THE ROOT OF DIVISION IN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY (original) (raw)

Dynamic party unity: the US Congress in comparative perspective

European Political Science Review, 2015

Moises Ostrogorski once denounced political parties for burying diverse concerns of pluralistic societies under monolithic electoral options. E.E. Schattschneider celebrated them for the same reason: organizing choice and 'responsible party government' amid pluralistic complexity. Comparativists have found both dynamics in European legislatures: most European parties exhibit the high average levels of voting unity that Schattschneider's theory implies, but also display rather Ostrogorskian cycles of discipline, stifling dissent on divisive issues at election time. We use comparativists' tools to explore the dynamics and normative quality of party unity in the different terrain of the US Congress. We find similar cycles of unity in roll-call voting, but in the American contextwith more loosely organized parties, especially historically but still today -Ostrogorskian stifling of dissent operates against a less Schattschneiderian background. In comparative perspective, Congressional parties muffle divisive issues more effectively than they deliver governance, with tenuous implications for representation.

Fighting for the Speakership: The House and the Rise of Party Government

2012

The US House of Representatives is organized by whichever political party holds a majority of its seats. This fact has consequences. Controlling the organization of the House means that the majority party decides who will preside over its deliberations, who will set the policy agenda, and who will dominate the workhorses of the chamber, the standing committees. Organizing the House does not mean the majority party will win all battles, but it does give the party a leg-up in virtually any question that gets considered by that body.

Party Polarization in Congress

2008

The political parties in Congress are as polarized as they have been in 100 years. This book examines more than 30 years of congressional history to understand how it is that the Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have become so divided. It finds that two steps were critical for this development. First, the respective parties' constituencies became more politically and ideologically aligned. Second, members ceded more power to their party leaders, who implemented procedures more frequently and with greater consequence. In fact, almost the entire rise in party polarization can be accounted for in the increasing frequency of and polarization on procedures used during the legislative process.

Losing Control: The Intraparty Consequences of Divided Government

Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2001

Divided government scholarship focuses either on evaluating divided government's correlation to legislative gridlock or on its tendency toward interparty squabbling. I argue that one overlooked aspect of divided government is its impact on intraparty dynamics: Divided government offers the controlling congressional party incentives to raise controversial issues to damage the coherence of the president's party. Revealing the tensions within the president's party serves to embarrass the president, increase the electoral chances of the majority party in Congress, and ultimately shift public policy. This phenomenon can be understood through Riker's theory of heresthetic. The contemporary debates between President Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress over abortion and gay rights provide ample evidence that this theory of divided government is compelling and warrants further consideration.

The Onward March of (Asymmetric) Partisan Polarisation in the Contemporary Congress

Issues in American Politics edited by John W. Dumbrell. New York and London: Routledge, 2013

For decades now, congressional parties have been the most significant political organisations on Capitol Hill as class and cultural issues have produced increasingly sharp ideological divisions between Democrats and Republicans engendering congressional parties that are cohesive and ideologically polarised parties to an extent that would have been unknown to members of the Congress in the mid-twentieth century and to the framers of the US Constitution in the late eighteenth century. As we have moved into the second decade of the twenty-first century, both partisanship and partisan polarisation in the Congress have strengthened even further from 10 or 20 years ago, at the same time that American voters care neither for the Congress as an institution nor its parties. Polarisation, however, has not been symmetric: For, typically ignored in many journalistic accounts, congressional Republicans have moved much more sharply to the right than have congressional Democrats to the left, never more so than since the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. There is no shortage of examples of the effects of asymmetric partisan polarisation on contemporary policymaking in Washington, most notably, over the debt increase in late 2011. This episode also demonstrates the level of political uncertainty that polarisation engenders: policy outcomes in each chamber have necessarily become much more volatile while the probability of congressional-presidential agreement in writing major legislation decreases under conditions of split-party government, whereas it increases significantly. This pattern of policymaking is a far cry from the naïve anti-party expectations of the US Constitution’s framers; and, apparently, not what most Americans want.

Reconceptualizing divided government

2014

In this dissertation, I explain why scholars are unable to conclusively find evidence that divided government is the main determinant of legislative gridlock. I argue this unsettled debate is largely attributable to an imprecise conceptual view of inter-branch tensions, and that these conceptual limitations are exacerbated by unrefined measurement practices. I argue refined measures such as party polarization and gridlock intervals better explain institutional behavior than divided government. Using unique datasets estimating legislator preferences on domestic and foreign policy, findings show that when compared to more refined measures, split-party government is not the sole or even the most important source of partisan conflict. In addition, compared to other studies on divided government, I argue the reason the distinction between unified and divided government is often blurred is that a number of underlying political and institutional pressures make sweeping policy change difficult even for most unified governments. These factors contribute to the public's growing dissatisfaction with government's inability to solve many economic and social problems. viii

Is Senatorial Leadership even possible? The Deadlock of the American Upper Chamber

Leadership and Uncertainty Management in Politics, 2000

You have to think of the Senate as if it were 100 different nations and each one had the atomic bomb and at any moment any one of you could blow up the place. So that no matter how long you've been here or how short you've been here, you always know you have the capacity to go to the leader and threaten to blow up the entire institution. And, naturally, he'll deal with you » (anonymous senator, quoted in S. Binder, 1997a, p.151). Checks and balances, the founding principle of American institutions, are not only found in the constant inter-branch dialog. The same applies within each branch, and especially in Congress. The bicameral division was initially meant by the Founding Fathers as an internal check within the lawmaking process. The upper chamber, the great anchor of the republic according to James Madison, was supposed to be a council to the Executive. As such, it was one of the institutional barriers meant to control the vortex of demagoguery and instability that the lower chamber was always in danger of becoming. Nowadays, the internal legislative check of the founding generation is still the order of the day even though the political dynamic is not the one envisioned in the late 18 th century.