Although there are plenty of indicators that Americans are as polarized as at any time since perhaps the Civil War, they still agree on a huge range of actual policy issues. That’s the conclusion of a study by the group Voice of the People based on in-depth surveys with more than 80,000 Americans, which found that “majorities from both parties agree on nearly 150 key policy positions across more than a dozen top policy areas.”
If this report is at all accurate, and its breadth strongly suggests that it is, then policy logjams and stalemate are a function polarization in Congress, not among American citizens. And if that is so, it’s high time that Congressional representatives start working more across the aisles, as the study’s funders (the Democracy Fund, the Hewlett Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the MacArthur Foundation and the Circle Foundation) suggest.
What the study’s sponsors don’t suggest is how to accomplish such a goal. EnCiv is working on tools that could help make that possible even in the absence of electoral reforms. One tool on our drawing board is a national deliberative process that could involve hundreds of thousands—even millions–of citizen, who could instruct Congress on where to focus its efforts—and how. Given the shared policy preferences of larges swaths of the American public, the tool would accent unity and collective decision making.
