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There are conservative parties everywhere, but the Republican party is the only party in the world that hasn't reconciled itself to the rise of the welfare state and the regulatory state.

Hello, welcome to Mr. Glanch on the Vox Media podcast network. A couple of weeks ago, I asked for ideas on people to interview about polarization and identities.

In particular, the ways that the Republican party and the Democratic party are fundamentally different from each other.

Why have forces that are affecting both led to very different outcomes? Why did the Republican party nominate Donald Trump in 2016, where as a Democratic party went with a much more traditional candidate?

Why does Republican parties seem to prefer shutdowns and seem to be more polarized both in tactics and ideology than the Democratic party has become? What's behind that?

The expert on this is a guy named Matt Grossman, who along with Dan Hopkins, both of them, political scientists, wrote a really fantastic book, a couple years back called asymmetric politics, ideological or Republicans and group interest Democrats.

And it's about the fundamental differences in the two parties, coalitions, the way those coalitions look at the world and how those differences explain what we see all around us today.

Grossman, he's got a political science podcast called political research digest with the Nyskinen center. He is really, really, I don't usually recommend people's Twitter feeds, but I really do recommend his. I think it is maybe the best way to follow new developments and new papers in political science.

But this is very much a conversation trying to help me and hopefully you think through what is really different in the Democratic and Republican parties?

Why have they acted and operated in different ways in this era and how fundamental are those differences? I'm not sure I am bought into every piece of Matt's theory, but I think it is really the starting point for trying to understand this topic.

And so I hope you enjoy it. My email is always as a client show at box.com. Here is Matt Grossman.

Matt Grossman, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I got to be here. So why are Democrats and Republicans so different? Are they?

Let's ask a big question. Let's go right to it.

I think there is a long standing set of differences between the Republicans and Democrats. And we, my co-author David Hopkins and I started kind of listing them.

And we decided that they really amounted to one sort of global difference that the Republican Party is a vehicle of a symbolic ideological movement, whereas the Democratic Party is a coalition of social groups.

And there are incentives for each party to kind of continue on their traditional way. Republican leaders by attracting loyalty to eternal values and reactions to social change and Democratic leaders by seeking concrete government action through kind of a catalog of specific policies to respond to each of the group identities in their coalition.

And so I want to push us because I think this is both a very interesting definition of it. And I want to understand where the boundaries of it really are.

So how do you distinguish an ideological coalition from a social group coalition? I look at the Republican Party and I know a lot of people talk a big game about limited government and so on.

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