Substantive policy entrenchment outlasts and outperforms partisan entrenchment in durability.

Evidence

This is not to deny that voters care about the identity or party label of the representatives they elect to office for reasons independent of the policy outcomes those representatives are likely to produce. Voters may want to replace incumbent officeholders who are incompetent, corrupt, or personally dislikeable, regardless of the consequences for policymaking. To the extent that voters have policy-independent electoral preferences along these lines, then some forms of electoral entrenchment will be viewed as problematic on grounds that have no equivalent when it comes to legislative entrenchment. Consider, for example, a bipartisan gerrymandering scheme that generates safe, noncompetitive districts for all incumbents but results in perfectly proportional representation for the two major parties. Governance outcomes under such a scheme would continue to reflect the policy preferences of the electorate, and indeed more voters would find themselves in districts represented by someone who shared their policy preferences and party affiliation than if districting were random. Yet incumbent officeholders who might otherwise have been unseated would be safely entrenched in office. Many people might prefer a “fair” election, even if the only change would be to replace those incumbents with co-partisans who would generate similar policy outcomes. … But the Republican ascendancy would not last forever. Democrats would quickly realize that their only hope of securing or retaining office would be appealing to the median voter of this new, wealthier electorate. The Democratic Party in Ohio and individual Democratic officeholders and candidates would presumably shift their platforms accordingly, moving them close to the platforms of prevailing Republicans. Eventually, competition and some sort of rough parity between the parties would be restored, and the entrenchment of Republicans would come to an end. But—and here is the important point—this would be cold comfort to supporters of the old Democratic platform and the predisfranchisement median voter. Whatever the party label of prevailing politicians in the new regime, governance outcomes would reflect the preferences of the new, wealthy electorate—more closely resembling the initial Republican coalition, resulting in policies more closely resembling the initial Republican platform. So long as that group of citizens and that set of policies remained entrenched, the end of partisan entrenchment seems relatively unimportant. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 166

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core question about ideological stickiness: policies entrenched in the underlying electorate survive even after the parties that enacted them lose power — a mechanism for why rationalizing ideologies embedded in institutional structure endure. — connects to: Durable depolarization requires structural or institutional rather than one-shot interventions — Derek E. Holliday, Yphtach Lelkes, and Sean J. Westwood, Why Depolarization Is Hard: Evaluating…, 50; Electoral and legislative entrenchment form one larger insulating phenomenon — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 41; Statutory change often needs functional supermajorities despite majority-vote rhetoric — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 64 (+6 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between partisan entrenchment (ephemeral, ends with competition) and substantive entrenchment (the platform’s voters/policies persist regardless of party labels) is a genuinely dense and reusable analytic distinction — relevant beyond elections to any scenario where the actor changes but the preference-structure endures.

Broader Connections

• Seemingly substantive policy domains conceal underlying partisan self-entrenchment battles. #complicates (0.85) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 536
• Stabilized politics make direct legacy influence fade into structure #expands (0.80) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 135
• Dead-hand control of the past pathologies applies equally to party and policy entrenchment #qualifies (0.78) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 171
• Tort reform functions partly as partisan class entrenchment, not policy neutrality #qualifies (0.76) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 278
• Judging partisan entrenchment depends entirely on which baseline is chosen #qualifies (0.74) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 420