Where civil debates yield civic results

While presidential debates may suggest otherwise, many state legislatures are most productive when rival lawmakers treat each other as moral equals.

The Monitor's View

If only a minority of Americans watch this year’s second presidential debate, chalk it up to the fact that some people may be looking elsewhere for models of civility. As candidate etiquette during the debates has declined, more voters are turned off by national politics. In April, even before this year’s first debate, a Pew Research Center poll found nearly two-thirds of adults said they were worn out by the campaigns – higher than during the last two presidential election cycles.

Yet the debates give a false picture of political civility in much of America where it counts. At the state level, it turns out, civility among elected leaders is the best predictor of whether a state legislature is productive, such as in passing a budget on time. Most notably, in states where political parties are the most competitive, lawmakers tend to get along and pass more bills, according to a new survey by the University of Arkansas.

“Legislative civility can compensate for the ill effects of polarization,” one of the study’s authors, political science professor William Schreckhise, told a radio podcast at his university. The survey tapped into the views of those closest to the work of legislators: more than 1,200 lobbyists in state capitals.

One conclusion of the study: Lawmakers who recognize that an opponent’s point of view is legitimate can get the most done. Treating each other as moral equals, in other words, leads to harmonious outcomes.

The task ahead, said Dr. Schreckhise, is on citizens to ensure they elect leaders who can form bonds of trust and reciprocity across party lines. “So as long as we encourage our legislatures to behave in a civil way,” he said, “then I think we can look forward to a future where states continue to be fairly productive.” Maybe, just maybe, he added, American society is arriving at the point of thinking “how we disagree with people on politics.”

At the state level, both the National Governors Association and the Washington-based National Institute for Civil Discourse have worked hard in recent years to promote civility in state capitols. Sometimes that means being humble enough to compromise. In a May survey for the nonpartisan group The Common Good, 89% of Americans said they favor lawmakers with the “political courage” to make a tough decision even when it puts that their career in jeopardy.

When people of opposite political stripes actually talk, their dislike of each other can plummet, according to experiments in 2020 at Stanford University’s Social Neuroscience Laboratory. “We think that the average person we disagree with is far more extreme than they really are,” Jamil Zaki, head of that lab, told PBS News Hour. “In many ways, we are fighting phantoms because we don’t interact with people we disagree with as much as we used to.”

“People don’t realize how caring, generous, and open minded others are,” Dr. Zaki wrote in a new book, “Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.” In many state capitols, rivals are learning just that, setting an example for the national stage.