Divided We Govern? A Reassessment (original) (raw)
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When parties matter: A review of the possibilities and limits of partisan influence on public policy
European Journal of Political Research, 1996
This essay explores the possibilities and limits of partisan influence on public policy in democratic nations. It will be pointed out, that differences in party composition of government, in general, matter in public policy in constitutional democracy. However, the extent to which parties influence public policy is to a significant extent contingent upon the type of democracy and countermajoritarian institutional constraints of central state government. Large partisan effects typify majoritarian democracies and states, in which the legislature and the executive are 'sovereign'. More complex and more difficult to identify is the partisan influence on public policy in consensus democracies and in states, in which the political-institutional circumstances allow for co-governance of the opposition party. Narrowly circumscribed is the room to manoeuvre available to incumbent parties above all in political systems which have been marked by countermajoritarian institutional pluralism or institutional 'semi-sovereignty'. The article suggests, that it would be valuable if direct effects and interaction effects of the party composition of government and state structures featured more prominently in future research on comparative public policy. Conservative Left Centre Centre Left Centre Conservative Centre Centre Liberal Conservative Centre Conservative Centre Centre Conservative Left Liberal Left Left Liberal Conservative Conservative Centre & Conservative
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
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.
Split-ticket voting and divided government: Intentional choices or unintended consequences
1995
Explanations of divided government have focused on the differences between the Democratic and Republican parties as the reason for partisan paterns of divided government. Yet the literature on split-ticket voting emphasizes the declining importance of parties in shaping vote choice. This dissertation investigates the apparent inconsistency and proposes an institutional resources model of splitticket voting and divided government. The institutional resources model argues that changes in the presidency and congress in the face of declining parties is responsible for the United States experience with divided government. Using survey data and aggregate election returns the dissertation tests the dominant explanations of divided government against the institutional resources model. It concludes by argueing that partisan patterns of divided government are less the result of differences in the parties today but rather the different historical circumstances of the two parties. particularly in the South. as institutional politics supplanted party politics.
Toward a conditional model of partisanship in policymaking
Do parties matter for policies? Despite the vast number of contributions to this old question, empirical findings remain highly contrasted and fail to demonstrate a substantial partisan influence. Nevertheless, this article argues that we should not conclude that parties are irrelevant for understanding policies. After an overview of the available empirical findings, it emphasizes that studies of legislative and governmental politics provide solid reasons for expecting a partisan influence and that we could make sense of the contradictory results by exploring the conditions under which parties matter. The final section identifies potential institutional, political, contextual and issue-specific determinants of partisanship in policymaking.
American Political Science Review, 2005
This paper aims at resolving the debate over the measurement of majority party influence in contemporary American legislatures. Our use of new analytic techniques (a gridsearch program for characterizing the uncovered set) enables us to begin with a better model of legislative proceedings -to abandon simple one-dimensional spatial models in favor of more realistic two-dimensional versions. Our conclusions are based on the analysis of real-world data rather than arguments about the relative merits of different theoretic assumptions. Our analysis confirms that when legislators' preferences are polarized, outcomes will generally be closer to the majority party's wishes, even if the majority party leadership does nothing to influence the legislative process. However, our analysis also shows that at the margin of the majority party's natural advantage, agendasetting by the majority party remains an efficacious strategy. This paper takes aim at a critical issue in the debate over majority party influence in American legislatures: what phenomena constitute evidence of conditional party government? The theory states that when party caucuses are polarized, (similar policy goals within each caucus, disagreement across caucuses), majority party leaders work to create outcomes in line with the caucus consensus. Thus, a situation where legislative outcomes favor the majority party is seen as evidence of conditional party government in action. However, using a onedimensional spatial model, shows that as preferences become polarized, the expected outcome of legislative action shifts towards the majority party, implying that the same observation (outcomes favoring the majority party) is consistent with two states of the world: one where conditional party government exists, and one where party leaders are inactive.