partisans. Our connection to the old Free and Cantril and the more recent Stimson work is that the basis of each party matches their potential victory in public opinion. That is, Democrats are on better terms, not when they defend government in the abstract, or when they sort of acknowledge a broader project of remedying any quality, but when they focus on particular goals that can be solved with specific policy solutions, whereas Republicans are always on firmer ground—both among their own supporters and among the public as a whole—when they talk in broad principled terms about the size and scope of government, and respect for traditional values, and America’s unique role in the world.

[major snippage]
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