AS OF Thursday evening it appears that for the second time in my voting lifetime Republicans are about to force a shutdown of the federal government. A substantial and powerful portion of the conservative electorate are pretty happy about this; the applause John Boehner received from his colleagues at the word "shutdown" made that pretty clear. A lot of liberals, meanwhile, are lamenting the fact that their leaders have allowed themselves to be pushed so far to the right during the course of the negotiations that the Democratic baseline (cuts of about $32 billion) now stands to the right of the Republicans' initial proposal (cuts of about $31 billion). Which points out a striking contrast in partisan styles: Democrats have never, in my political memory, pulled any political stunt as extreme as actually shutting down the government in defence of their policy or ideological convictions. Why are Republicans and Democrats so different?

As Steve Benen points out, it definitely isn't (or isn't just) a function of Democratic legislators' lack of determination. It's partly a function of the fact that, as recent NBC/Wall Street Journal, Pew, and Gallup polls show, Democratic voters want their leaders to compromise, while Republican voters don't. Jonathan Chait argues that what we have here is a structural issue that forces Democratic politicians to be wimpy:

Most people have the default assumption that the two parties are essentially mirror images of each other. But there are a lot of asymmetries between the Democratic and Republican parties that result in non-parallel behavior. The Republicans have a fairly unified economic base consisting of business and high-income individuals, whereas Democrats balance between business, labor, and environmental groups. The Republican Party reflects the ideology of movement conservatism, while the Democratic Party is a balance between progressives and moderates. The upshot is that the Democratic Party is far more dependent upon the votes of moderates, who think of themselves in non-ideological terms and want their leaders to compromise and act pragmatically. The reason you see greater levels of partisan discipline and simple will to power in the GOP is that it has a coherent voting base willing to support aggressive, partisan behavior and Democrats don't. This isn't to say Democrats are always wimps, but wimpiness is much more of a default setting for Democrats.

Another way of saying this is to recognise that a lot more Americans self-identify as conservative than as liberal. That means that Democratic politicians have to appeal to moderates to get to 50% of the vote, which leads to compromise.

But Mr Benen also mentions the "different personality styles between partisans" as a factor, and I have to say, as we go through this dance for the second time, I'm finding myself increasingly interested in that side of things. Political analysis based on personality types, which was popular in the 1950s with Theodor Adorno's typology of the "authoritarian personality" and so on, largely broke off in the 1960s because of the trenchant critique that most people's understanding of politics and ideology is so confused, mutable and inconsistent that it can't be meaningfully connected to something as stable as personality. But more recently, a lot of studies have been finding strong, meaningful associations between broad ideological affiliations and the so-called "Big Five" personality dimensions. A widely cited 2008 study by Dana Carney of Columbia, Jon Jost of New York University, and Samuel Gosling of the University of Texas at Austin found that affiliation with liberal or conservative ideology could be "parsimoniously explained" by two of the "Big Five" characteristics: openness to new experiences and conscientiousness. Openness makes people more liberal, while conscientiousness makes them more conservative. (The other Big Five characteristics are extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability—or, to take it the other way around, neurosis.)

More recent papers by Yale's Alan Gerber and Greg Huber confirm those results. They also show that one of the other Big Five traits, extraversion, is associated with identifying with a political party; introverts are more likely to be unaffiliated. Openness, meanwhile, in addition to making people more liberal, also makes them less likely to identify with a party. So maybe that's another problem Democrats face: the same trait that makes people liberal makes them less likely to become partisans. Anyway, on the opposite end of things, the problem with using personality traits to say anything interesting about politics is that the personality disposition of the overall population is probably fairly stable. It's hard to use people's long-term personality traits to say anything meaningful about why the government is getting shut down this year, and not five years ago. Personality may have something to do with it, but the fact that conservatives fundamentally dislike government and liberals don't is clearly a pretty powerful, if not particularly interesting, explanation.

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