Strategic Party Government: Why Winning Trumps Ideology
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Strategic Party Government: Why Winning Trumps Ideology
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Overview
In Strategic Party Government, Koger and Lebo argue that Congress is now primarily a forum for partisan competition. In order to avoid losing, legislators unite behind strong party leaders, even when they do not fully agree with the policies their party is advocating. They do so in the belief that party leaders and voters will reward them for winning—or at least trying to win—these legislative contests. And as the parties present increasingly united fronts, partisan competition intensifies and pressure continues to mount for a strong party-building strategy—despite considerable disagreement within the parties.
By bringing this powerful but underappreciated force in American politics to the forefront, Koger and Lebo provide a new interpretation of the problems facing Congress that is certain to reset the agenda for legislative studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226424743 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 01/30/2017 |
| Series: | Chicago Studies in American Politics |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Strategic Party Government
Why Winning Trumps Ideology
By Gregory Koger, Matthew J. Lebo
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-42474-3
CHAPTER 1
Worst. Congress. Ever. Why?
The current US Congress is divided into two competing parties that struggle to govern together. Since 2011, Republican and Democratic Party leaders have worked hard to make party positions clear and avoid embarrassing defeats, but they struggle to actually enact policy measures. As a result, Congress's job approval rating reached 9 percent in 2011, an all-time low, and experts dubbed the 112th Congress (2011–12) "the worst Congress ever" (Klein 2012; Ornstein 2011).
Then Congress's performance got even worse. After the 2012 presidential elections returned the same power balance (Democratic president and Senate majority party, Republican House majority party), the players resumed the game. The parties clashed over passing disaster relief after Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast, and firearm background checks failed in the Senate. In September 2013, the Republicans refused to raise the national debt limit and attempted to withhold all government funding unless the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare," was repealed, leading to a government shutdown and fiscal crisis. By November 2013, the Senate Democrats' frustration at Republican obstruction of judicial and executive nominations culminated in a rare, highly partisan "nuclear option" reform to end filibustering against nominations. Congress passed zero of twelve appropriations bills before the October 1 deadline in both 2013 and 2014, while the 296 laws enacted barely edged the 284 enacted during the 112th Congress — the two lowest totals since World War II. Multiple pundits lamented that the 113th Congress was actually the worst Congress ever.
Behind these criticisms and low job approval ratings is the sense that Congress is now primarily a forum for partisan competition. The majority parties in both chambers devote much of their time to crafting "message" bills that convey party positions but have little chance of enactment. By itself, this is not new; legislating-as-position-taking is as old as the Capitol itself. But these efforts are combined with a failure to complete basic tasks: developing a bicameral budget, passing appropriations bills, reauthorizing major laws, and maintaining the full faith and credit of the United States by raising the federal debt limit in a timely manner. To the extent Congress did act on these topics, it was frequently after a period of crisis bargaining with actors attempting to make take-it-or-leave-it proposals so they could win without compromise. In other cases, key measures were approved over the objection of most members of the House Republican majority, such as a partial extension of the Bush-era tax cuts (January 2013), the Hurricane Sandy relief bill (January 2013), a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (February 2013), and funding for the Homeland Security Department (March 2015). These votes violated the "Hastert Rule," which dictates that bills should not reach the floor of the House without the support of most of the majority party.
Why is Congress stalemated by partisan disagreements? The conventional answer is that members of Congress (MCs) fundamentally disagree with each other along ideological lines. Republicans are conservative, Democrats are liberal, and even though their primary goal is to improve public policy, there is a decreasing set of policies that members of both parties can support. They represent constituents in increasingly party-aligned districts and states who embrace starkly different aspirations for national policy. While there is some truth to this view, there is a lot that it does not explain.
This book provides a different account of party influence in Congress. Like Lee (2009), we think the "ideological" account overstates the depth of constituency and policy disagreement as a driver of congressional polarization. We view congressional parties as fundamentally diverse, so even in our polarized era, there are real disagreements within each party on major policy questions. We also recognize that legislators represent complex constituencies with potentially conflicting policy views, so it is an oversimplification to portray legislators as advocates for a single ideological viewpoint when they are actually trying to satisfy a diverse set of donors, activists, interest groups, party loyalists, and average constituents (Fenno 2008). Despite intraparty diversity and complex constituencies, the competition between two parties for electoral gain is a driving force behind the partisanship we observe — legislators unite into parties to win elections in an arms race of partisanship. In our assessment, the prevailing view understates this critical component of competition in the congressional game. In order to avoid losing legislative battles, legislators may unite behind strong party leaders even when they have diverse policy views. They do so in the belief that party activists and voters will reward them for winning these contests, or at least trying to win.
Furthermore, even when legislators generally agree on matters of policy, they have an incentive to manufacture conflicts with the opposing party to diminish its reputation and slow its legislative progress. In several major policy areas, there are potential positive-sum compromises, so if legislators truly sought to maximize policy outcomes, they would gain by passing laws that codify significant areas of agreement while compromising on remaining issues.
As Norman Ornstein wrote, "Look what we have now: a long-term debt disaster with viable bipartisan solutions on the table but ignored or cast aside in Congress; an impasse over the usually perfunctory matter of raising the statutory debt limit placing the United States in jeopardy of its first-ever default; sniping and guerrilla warfare over ... health-care reform and financial regulation; no serious action or movement on climate change, jobs, or the continuing mortgage crisis; and major trade deals stalled yet again despite bipartisan and presidential support" (2011). On the other hand, the political credit for legislative success is zero-sum, so a party that helps its opposition pass its agenda is contributing to its own electoral disadvantage. We propose an account of congressional parties based on electoral competition to help explain this behavior.
1.1 Understanding Legislative Parties
From the beginning, political scientists have agreed on what congressional parties are not. Unlike European legislative parties, they are not consistently "strong," unified teams that vote as a bloc following the command of a dominating party leader. In the first political science work on Congress, Woodrow Wilson lamented that party organizations had little effect on the behavior of legislators or the policy output of the Congress: "At least there is within Congress no visible, and therefore no controllable party organization. The only bond of cohesion is the caucus, which occasionally whips a party together for cooperative action against the time for casting its vote upon some critical question. There is always a majority and a minority, indeed, but the legislation of a session does not represent the policy of either" (1885, 80). When Wilson wrote his famous book, both congressional parties held diverse and uncoordinated views on the key issues of the day: tariffs, monetary policy, railroad regulation, and liquor. When party leaders involved themselves in legislating, their greatest challenge was often overcoming the diversity of their own members' constituencies to achieve a result that advanced their party's general electoral interests. Within ten years, however, majority party leaders had become dominating figures in both the House and the Senate. In the House, the majority party suppressed filibustering and centralized control over the floor agenda (Binder 1997; Cox and McCubbins 2005; Koger 2010; Schickler 2001). In the Senate, a clique of Republican leaders provided direction to Senate Republicans, albeit without the immense procedural powers of the House Speaker (Rothman 1966).
By the mid-twentieth century, however, congressional parties were once again decried as too "weak" by scholars echoing Wilson's call for overt party government by urging electoral and legislative reforms to hold parties responsible for implementing their party platforms (APSA 1950). A coalition of interest groups and legislators sought to weaken the committee system, abolish or limit Senate filibustering, and increase party leaders' influence over individual members (Rohde 1991; Zelizer 2004).
It would appear that these efforts were successful. By a variety of measures, congressional partisanship has increased dramatically over the last fifty years (Sinclair 2006; Theriault 2008, 2013), giving rise to fears that partisanship makes Congress a less respected and productive institution (Binder 2003; Jones and McDermott 2010). The recent increase in congressional partisanship has given urgency to a classic question: Why does the influence of congressional parties rise and fall over time?
While there is no shortage of empirical research documenting congressional partisanship and identifying possible causes, what we most need is an updated theory of congressional partisanship. By a "theory," we mean a model that starts with clear assumptions about congressional actors, explains their strategies, and predicts their behavior with testable hypotheses. Since we are trying to explain behavior over time and across institutions, a useful theory will be flexible enough to explain how patterns of behavior shift as the political context changes and will help us explain past behavior so that we will understand why party influence has varied over time. It also will provide us with conceptual vocabulary we can use to interpret current events: What do the players want? Why do they behave as they do? And finally, a good theory will help us predict future behavior and understand the effects of institutional changes.
As we explain below, we believe our model of legislative parties offers several comparative advantages over prior accounts. But this does not mean that we consider prior research on this topic to be wrong or fundamentally flawed. Over the last two decades, legislative scholars have been at the forefront of developing and testing competing models (e.g., Krehbiel 1991), in which empirical studies are intended to select a "winner" (e.g., Sinclair 1994). This is a "cage match" approach to theoretical development: two (or more) theories go into the data, but only one comes out. This is not our intent, and our work is not organized as such. Instead, a better analogy is that of a "software upgrade." We seek to build on the theoretical development and empirical insights of previous work on legislative parties. However, just as software may decline in usage if it remains static, a model of legislative parties may fade from use if it is not updated. Like a good software update, we seek to resolve "bugs" in existing theories, incorporate recent theoretical and empirical research, and add new features that we hope our readers find useful.
For example, our model includes familiar explanations for why partisanship varies with legislators' preferences over time and why a majority party values the ability to keep issues off the chamber agenda. But our account goes further to explain how competition between parties leads to symmetric partisanship, why partisanship varies with party size, how parties select issues for the chamber agenda and ensure their passage ("positive agenda power"), and how and why partisanship in the legislature is tied to voters' evaluations and election outcomes. Our empirical tests cover a wide range from experimental studies of individual voters to historical patterns of legislative outcomes, partisanship, and elections in both the US House and Senate. While there has been ample empirical research on congressional parties, this work is unique in its effort to trace the connections between electoral politics and governing.
1.2 Toward a Theory of Congressional Parties
For the first eight decades of research on Congress, scholars were mostly interested in describing the activities of congressional parties, measuring their strength, and lamenting their "weakness" relative to European parties. One early effort to explain legislative party strategy was Froman and Ripley's "Conditions for Party Leadership" (1965), based on analysis of votes and their observation of the House Democrats' whip system during the Eighty-Eighth Congress (1963–64). They found that partisanship varied with leadership involvement, whether the vote was procedural or substantive, visibility, constituency pressure, and the role of state delegations. This work helped explain why partisanship can vary from issue to issue, from vote to vote, during a two-year Congress.
Why, though, does partisanship vary over long periods of time? A classic answer is, "because congressional constituencies vary over time." Cooper and Brady (1981) develop this thesis with a comparison of party organization in the US House at the beginning and middle of the twentieth century. They attribute the declining power of House party leadership over this time span to the increased diversity of congressional districts; over time, the Democrats represented a broader range of economic interests, which made it difficult for the party to unify its members around a coherent economic program.
1.2.1 Conditional Party Government
John Aldrich (1995) and David Rohde (1991) have refined the simple constituency model with their theory of conditional party government (CPG; Aldrich and Rohde 1997–98, 2000a, 2000b, 2001; Aldrich et al. 2007; Rohde 2013). Rohde (1991) attributes the recent increase in congressional partisanship to both constituency change and internal party innovation. The realignment of conservative Southern whites from the Democratic Party, the full enfranchisement of Southern blacks loyal to the Democratic Party, and the realignment of the Northeast from Republican to Democratic dominance all contributed to making congressional Republicans more conservative and Democrats more liberal. However, Rohde notes that partisanship is also endogenous: pro-party reforms of the 1970s contributed to the resurgence of congressional partisanship in the 1980s.
Stated in general terms, the central claim of the CPG theory is when the two parties are internally homogenous (the members of each party tend to agree with each other) and there exists interparty disagreement (the two parties tend to disagree on major issues), we should observe three patterns: (a) increased delegation of resources to party leaders, (b) increased use of party leadership powers, and (c) increased influence of parties on policy outcomes. In the US House of Representatives (the primary focus of this work), increased party influence should result in patterns of policy outcomes that favor the majority party. When these conditions are met on a particular issue, we should expect to see party leaders actively striving to win. Over time, parties will grow stronger during eras when we observe internal homogeneity and interparty disagreement.
The CPG framework does not explicitly predict any relationship between legislative parties and electoral outcomes. Legislators' preferences will be influenced by the way in which they are recruited for office, are selected as the candidate of a party, and win their general election (Aldrich et al. 2007), but the focus of the theory is on the legislative role of party organizations and their leaders. In CPG, the party is a machine that focuses on altering policy outcomes on a subset of issues that divide the two parties from each other and unite them internally.
In response, Krehbiel (1993) questions whether the efforts of parties and their leaders have a significant net effect on policy outcomes. Party labels may be correlated with members' preferences in this view, but parties do not alter legislative behavior. This challenge provoked a torrent of research demonstrating significant "party effects" in voting, agenda setting, and outcomes. Collectively, this work suggests that parties can influence legislators' votes, but party leaders minimize the extent to which members vote against their own electoral interests. Instead, House majority leaders carefully structure debates to minimize difficult choices between collective party interests and the induced preferences of party members. When difficult votes are inescapable, majority party leaders convert just enough votes to carry the day. Party leaders are thus most active when the majority party is internally divided and extra effort is necessary to overcome intraparty disagreement.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Strategic Party Government by Gregory Koger, Matthew J. Lebo. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface Chapter 1. Worst. Congress. Ever. Why?Chapter 2. A Theory of Strategic Parties
Chapter 3. Microlevel Foundations: Do Citizens Dislike Partisanship or Extremism? (Coauthored with Everett Young)
Chapter 4. The Electoral Costs of Party Loyalty in Congress (Coauthored with Jamie Carson and Ellen Key)
Chapter 5. The Effects of Legislative Behavior on Aggregate Election Outcomes
Chapter 6. The Dynamics of Partisan Power
Chapter 7. Party Competition in Legislative Voting
Chapter 8. Conclusion Notes
References
Index