There’s a report that’s been floating around this week called Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. Based on a survey of about 8,000 people, the aim was to cluster people in to different political groups, then figure out what the differences between them were.

There are many interesting things in this report and others have taken those on, but the one thing that piqued my interest was the way they categorized the groups as either “wings” of the party or the “exhausted majority”. Take a look:

It’s rather striking that traditional liberals are considered part of the “exhausted majority” whereas traditional conservatives are considered part of the “wings”.

Reading the report, it seemed they made this categorization because the traditional liberals were more likely to want to compromise and to say that they wanted the country to heal.

I had two thoughts about this:

1. The poll was conducted in December 2017 and January 2018, so well in to the Trump presidency. Is the opinion of the “traditionalist” group on either side swayed by who’s in charge? Were traditional liberals as likely to say they wanted to compromise when Obama was president?
2. How do you measure desire to compromise anyway?

It was that second question that fascinated me. Compromise seems like one of those things that it’s easy to aspire to, but harder to actually do. After all, compromise inherently means giving up something you actually want, which is not something we do naturally. Almost everyone who has ever lived in a household/shared a workplace with others has had to compromise at some point, and two things become quickly evident:

1. The more strongly you feel about something, the harder it is to compromise
2. Many compromises end with at least some unhappiness
3. Many people put stipulations on their compromising up front…like “I’ll compromise with him once he stops being so unfair”

That last quote is a real thing a coworker said to me last week about another coworker.

Anyway, given our fraught relationship with compromise, I was curious how you’d design a study that would actually test people’s willingness to compromise politically rather than just asking them if it’s generically important. I’m thinking you could design a survey that would give people a list of solutions/resolutions to political issues, then have them rank how acceptable they found each solution. A few things you’d have to pay attention to:

1. People from both sides of the aisle would have to give input in to possible options/compromises, obviously.
2. You’d have to pick issues with a clear gradient of solutions. For example, the recent Brett Kavanaugh nomination would not work to ask people about because there were only two outcomes. Topics like “climate change” or “immigration” would probably work well.
3. The range of possibilities would have to be thought through. As it stands today, most of how we address issues already are compromises. For example, I know plenty of people who think we have entirely too much regulation on emissions/energy already, and I know people who think we have too little. We’d have to decide if we were compromising based on the far ends of the spectrum or the current state of affairs. At a minimum, I’d think you’d have to include a “here’s where we are today” disclaimer on every question.
4. You’d have to pick issues with no known legal barrier to implementation. Gun control is a polarizing topic, but the Second Amendment does give a natural barrier to many solutions. I feel like once you get in to solutions like “repeal the second amendment” the data could get messy.

As I pondered this further, it occurred to me that the wings of the parties may actually be the most useful people in writing a survey like this. Since most “wing” type folks actually pride themselves on being unwilling to compromise, they’d probably be pretty clear sighted about what the possible compromises were and how to rank them.

Anyway, I think it would be an interesting survey, and not because I’m trying to disprove the original survey’s data. In the current political climate we’re so often encourage to pick a binary stance (for this, against that) that considering what range of options we’d be willing to accept might be an interesting framing for political discussions. We may even wind up with new political orientations called “flexible liberals/conservatives”. Or maybe I just want a good excuse to write a fun survey.