The Polarization of American Politics: Myth or Reality?
Saturday, December 4, 2004
Panel 5
Ross Baker: Good morning. My name is Ross Baker, from Rutgers University. As we meet this
morning we’re just a few hundred meters from Prospect House, which was the home of
Woodrow Wilson when he was president of Princeton University. And Wilson, in his wonderful
book, which unfortunately not many people read these days, Congressional Government, said
that “like a vast picture thronged with figures of equal prominence and crowded with elaborate
and obtrusive details, Congress is hard to see satisfactorily and appreciatively at a single view
and from a single standpoint. Its complicated forms and diversified structure confuse the vision
and conceal the system which underlies its composition. It is too complex to be understood
without an effort, without a careful and systematic process of analysis. Consequently, very few
people understand it.” Well, today we have some people who do understand it – the few and the
proud! Who they are are Jackie Calmes, who is the congressional correspondent for The Wall
Street Journal, Larry Evans from the College of William and Mary, Jack Pitney from Claremont
College, Dave Rohde from Michigan State, Barbara Sinclair from UCLA, and Rob Van
Houweling from the University of Michigan. And we’ll start off with Jackie Calmes.
Jackie Calmes: Thank you. I really don’t know what I’m doing on this panel frankly, but I’ll
sort of start off with a real-life experience. I have to correct one thing Ross said which was…I
was the congressional correspondent full time for twelve years, starting in 84, five or six of it CQ
and then six for The Wall Street Journal. Since 97, right after the government shutdown of 9596, I’ve sort of had one foot always in Congress, and the fact is my love is Congress. I was
always amazed that once I started covering the Clinton White House and did a little of Bush, for
the first time in my life my family back in Ohio really cared what I did. For the years they
thought I worked for the Washington Post, covered police, I don’t know. And so once I covered
the White House, they thought I was somebody, and I told them, I said, you know the prestige of
covering the White House is inverse relationship to the job satisfaction you get from doing it. I
never had much fun except for the foreign trips, covering the White House. I’m glad I did it
because I got a view from that end of things and helped broaden my understanding of Congress,
or the workings of government in general, but I always loved Congress no matter what. And I do
wish, when he’s quoting Woodrow Wilson, I read that so many years ago, I think I’ll go back
and read it. But I wish there was somebody who could actually go back and write a book like that
now, and maybe Jack is. Maybe that’s what your book will be.
I started covering Congress – it’s amazing, I don’t know if it’s a sign of how old I’m getting or
not – but I really did think that I was never going to see a Republican majority in my lifetime in
Congress. And I thought perhaps the Democrats would have a lock on Congress, and
Republicans would have a lock on the White House for as long as I would be working. As a
journalist I’m happy that wasn’t the case, because I’ve gotten to see a little of everything,
including an impeachment. And as a citizen I think it’s a good thing, because I really don’t think
even Democrats thought that after forty years in complete power in Congress that things
shouldn’t be shaken up a little bit. The question in my mind right now is whether after ten years
of Republican governance they haven’t fast-forwarded to where Democrats were after forty years
in power…that they won’t last forty years themselves in the majority.
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One thing that I’ve thought for some time – I’ll make a small prediction – I think the next
movement after we’ve had term limits and the like in this country, would be maybe a
redistricting reform movement. The limits of that kind of movement are that you only have a set
number of states that have the ability through the initiative process to do that. But you’ve had…
Arizona now has led the way, Iowa, California has tried and failed, but the man who was head of
the term limits movement and was an initial starter for the Gray Davis recall in California has
told me that redistricting reform is where he next wants to go. I haven’t checked in with him
lately. In any case, it just seems at bottom redistricting is the…. It’s a wonder that
Americans…well, it’s a sign I guess of how little Americans pay attention to Congress, but it’s a
wonder that they are countenancing a model of where elections are as predictable as the oneparty Soviet model. In the Supreme Court I think they’ve not weighed on redistricting, though
the Texas case certainly gives them reason to in terms of the partisan aspect of the Texas
redistricting to be done after the regular round of decennial redistricting forcing three special
sessions and the obvious results and the questions that arise about one man-one vote, all made it
a potentially good case for the Supreme Court to step in.
In this last election, as a lot of you probably know, 95 percent of the House races were decided
by greater than ten percentage points, and 83 percent by 20 percent or greater. While I don’t
know…I haven’t studied it enough to be ready to subscribe to Morris Fiorina’s idea that a
polarized America is a myth, his quote that a polarized political class makes the citizenry appear
polarized, but it’s only that, an appearance. I am sure that the institutions – Congress and
increasingly the state legislatures – are more polarized than their constituents are. And the
causes? A lot of this was all discussed yesterday. I mean once you got past the post-Civil Rights
alignment of the South in both political parties were truly national, much else flows from that.
I think what’s interesting and what a lot of people haven’t been paying attention is just how
much the same changes that polarized Congress – I know I’m supposed to be speaking about
Congress – are happening in a number of state legislatures. And even in places like Nebraska,
which is unicameral and where Republicans mostly control, there still is a healthy Democratic
component and tradition of working in a bipartisan way, but that is increasingly changing. The
Republicans that are being elected, especially…there was a lot of this, in combination with term
limits and state legislative redistricting. A number of people in Nebraska who you would
consider sort of pragmatic Republicans…. And it’s not even a question of being pragmatic.
When I say “pragmatic,” I’m mostly thinking about, Oh they agreed to raise taxes in order to
balance the budget. The states have to balance the budget. So in a number of states like
Nebraska, Virginia, Nevada, you had a number of more moderate (if raising taxes is what makes
for a moderate Republican these days) defeated in their primaries, so that while Democrats only
sort of gains to speak of in this past election were in the state legislatures, what you don’t see is
that last spring in the primaries, a number of the Republicans from safe Republican seats were
replaced by more conservative antitax, socially conservative Republicans, which, considering
that the states’ fiscal health is still not secure, that could bode ill for the future, particularly as the
Federal government is going to have to tackle the deficit.
I think that worse…so redistricting is the main thing, that leads in the lack of cross-party
friendships. When I first came you had, of course, Bob Michel and Dan Rostenkowski would
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commute home, and along with even Sid Yates, the liberal from Chicago, and now you have Ray
LaHood, Bob Michel’s former chief of staff, who I used to see sitting in the office with Tip
O’Neill’s staff to talk about what was going to happen that day. There’s none of that anymore.
And they fought, they fought a lot, but at the end of the day, I mean many of us have talked
about it. It’s the oil that keeps the place moving, and there’s none of that. Today in the New York
Times David Brooks has a column about how bipartisanship is going to be needed going forward
for the Social Security reform. I just don’t see what’s in it for Democrat. I don’t see what, given
what’s transpired over the past four years and the loss as a result of some of these Republican
tactics of people like Charlie Stenholm, what’s in it for them? In addition, I have no doubt in my
mind that John Breaux would not have retired on the Senate side if he thought there was going to
be a serious bipartisan effort on Social Security or tax reform. Instead, he decided to get out and
make money.
I used to disdain political junkets, the people that went on them in Congress when I first got
there, until two things happened. One, I took a couple of foreign trips myself and found out how
broadening they can be. But number two, as I got to know congressmen and I’d get to know
these odd couplings and Republicans and Democrat, invariably they would tell me that they got
to know each other on a foreign trip. But try explaining that to your readers and your
constituents, that you think the junkets are a good thing.
I had sort of jarring experience one time recently when this past Congress started, and I went out
to dinner with Rahm Emanuel, the congressman from Illinois who I had known from the Clinton
White House, and we were in a restaurant and I saw Congressman Jim Greenwood of
Pennsylvania, and I pointed it out to Rahm, and Rahm didn’t know who he was. And Rahm
being Rahm gets up and walks across the restaurant to introduce himself to Congressman
Greenwood, and Greenwood, to me is a moderate, genial guy I thought, but it was shocking to
me. He just looked at Rahm like he was poison, and Rahm came back and said, That was really
weird. So I don’t really know what explains it, but I do know that there has been an active
discouragement of these relationships.
There was a column about a year ago Robert Novak had that I made a note of. He, sort of leaving
it to others to point this out, people with better contacts maybe within Republican ranks than me,
but in the Washington Post he had a column headlined Executive Arrogance, in which he wrote
senior lawmakers are admonished by junior White House aides to refrain from being too
chummy with Democrats. I’ve talked to people who…I mention Billy Pitts, who used to work
for Bob Michel, is working for the Rules Committee, and I was speaking to George
Candenas[sp?] who used to work for Tom Foley, one day, and I said, Will you and Billy get
together for old time’s sake, and he said, No, I wouldn’t do that to him. He’d get in trouble if he
was talking to me. I said, You’re joking, aren’t you? And he says no, no I’m serious.
Obviously the K Street Project that Tom DeLay and others have had is one that goes to the same
point, but I guess to like to also add that the implications for this are important. The national
questions don’t reflect national sentiment in a lot of case, and I never knew how to illustrate that
until the Clinton impeachment. And people were asking me, if two-thirds of the country is
against the Clinton impeachment, why is the House going forward as it is? I thought the answer
was simple, and then I decided that would make a story, and they did run it on the front page.
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And that was that the Republicans going back to their districts, two-thirds of the country may
have been against impeachment for a variety of reasons, but in their districts easily two-thirds
were for impeachment, and those were the people they were hearing from. I think an implication
for major national policies that are becoming law without the bipartisanship they need to
translate into long-term credibility and public support. You can think Medicare. I mean that law
is under threat and if put to a vote today wouldn’t even pass. Social Security and tax reform are
ahead. The Hastert rule that has gotten a lot of attention now is one that major bills won’t pass
without a majority of the majority. That’s actually been ongoing for some time as well. It’s just
that now with this intelligence bill that the president wants – or says he wants – it brought it to
importance. Other things like the energy bill didn’t pass despite the inclusion of the changes to
the electric grid system after we had had a multibillion dollar blackout that engaged the whole
country’s attention, and there was this promise of action, and it didn’t happen.
And the last major implication is for the weakened institutions. Congress has weakened itself and
I think in some cases that these fights over judgeships have weakened the public attitudes
towards the judicial branch as well. And Congress, I think, has under cut its…I remember having
discussions in the past with Mickey Edwards about too much centralization in the Executive
branch and maintaining the independence of the Legislative branch, and I think that is threatened
as well. So with that I’ll stop and let the experts speak.
Baker: I made a blood oath to Fred Greenstein that I would keep people to five minutes, and this
is one of the larger panels, so I think I’ve got to police that rigorously. Our next speaker is Larry
Evans.
Evans: Most of the discussion yesterday focused on the House of Representatives, and we had a
superb panel with current and former members of the House, and I’m surrounded today by some
of the most prominent students of the House in the country. So I think the rational strategy for
me is talk about the Senate, and that’s what I’m going to do.
I think it’s appropriate, the figure that David Brady started us off with yesterday, I think has
raised a number of interesting points and questions. One obviously has to do with whether or not
polarization is sort of like the trend and the period of the conservative coalition has been sort of
an outlier. The other, though, is the fact that Senate and House trends on polarization have been
very similar. What it suggests is that to explain polarization and changes over time, we need to
look at causal factors that can cover both institutions. If we look at the kind of causal factors that
were discussed yesterday, beginning with residential patterns, looking at those maps, I had a hard
time making out some of them. My eyes are starting to go; it’s an over forty thing. But it seemed
to me that emergence of or the decline of purple areas also shows up at the state level and not
congressional districts. But I think it’s harder to make the argument that residential patterns
explain increased polarization in the Senate, with the states that are obviously are much larger
and on average more heterogeneous. The argument that it’s some kind of partisan sorting, I
think, is part of it. Clearly there’s been a shift in the South in the Senate, including this past
election, where conservatives are starting to become Republicans more and liberals have shifted
toward the Democratic Party.
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But if you look at the distribution of [unintelligible] scores over time, it’s more than just
Democrats now being to the left and Republicans uniformly the right. The distance between
those two distributions has increased dramatically over time. Another causal factor that is often
pointed to is internal structural change. And here for the House obviously we typically
emphasize changes in the Rules Committee in the 1970s making it on the leadership. It’s hard to
make an argument that similar structural changes occurred in the Senate during that decade.
Obviously the rules function, the floor procedures are very different there. There was a key
party-building reform that is often underemphasized I think, and that’s passage of the
Congressional Budget Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which created a reconciliation
procedure which is very important in the Senate because it cannot be filibustered. Ironically, it
was an unintended consequence, that turned out to be a party-building reform. But I think it was
more than countervailed by other structural changes in the Senate, particularly the emergence of
the two-track system and the institutionalization as a whole. So it’s hard to argue that
institutional changes inside the Beltway are responsible for an increase in polarization beginning
in the 1970s.
Instead, our attention, I think, naturally looks to factors outside the institution. Here the obvious
candidates are changes in important intermediary institutions, particularly political party
organizations and the nomination process in the interest-group community. It’s well known in
the late 1960s and early 1970s the process for selecting candidates changed. The role of the
activist base became much more important. The interest-group community became more diverse,
larger, and Poole and Rosenthal and others have demonstrated that interest groups tend to be
more extreme, tended towards the extremes, away from the median position on the main DW
nominate[?] coordinate. My sense is that to understand polarization in the Senate, we really need
to look to causal factors such as those.
Now to address the questions that have been laid out here and the talking points, we’ll do them in
a little bit different order. The first question up is, Does increasing party unity reflect polarization
and policy preferences of rank-and-file members? At a certain level that’s kind of a no-brainer,
of course. If you’ve got a polarization and movement away, you’re going to see more party-line
voting. But Dick Fennel and John Kendin [sp?] taught us decades ago that the preference
orderings that members of Congress had as they make decisions in committee or on the floor are
not best viewed as exogenous, and they’re endogenous to the political process and their induced.
Members of Congress consider the actors and the relevant field of forces for them, and, say, with
an intelligence reform bill, they might consider what they think what the centrist opinion in the
district looks like, there might be an ordering of sorts. It’s not fully formed, but they’ll consider
it. They’ll consider the preference ordering among party leaders, among party activists, the
orderings of different groups in the advocacy community. And then much of the game, of the
legislative game, becomes a cognitive one where they sort of weigh and they balance and they
translate these often divergent signals into an ordering that then drives their behavior on the
floor. So I think that the question that’s really being asked here is, In the Senate or in the House,
but in the Senate do leaders such as Senator Frist and the minority leader, do they have the
resources necessary to change the incentives to get people to weigh the party ordering more than
the other orderings that are out there in their environments? I think the answer to that question,
and I think the literature demonstrates the answer to that question, is yes for the Senate, but only
on the margin. Occasionally you’ll see a senator on the floor, let’s say Rick Santorum, who
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would probably like to be Tom DeLay. I watch Senator Santorum occasionally, and he gets this
kind of Spanish Inquisition look in his eyes. He’d love to be “The Hammer,” but he can’t, and he
never will be because of the different institutional milieu.
But there are certain resources that the leadership has in the committee assignment process; for
instance, they do have some discretion in assigning members to some of the more prestigious
committees such as the Finance Panel. They do play a role in the selection of chairs and also the
terms upon which chairmanships are accepted. The episode with Senator Spector is a good
example. I think a better one is James Jeffords of Vermont. Back when he was a Republican in
the 1990s, he chaired a committee called the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. It’s an
important panel. On that committee, the partisan split, I believe, was ten to nine at the time.
Jeffords, of course, was a moderate, with policy views closer to those of the Democrats, and to
get that chairmanship, then Majority Leader Lott basically forced Jeffords to accept an
agreement where he would not vote in his committee if it would block conservative initiatives,
which is amazing to me that a chairman would agree essentially not to vote on important items in
his own panel. It's hard to imagine, say, Senator Eastland agreeing to that on voting rights issues
back in the 1960s.
Another tool is the importance I think of message and the party name brand. If you just look sort
of at standard indicators of message activity, and by that I mean focusing on legislation that
appeals to a party’s base, and unifies the base and hopefully divides the opposition and also
speaks to a party’s core strength in the polls – the issues that they have a high advantage in terms
of public confidence – these message activities have ramped up since the 1980s. If you look at
the morning hour, there’s a lot more attention to organize public relations activities now than
there used to be. If you just look at the allocation of resources in terms of staff and count the
number of people who are working in this area, it’s increased remarkably over the 1990s.
Senators now realize that there is more of a common electoral fate than there was ten, fifteen,
twenty years ago. It’s not quite to the level we see in the House, but it’s there.
These changes have had significant consequences for the way that leaders lead and the process.
Let me just name a few of them. First, there have been significant changes in venue. Senate
committees have always been less important as a venue of decision making than the House
committees. But as David Price demonstrated back in the 1960s with his book, Who Makes the
Laws, they could, under the right conditions, serve as important places for legislative creativity
and compromise. Now that is much less the case. You’re more likely to see deals be cut within
party caucuses within committee, within party caucuses generally, or pushed off to conference
committee rather than the sort of open mark-up.
The second thing is the partisan use of obstructionism has ramped way up. It’s changed
remarkably. It used to be that cloture votes were almost never partisan. Now they’re almost
always are. There has been increased tendency for the leadership to attempt to use or invoke
cloture early to cut off non-germane amendments. There has been use of the hold, threatening
filibusters has become much more partisan than it used to be.
Third, the endgame has changed dramatically, the congressional schedule. It’s been a long time
since the Senate was able to actually pass thirteen appropriation bills. Now the standard approach
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is you get two or three of them with broad bipartisan support, maybe the agricultural bill, and all
the difficult stuff gets pushed off for an omnibus bill that they handle in September. Because of
that, a lot of decision making then gravitates up to the leadership level, and [unintelligible] point
at which you almost look at it as the minority throwing tacks on the road on the appropriations
process to slow it down so that the majority cannot claim that they have actually moved
legislation on time.
Lastly, I would just mention an increasing bicameral coordination. When I worked on the Hill
during the 103rd Congress, Tom Foley and Senator Mitchell talked occasionally – that was my
sense – and there was some coordination, but nowhere near like we have now. One indicator is
simply to look at where the offices are of the leaders. The offices of Senator Frist and the
Speaker now are basically adjacent to one another. They’re on different sides of the Capitol but
they’re right on the dividing line, and there are literally doors you can walk out and walk down
the hall and be in the office of the leader of the other body, and the staff goes back and forth
pretty much constantly all day, and there are regular meetings between the principals, between
Senator Frist and the Speaker. A lot of this is over message and the agenda, but I think it’s one
implication or one consequence of increasing party polarization. And I’ll stop there.
Baker: Thank you, Larry. Okay, Jack Pitney.
John Pitney: Yesterday, Tom Cole talked about the team mentality, and I want to build on that,
because what we’ve seen, particularly in the past twenty-five years, is a new approach to
dealings with leadership. We can call it sack the quarterback. Think about it. For national
political parties, parties in Congress, we have an approach where you try to take out the leader.
First you could defeat the leader in a general election. We saw that happen to Tom Foley, and
most recently to Tom Daschle. Or, you can make the leader a millstone, make the leader so
radioactive, so unpopular that it does damage to the party, and what happens to the leader
eventually is he quits, either just quits the leadership, as in the case of Trent Lott, quits Congress
as in the case of Jim Wright, Tony Coelho, Newt Gingrich. Or, in the case of Bob Livingston
even quit the Congress before you become Speaker. You can call that the tactic of preemptive
surrender. Now there were leaders in the past who got into trouble. We all read Chuck Jones’s
piece on Joe Cannon, but it wasn’t a typical approach. This was not something that happened
often. Now just think this has all been condensed into the past twenty-five years. So what’s
happened?
Well, yesterday we had some good presentations on the media, and I think the media are part of
this. Because of C-Span, leaders now come into our living rooms. Now this is obviously not a
major concern for the great majority of television viewers. But for the ten million or so activists,
for your C-Span junkies, television provides an opportunity to see the leaders and to see the
attacks on the leaders. Newt Gingrich came to Congress in 1979, which coincidentally was the
first year of C-Span coverage of the House of Representatives, and he made very effective use of
that.
It’s not just C-Span; it’s cable news. The shout shows we heard about yesterday. Talk radio. Talk
radio now brings congressional leaders as a point of national controversy, as a point of national
attack. If you were a “dittohead” in the past couple of years, you would think that the name of
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the Senate Democratic leader was Puff Daschle. That was Rush Limbaugh’s term for the senator
from South Dakota. And television provides an undeniable record. Think why Trent Lott got into
trouble. In previous years he would have been able to deny what he said about Strom Thurmond.
He could say I was misquoted; it was taken out of context. No, no, no. Not this time. It was on CSpan, and it got played over and over and over again. So that’s one way in which leaders can get
in trouble.
Another one is the [unintelligible] of the national party committees. Paula Hernson and Robin
Kolodny [sp?] have done some really good work on this. The national party committees can’t
help but nationalize races. Tom Foley got into trouble over the issue of term limits, which was an
issue pushed by the national Republican organizations. Tom Daschle got into trouble because he
was the centerpiece of opposition to the Bush agenda in the U.S. Senate. They provide money,
they make issues, and opposition research. After all, where do you think Rush Limbaugh gets his
material? So that’s a second part of sack the quarterback.
The third, particularly when leaders get into trouble over ethics violations, it’s new ethics rules
and new expectations over ethics. Take, for instance, the case of Jim Wright. Now whatever Jim
Wright may have done in regard to the rules and expectations of the 1980s, he was squeaky clean
by the standards of the 1950s. In the 1950s you didn’t have to sell books or go through some
elaborate process. They just stuffed cash in your pockets! So Jim Wright was a victim of new
ethics rules and expectations.
So what lessons do we draw from this? One, that the attacks on leaders are both a cause and a
consequence of polarization in Congress. To a large extent, Congress resembles that summit
scene in the Godfather, in which they supposedly make peace, but we all know that there are
more assassinations to lie in the future. Second, it makes it very difficult for leaders to engage in
negotiations, because you know that the other side – whatever we’re saying right now – is going
to come to get you.
So what’s a party to do? What are leaders to do? One, we see some leaders being very careful to
stay off of television. Tom DeLay does not want to become a national media figure. You don’t
often see him on TV. He once admitted to the New York Times Magazine, “I look mean.” And
he’s very intelligent about his self-awareness there. Second, avoid ethics problems. Now that’s
where Tom DeLay could still get into some trouble, and we’ll see what the months ahead bring
on that. And a third strategy for parties is to avoid leaders who are electorally vulnerable. So in
this context I close by pointing to the example of the Senate Democrats who were very smart in
picking Harry Reid. Think about it. He was recently reelected, so he has six years ahead. Second,
he’s low key; he’s not a media figure. And, as far as getting into ethical trouble goes, as far as
any personal scandal goes, he’s a Mormon! So he’s a very smart choice for the Democrats.
Baker: Thank you Jack. Our next presentation is from Dave Rohde.
Rohde: I’m going to start out here. Like so many of my predecessors, I want to being with some
evidence on congressional voting using the Poole-Rosenthal data, but organized a little
differently than you’ve seen it before. So I think I can make a couple of additional points.
Howard, your big mistake was not getting royalties on this. [Unintelligible] to use the data
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grouped into categories, so these are grouped into deciles from the 10 percent most liberal
members of the House of Representatives to the 10 percent most conservatives of the House of
Representatives, with about 43 members in each category. This is the 91st Congress, the first
Congress when Richard Nixon was president in 1969-70, and the two points I just want to
emphasize on this is: One, look at the range of the distribution. In every single decile – the black
is Democrats, the white is Republicans – in every single decile there are Democrats, from the
most liberal end of the spectrum to the most conservative end of the spectrum. In every decile
but one there are Republicans from one end to the other. So the range that the parties covered at
this period of time was the entire range of the spectrum.
The second point follows from the first, I think, and helps us to understand a part of the
consequences of polarization, is that no matter where you stood on the spectrum and no matter
which party you were in, there were people in the other party who were your natural allies. They
held essentially the same ideological position you did, and you could work with them
strategically in the Congress.
As you might expect, things are different. This is the 105th Congress, in the far left decile only
Democrats, in the [unintelligible] only Republicans. Arithmetically there must be one decile
where there’s overlap, and there is, and it’s slightly to the left of center, and if you expand on
this, the number of Republicans that you have to move so that was no overlap at all would be
two, and one of them switched parties during that Congress.
Now as David Brady pointed out to us, there’s nothing new about polarization by party. We saw
in the historical data that’s been presented by a number of people here, but what seemed to me
important in my work was to know that the circumstances are extraordinarily different from the
earlier period. That is, it’s not at all surprising that there would be polarization by party when the
parties control access to nominations and can say who can run under their label. It’s not
surprising that there would be polarization when the leadership in Congress determines
completely who gets on what committees and can remake them from Congress to Congress or
decides who the committee chairmen are. It’s not surprising that there would be polarization by
party when there’s a strong linkage in the electorate between party identification and voting and
a lot of straight ticket voting and all that sort of stuff. Well, that’s the way things used to be. But
they certainly weren’t that way in the 1970s and 1980s. Anybody can run under any party label
by running in the primary, and the parties can’t do anything about. The seniority system
dominated the Congress at that time, and there was a weakening of party ties in the electorate.
So the challenge I saw was, How do I understand the rise of strong parties again in that set of
conditions as opposed to the ones that had previously existed, that were more like the conditions
that underlay strong parties in a parliamentary system? And the explanation I coined, focusing on
a Democratic Congress of the Reform Era and afterward, [unintelligible] I used was conditional
party government. One of the talking points for this panel was, Is there something like
responsible party government?, and “something like” is what I argued there was. But its
existence depended on a configuration of forces and, in particular, it dependent on the
distribution of preferences among members of Congress. That when parties in the first slide I
showed you, when parties were very diverse, there was a natural reluctance on the part of
members to delegate strong powers to party leaders because you could never tell for sure he was
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going to occupy those posts. And while it might be fine if it was somebody from your wing of
the party, if it was somebody from the other wing of the party, that would be very dangerous to
you. So in terms of policy and electoral interest, you’d be reluctant to delegate. So the idea was
that as parties became more internally homogeneous and more divergent from one another, then
the members would be more willing to delegate strong powers to their leadership. And that was
essentially the story of the Reform Era Congress.
And then after the theory was developed, along came the election of 1994 and Republican
control and the leadership of Newt Gingrich, and it offered a sort of strong test of the theoretical
argument, because clearly the Republican majority of 1995 was more homogeneous than the
ones that had come before. And so we would expect a priori stronger delegation of powers to
leaders and stronger exercise of those powers by leaders, and that’s what we got. So we were
pretty comfortable with the way the theory was supported, but many people raised questions at
the time about whether this wasn’t sort of a unique situation, really unusually, both Gingrich and
[unintelligible], and in particular many people in response to our theoretical arguments
contended that once Gingrich was gone and particularly when Denny Hastert was chosen to
succeed him, that there would be, as Hastert himself promised, a reversion to the regular order of
things.
And so I would just note a few points about the subsequent developments, some of which we’ve
heard already. First of all, polarization has continued and been reinforced. The divisions in terms
of the scores are even a little bit stronger in the Hastert Congresses than they were in the
Gingrich Congress. So again our expectations should be continued strong delegation, continued
strong exercise of powers by the party leadership.
In terms of delegation, as strong as the powers that were granted Gingrich were, Hastert has been
given even stronger powers, and, most importantly, in contrast to the Democratic leadership
under the Reform Era asked for those powers so that Democratic leaders of the Reform Era were
the recipients of powers granted by the members, but they were reluctant. Indeed, many of them
opposed granting of the reforms that had been offered. For example, Hastert decided that when
the term limits for committee chairmen set in, that the Steering Committee would decide who
would be committee chairmen, in effect completely setting aside the senior system, a rule, a
norm that had been almost inviolable before the Democrat Reform Era of the 70s, now was set
aside completely. There was no necessary relationship between seniority and who got to be
committee chair. It was who could make the best case for him- or herself in front of the Steering
Committee, and ideological positioning was very important in that. For example, Chris Shays
who was passed over for chair of Government Reform – he was the most senior member of the
committee – in favor of somebody more junior, but more ideological acceptable.
What I might note, just to follow on Larry’s point, this is going on the Senate, too. Just in the last
few weeks we have seen new committee-assignment powers granted to Bill Frist for the precise
purpose of being able to pressure individual members to toe the party line in order…in exchange
for being able to secure committee assignments. So in terms of continued grants of power, it’s
gotten stronger and in terms of exercise of power, I would just note two things. One is over and
above what’s been talked about, somebody made reference to things that David Dreier had said.
David Dreier, when he was in the minority, was one of the leading voices against the use of
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restrictive rules. Now that he’s chairman of the Rules Committee, he’s one of the leading
proponents of restrictive rules. Dreier said: I had not known what it took to govern. Now our No.
1 priority is to move our agenda. And so if it’s necessary to impose restrictive rules to move the
agenda, that’s what they will do. And indeed Don Wolfensburger[sp?] who was the Republican
staff director of the Rules Committee has done a study of the behavior of the Rules Committee in
recent years, and he said: By the 107th Congress, the Republicans had far exceeded the
Democrats, worse excesses in restrictive floor amendments. Now that’s a normative judgment
that I’m not involved in making, but it is supporting the idea that there has been at least as
strong, if not stronger, exercising of powers in recent years than had been the case before, and so
on.
Barbara Sinclair: I’ve organized my remarks in terms of those questions that were asked. The
first was, How closely does the contemporary Congress approximate a system of responsible
party government? If you take the 1958 PSA[?] report’s definition, you kind of have to say pretty
closely. Just to remind you, that report calls for parties (and I quote) “that are able to bring forth
programs to which they commit themselves and that possess sufficient internal cohesion to carry
out those programs.” Well, what do we see now? We certainly see intra-party, cross-branch
cooperation at quite a high level, and it’s based on shared policy preferences and a perception of
a shared electoral fate. We also see campaign policy promises that are, to a considerable extent,
common to the president and the members of his party enacted into legislation – not everything,
but quite a bit.
Does this increased party unity reflect polarization in the policy preferences of rank-and-file
members? And my answer is yes, to a very considerable extent, but that isn’t all it reflects. I
mean there is no question that House members and senators are more polarized in their policy
preferences, and we all know that part of it has to do with the Democrats losing their
conservative Southern wing. But it’s also the case that the typical Republican member, really in
both chambers, is much further to the right now than used to be the case.
Well, if it’s not only this kind of member policy polarization in terms of their preferences, what
else does it reflect? Certainly in the House polarization is amplified by internal arrangements,
and the bottom line is simply that getting ahead in the contemporary House now largely depends
a member’s standing in the party and with the party leadership. So both House parties really are
highly organized, both for joint action and to allow the members to participate through and
within the party and they’re strongly led and that is because members want that. And they want
an active party a strong party leadership because they really are prerequisites for their attaining
their goals within the current political environment which features narrow margins and a very
considerable ideological distance between the parties. After all, compromising across what is a
very considerable gulf in terms of policy preferences means you have to make painful policy
concessions. Not surprisingly, the majority party members would rather not do that.
So for House members the incentives to be team players are enormous now. As has been
mentioned, really their House lives now take place mostly within the party. There are lot of
opportunities to participate in and through your party. The opportunities for bipartisan
participation are much less now, and they have all kinds of difficulties attached. Advancement
within the chamber in terms of good committee assignments, chairmanships, and, of course, the
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party hierarchy do depend on your reputation with your party peers and with the leadership. So
all of this does amplify party cohesion.
Well, what about the Senate? Floor voting in the Senate is about as partisan as it is in the House
when you gauge it by the usual voting measures. But the Senate is somewhat less partisan than
the House at the committee level, at least if you look at the major measures. Nevertheless, having
said that, the Senate is a lot more partisan than it used to be, and basically the constituency-based
forces toward partisan polarization are similar, if not identical, for members of the two chambers.
But given the Senate’s non-majoritarian rules, partisanship plays itself out differently in that
chamber. The rules do exert pressure on senators to compromise across party lines, but when that
doesn’t work and when you can’t use the budget process, the result tends to be stalemate. And, of
course, that is extremely frustrating for the Senate majority party and for its leader.
And I suggest that one of the most interesting things that’s going to happen in this session of
Congress is to see what the Republicans and Frist do about nominations. Will they actually use
the “nuclear option”? Will they try it? That could, I think, change the Senate fundamentally if
they do.
Has polarization made Congress more or less productive as a legislative institution? It depends
on what you mean by “productive.” It is true that Congress can now sometimes pass really major
legislation, legislation that I think one would have to say is nonincremental without broad
support in Congress or the public. The Medicare prescription drug bill I think fits that. I think
you can make the argument for at least some of those tax bills. So in the sense of producing
legislation, you would have to say that’s productive. On the other hand, the results is likely to be
continuing controversy about these big programs, and you are likely, as in this case,…enactment
doesn’t signal a consensus…it doesn’t even signal the end of the fight.
So the original Medicare bill, well it took forever to enact that, from the Truman administration
certainly and you can argue from FDR up until the mid 60s, but when it was enacted, then it had
very broad support. Well, is that better or worse in terms of the process, societal outcomes, etc.,
than Bush’s Medicare bill? I think that you can see real problems with both processes.
Another thing to watch is that the Congress seems now to have great difficulty getting its most
basic legislative work done via anything approaching regular order, and here I mean especially
appropriations and budget. For the last three years appropriations have been done through these
omnibus CRs. There’s been no budget resolution for two of the last three years. Part of this has
been the Senate as a block, but also to some extent there has been ambivalence in the House, not
wanting to take tough votes or wanting to have it both ways. So you could really argue that the
lack of broad popular support for some of the things that the Republicans really want to do has
led to a kind of stealth policy-making, you know you bundle everything into this huge package
that almost no one even in Congress, much less in the public, knows what it contains, and it is
kind of hard to argue that that’s responsible party government.
Van Houweling: I want to talk about…mainly focus on Conference Committees in a polarized
Congress and to begin this I want to focus on two things that are about the House, although
eventually the reason I think it’s important to talk about Conference Committees has more to do
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with the Senate. And back in the House, as we’ve seen for the last few days, or yesterday and
then today again, polarization is something that has been occurring, right? We sometimes seem
to talk about it as if it’s something new with the Republican majority, but that’s not true. It’s
been from the mid 70s onwards, and that’s something that’s important to keep in mind,
particularly from an academic perspective. This is not something that is due entirely to new
Republican efforts. As a longer-term thing, we’ve seen something else rise, a number of other
things rise, with this polarization, and one of the main things that other people on my panel have
talked about a lot more than I have is the use of restrictive agenda procedures in the House. On
restrictive agenda procedures in the House we’ve heard people talk about the excesses now. But
these are not inventions of the Republican majority, right? There were complaints, obviously, as
we heard yesterday, about these agenda procedures before the Republicans ever took over, and
that these agenda procedures and polarization have gone hand in hand I don’t think is any
mistake, right? I think a lot of what’s happening is that as members are polarizing in the House
and they want polarized policies, agenda restrictions help them avoid dealing with moderate
alternatives, voting against alternatives that they know are not the policy they want but are
policies their constituencies might want. Voting against them would upset their constituencies.
So I think this happens a lot in the House, and I’ll give you an example.
Look at President Bush’s first tax cut. In the House, that is basically given as an all-or-nothing
option. There’s the Democratic alternative allowed one, but it’s not really a particularly moderate
alternative. It’s sort of nothing. Bush is sort of all. Republicans in the House had it much
better…they did not have to choose against a tax cut that was right square in the middle, one that
their constituencies would have supported. They had this other choice, right? You could argue
that some of these people from moderate districts that we saw in John Zaller’s plot yesterday,
who are really fairly extreme, appreciated that. They didn’t want to have choose against
something that their districts would have preferred.
The Senate, of course, there’s no option for agenda control that approximates this, and regularly
the Senate gives in on these things. That tax cut is an example. Moderate senators have to face
amendments, and they often vote for them, that moderate the policies that their party wants and
perhaps they want as well. We regularly see the Senate giving in on amendments like that. On
that tax cut, they gave in. Conferences provide a solution to this. When the Senate passes
something where they’ve given in, they can go to conference where majorities rule and where, as
we have seen recently, minorities can even be excluded, and they can take back what they’ve
lost. They can agree with the House, and move almost all the way or all the way back to where
the House was with agenda control, and the alternative comes back to the Senate with no
possibility of amendment. And this is what happened with that tax cut, if you’ll remember, right?
The Senate compromised, it went to Conference Committee, and almost all the president’s
priorities made it back into the bill, at almost the same level they were in the bill before.
So my argument, though, is that this is nothing new, and it’s been going on with conferences for
awhile, and the use of conferences for partisan purposes, to rescue partisan agendas, is something
that’s risen with polarization in general. So here’s an interesting slide to begin things, which just
looks at…just focus on the red bars here, because they’re from [unintelligible] Congress. This is
a sample of what David Menkens[sp?] identified as the most significant legislation Congress has
passed, and this is how it was resolved, differences between the chambers were resolved, through
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conference or through other procedures that allow amendments in the Senate. And the surprising
thing is that when there is split control of the chambers, which happens a few times right during
this period, the [unintelligible] period, the chambers tend to resolve their differences, are more
likely to resolve their differences using other mechanisms – mechanisms other than conferences,
which a textbook story would say conferences for resolving difficult differences. But instead
they use other methods to resolve their differences when there’s split control. When there’s
unified control, they almost always use conference. That is, conference is a place where the
parties can get together and make decisions together; in unified control that would be my
argument. In split control there’s not that advantage.
So then I took that same sample of legislation – so these are the significant laws again – and I
collected all the articles written in…this data represents the articles written in CQ on these bills,
and just simply asked the coders to look at, “Do the articles talk about partisan disputes in
conference? Do they even mention partisan disputes in conference?” And you can see that in this
period where we know there’s low polarization, parties obviously aren’t the important symbols
there. They aren’t the way we talk about politics, and partisan disputes don’t seem to play a large
role in conference, right? Over this time you will increasingly see – and I don’t show this – a
trend from talking about conferences and House-Senate confrontation to a partisan confrontation.
By the time you reach the 107th Congress, almost every article talks about significant partisan
disputes in Congress.
So at the same time conferences seem to be more about partisan disputes, you can ask the
question, “What’s happening in conference?” This is just - I’ll show you in a second – a trend in
this, but this is just a slide to show you that what’s happening is what you’d expect. When the
Democrats controlled both chambers, Democrats, according to these articles (again, a coding of
these articles) win conference or succeed clearly – the instructions are for it to be a clear victory,
not a question mark, when Democrats are successful in conference. And when Republicans
control Congress, Republicans are successful, and when it’s split, you can see that middle
percentage, 68 percent of the time it’s unclear who wins in conference in this graph.
Now to take this a step further, this is a statistical model – it smoothes things out over time – but
not only are conferences more likely to be about partisan disputes, but it’s more likely the
majority party is going to come away from conference a winner over this period. And you can
see in the 83rd Congress, when partisan disputes were not very frequent, the majority party won
about as often as the minority party in conference, or at least that’s what the estimate is. It
controls for some other things. By the time you reach the 107th Congress, this is no longer how
things are happening, right? The majority party, by those codings, is winning conference almost
all the time. You can think, then, of an example like the one I gave or an example like people
were giving yesterday of this majority manipulation of conference. That’s what I think is
happening in a lot of cases.
Just to give you one more table, this is increases like I said over this period, the articles stop
talking about conferences and House-Senate disputes. But I had the coders examine that, too, and
there actually ends up being an interesting pattern there, which is consistent with this. So
essentially what I think is happening is the Senate is often giving in to the House when the
chambers are unified. That is, the majority party is getting back what it lost, and you can see that,
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again, the articles stop really identifying chamber winners, but…and this is [end side a] let me
divide it, because very frequently [unintelligible].
So what’s the point of all this? The point of all this is that it both bears on this conference, which
we’ve been talking about more and the manipulation of it has become more an issue now. I think
it’s a longer-term trend. But it also bears on another point, which is, How in a Senate where
there’s no agenda control but we know members are as extreme as in the House and is polarized,
how is it that that Senate reaches similar policy outcomes as the House, and I think conference is
a key explanation for that, and that the increasing use of it is due to the increasing polarization of
the chambers.
Baker: Thank you, Rob. Questions for our panelists? Mickey.
Edwards: I just wanted to add some additional information to the question of whether we are
dealing with something that is new or whether somehow [unintelligible] conferences becomes
there has been the advent [unintelligible] of something we haven’t seen before [unintelligible] to
give us some concern. I was thinking as I was listening to these talks, for example about the
appropriation bills, and the ability now to get the appropriation bills through. I remember when
Ronald Reagan was president, and he stood up on national television [unintelligible], we did that
routinely. We routinely…then long before this current era we were dealing with omnibus
appropriation bills but we couldn’t get the appropriation bills through. In terms of trying to
bypass the seniority system in order to put in place chairs who were better able to articulate the
position of their party, I mean I can go back to when Mel Price was replaced as chairman of the
House Armed Services Committee by Les Aspin, or when [unintelligible] on the Republican side
Jimmy Quillin[sp?] from Tennessee was passed over for chair of the Rules Committee. He was
replaced by the much more combative Jerry Solomon from New York, and if you go all the way
back – I think it was either 1977 or 1979 – when Phil Lucci[sp?] was replaced as the ranking
Republican on the Interior subcommittee on the environment by Bob Bauman from Maryland, so
I mean this is a longstanding [unintelligible] as indicators of a sharpened and more intense
combativeness as things that [unintelligible] have seen for years.
Question: But, Mickey, hasn’t it come together now in a way that makes it in effect create, as
you yourself just said to me, a kind of a new condition for service in Congress where there may
have been antecedents and origins in each of the devices, but to be in Congress now
[unintelligible] party discipline. It creates a different reality than [unintelligible].
Price?: Just thinking a minute about the effects in terms of legislative outcomes, Barbara had a
couple of good examples where unified Republican control has no doubt facilitated certain kinds
of legislative outcomes – tax cuts come to mind – and the Medicare prescription drug bill, which
clearly was not a consensual product, but control mechanisms enabled the Republicans to pass
the kind of bill they wanted. So those are good examples, I think. There are other examples,
though, other episodes that I think are more puzzling. Some of them are fairly conventional
pieces of legislation that one would think would have been put through without much difficulty.
The Higher Education Act, which I had never known to ever have been bogged down ever in
history, we used to just shove it through on a bipartisan basis. Yet this Congress couldn’t pass it.
The transportation bill clearly bogged down. There, too, that’s usually about the easiest kind of
15
bill to pass, and yet it’s bogged down with intra-Republican disputes in this Congress. The
energy bill is a somewhat more complicated case, but nonetheless it’s the kind of thing you
would think unified party control would make it easier to pass. So there is that universe of
conventional legislative measures which are actually are not getting produced I would say in the
normal fray. And then there’s this additional category of legislation which I was talking about
yesterday, which I think historically has required bipartisan support, trade bills, [unintelligible]
budget agreements, entitlement reform. It seems to me that’s yet another issue. How well served
are those issues going to be by this kind of unified party control and the attendant polarization
and alienation of Democrats, reduction of the incentives to work together on these matters? So if
you address both categories, it strikes me that the legislative scorecard isn’t very impressive on
these measures.
Calmes: If I could ask you and maybe Tom Cole why that is, why some of these conventional –
you’ve mentioned intra-Republican disputes? Tom?
Cole: Well, you know, I can go ticking down the list. I mean the energy bill [unintelligible]
bipartisan support on both sides of the aisle. You [unintelligible] a breakdown essentially 58
people for, and you can’t get to 60. If you look at the opposition, there’s really not
[unintelligible] Republicans [unintelligible] are against the bill. But to me that’s not
[unintelligible] the transportation bill, [unintelligible] to see who was going to run the Senate.
You did have three Republicans [unintelligible] clear sense of who is going to control the Senate
chamber. I guess, since I have a House perspective, a lot of the problem is the narrowness and
the rule structure [unintelligible] or any of the parties, the rule structure really makes it much
tougher to [unintelligible], so some of these things are not products of the House [unintelligible]
so much as the Senate [unintelligible] with reasonable speed early next year. [Unintelligible]
some of these disagreements will disappear or at least be [unintelligible]. I think so.
Price: There are individual explanations for each of these, none of them I think rise to the sort of
thing you would expect would hold up fairly conventional bills under unified party control.
Cole: I don’t think the energy bill [unintelligible].
Price: Well, that’s a partial exception, but that is a more partisan bill, I believe, than you are
indicating [unintelligible].
Cole?: [unintelligible] I’ve got a whole lot of Texas Democrats [unintelligible] gets down to
producing and consuming states. There is an environmental [unintelligible] passed pretty easily
through the House, with a pretty substantial number of Democrats for it. [unintelligible]
Price: In any case, I think it’s fair to say that unified party control isn’t quite living up to its
billing on these major pieces of legislation. And then when you get passed it, to the bills that
nobody ever expects to pass on one side of the aisle alone and where I believe we have lost or are
in the processing of losing our bipartisan capacity to act. And that’s more worrisome still.
Cole: [unintelligible] I would argue that the last session actually [unintelligible] biggest
expansion of entitlement reform in twenty-five years and you get major tax [unintelligible] there
16
was a legislative activity, particularly considering we were sliding into what was a very close
presidential election a lot of stuff [unintelligible] for a lot of things. I do agree with your point
about whether or not there’s going to be enough bipartisanship to do things like entitlements, so I
think part of this, too, and again this is not a critical observation [unintelligible] Democratic
position if the numbers were reversed. But there is still, at least on our side, is the Democratic
positioning is not about passing legislation; it’s about having issues to regain the majority. I
mean again I go back to Medicare. That wasn’t that tough a bill for a lot of Democrats to
[unintelligible] right-wing Republicans and centrist Democrats to be for that bill, but the
discipline by the Democratic [unintelligible]on the floor was at least as intense as the Republican
discipline in trying to pass it, because I don’t think, frankly, there was any desire to see this
president or the Republican majority get any credit for reforming Medicare at all. So there was
definitely a deal [unintelligible] both sides [unintelligible] and it also takes recognition when one
side is in the majority, you’re not going to get [unintelligible] and you have to decide which do
you want. Do you want the legislative accomplishment that you can claim credit for it, or do you
want the issue which you can exploit in the next election? I would argue that most of the time in
the last Congress, the Democrats would rather have the issue [unintelligible]. And again I’m not
saying it’s a bad thing. I think you’ll see a breakdown in the Senate on transportation. Every
single Democrat on the [unintelligible], every single one, [unintelligible] any of the nine
Democrats, and I don’t believe all the nine Democrats [unintelligible] than they did five years
ago. I think [unintelligible]. It was that close. There was a strong constituency for the Democrats
in the Senate not to [unintelligible] after the election.
Price: Let me just add one [unintelligible].
Mann: But it does give a flavor!
[Unintelligible cross talk]
Price: The transportation bill, you know, there are many conflicts there. [Unintelligible] and
Democrats [unintelligible], but basically you had the bipartisan leadership of the House
Transportation Committee wanted a robust bill, that being nixed by the White House and by the
Republican leadership, and we’ve gone on from there, and the White House has put a very low
bar as to what it’s willing to sign, and so the bill didn’t get passed. It’s mainly intra-Republican
disputes, I think. Democrats did not have the capacity to hold that bill up if the Republicans had
gotten their act together. Now with the Medicare bill, I do believe there’s another interpretation
of that, which is [unintelligible]. We were on our way to having a more consensual bill, and
that’s the bill that the Senate wrote, and when Ted Kennedy had gotten pulled into the process of
helping write it, and the key issue and the key issue was what kind of coverage is going to be
available under Medicare proper if these private plans that we’re subsidizing don’t materialize?
And on that key point the Senate wrote a bill that I and others like me were willing to vote for –
just barely – but we were willing to vote for it [unintelligible] had that come out of conference. I
think the conference under the pressures of the Republican leadership and the White House
produced a bill far closer to the House [unintelligible]. You lost in the Senate to the conference
vote you went from – what was it? – 35 Democrats voting in favor of this thing in the Senate to
something like 14 or 15, I believe, voting for the conference [unintelligible]. It became a partisan
product in the conference, and that’s…. Now unified partisan control let you push it through,
17
with a few [unintelligible], but I do not think that the Democrats throughout this whole process
were determined to see it go down because they wanted to win the next election. Quite the
contrary. I think the Democrats were willing to write a consensual bill, and I think the Senate
Democrats proved that, and I think a fair number of us in the House would have voted for such a
bill, had that been what was put before us after the conference. So that wasn’t the way I was
looking at it. I wasn’t look at it, “Gee, I hope this goes down, so we’ll have an issue in the next
election.”
Cole?: If 15 Democratic senators voted for it in the end, there are a lot more Democratic House
members than Democratic senators. If you only get 9 House members, that suggests a high
degree of discipline. And again I [unintelligible] there was an intense discipline on both sides.
[Unintelligible] there should have been a larger number of Democrats [unintelligible] then some
Democrats switched and [unintelligible], three hours were simply to embarrassed [unintelligible]
in fifteen minutes [unintelligible].
Baker: Skaggs.
Skaggs: This feels pretty familiar! [Unintelligible]
Baker: This is what comes from the use of open rules! Dave.
Broder: I have a question for Professor Evans. At the anecdotal level we begin to see the former
governors now in the Senate functioning as a group, a bipartisan group, trying to offset some of
the polarizing forces. What can you tell us about the…has there been a change in the recruitment
of senators from former governors…governors moving into the Senate? We know that now there
are a lot of senators who’d prefer to be governors. The point that was made yesterday by
someone, that there’s a spillover from the House to the Senate because of the…. How much has
changed in terms of where senators come from?
Evans: That’s a good question. It’s an empirical question, and I don’t know the answer in terms
of percentage of new senators or House members who were governors. I am familiar, though,
with those efforts to form a centrist coalition. This isn’t new. I mean obviously this goes back to
the 1990s. There have been repeated attempts to form coalitions of the middle, to form centrist
alternatives to get them out there on the agenda. There have been some success stories – in the
education area Senator Lieberman and some others affected the agenda, but for the most part
these attempts have failed, because when push comes to shove, people coalesce around the main
party alternatives. So I’m a little bit skeptical about the ability to form a centrist coalition. No
matter which party is in charge, there’s a tendency – I think as was mentioned yesterday – to
legislate from the median of the majority party in towards the middle, not from the middle out.
But your question about governors, I think, and [unintelligible] process is a good one. I don’t
know. That’s something somebody should look at.
Bartels: I am interested in the issue of electoral incentives. The complaint at the moment seems
to be that people don’t have any incentives for consensual policy-making because they are taking
[unintelligible] positions. The old rap used to be that they didn’t have any overall incentives for
central policy making because they were all be show horses, running their own shows, and doing
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things they [unintelligible] policy making. So I’m wondering if anybody knows of a period in
which there were electoral incentives for central policy making of any sort?
Sinclair: If that’s what it takes to get legislation through and it’s legislation that you need for
reelection purposes, sure. I mean you can argue that for a very long period that that was the case.
But it’s still the case sometimes, and there is going to be a transportation bill. It just…I mean
Bush simply wanted to look like he was finally concerned about deficits, and now that the
election is over, he may feel less of a need to and members will pass a transportation bill as big
as Bush will let them.
Bartels: When did we last vote anyone out because they didn’t produce legislation?
Sinclair: Members do believe that this sort of thing can happen, but I should ask the members to
speak to that.
Baker? Or Price?: What are you saying, that the incentives to produce legislation are weak and
therefore the incentives to do whatever it takes to get the legislation through, to overcome the
polarization, are weak? Is that your point?
Bartels: I guess it seems the electoral incentives specifically are weak and that therefore if we
have more [unintelligible] than we used, and I’m sure that we do, but if we do, that maybe
[unintelligible] are not ones that have to do what’s going on.
Price: Well, if you’re asking if [unintelligible] because of the failure to produce the higher
education act, the answer is no, or even the failure to produce something as important as the
transportation bill, the answer is probably no, although I for one and others try to go home and
talk about what a disgrace it was because we couldn’t get the infrastructure support we needed in
our state. That doesn’t mean it became a voting issue for almost anybody. If you’re asking,
though, in a positive sense we go home and claim credit for things that are produced, no matter
whether it’s on a partisan or bipartisan basis, the answer most certainly is yes. I remember once
taking issue with my own caucus because of the first Higher Education Act that was passed five
years ago. It was passed on a voice vote. [Unintelligible] and it struck me as very strange,
however, that in the take-home packet I got from my caucus there was no mention of the Higher
Education Act. It was as though something that didn’t occasion a partisan dog fight really wasn’t
something we wanted to go home and brag about, and I thought that was a profound mistake. I
was certainly going to go home and brag about the Higher Education Act, no matter how it came.
So there’s a kind of partisan mentality, I think, that feeds into what we claim credit for and what
we brag about, but I think for most members like myself, we’re perfectly willing to go home and
take credit for whatever we can. And the incentives are there for us to be part of the solution,
producing such legislation, are pretty strong. That doesn’t mean we’re going to get beaten if we
don’t do it. But it does mean it’s a positive thing if we can do it.
Edwards: There’s one other factor [unintelligible] in response to what Barbara said and Larry
said [unintelligible], and it may also be that the impact of the incentives in terms of election is
overstated and that incentive may be more, you know, the political beliefs, ideology, however
you want to describe it, of the person who ran for office [unintelligible] that he or she believes in
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or wants to improve the education system. I mean if you [unintelligible] without thinking
[unintelligible] if you think of this in terms of people running for office, not just to be there and
get reelected, because there are certain things they believe in that they want to achieve. That
changes the whole impact, and I have no [unintelligible] they are primarily driven by the things
they want to achieve that they think are good for the country as opposed to what the impact is
going to be on the next election.
Rohde: Also, I think what Mickey said is right, but even at the electoral level there are
incentives. Leading into the election of 1994, the Republicans in the Senate filibustered almost
every major bill at the end of the Congress to try and block them from passage because they
believed that there would be an electoral effect on the Democrats and most analysts believe that
that they were right, that there was an electoral effect, that the public perceived the Congress as
unable to pass things and blamed the Democrats because they were in charge and that they
suffered at the ballot box. The second thing is that – I mean this is a small counterweight to the
whole two days of our discussion – is that the overwhelming majority of the legislative business
of the Congress is not partisan, it’s not partisan, it’s not conflictual in any way. We did a study of
the 96th, 100th and 104th Congresses, and took every piece of legislation that reached the floor,
and set the most minimalist bar of conflict that you could imagine. Was there in either committee
or on the floor even one roll call on which the minority was larger than 10 percent? So if there
was, even one roll call in either chamber, in the House, larger than 10 percent, it was classified as
controversial. Even by that minimalist standard, less than a third of the bills in all three
Congresses exhibited any controversy of any kind at all. And this was after throwing out from
consideration all the commemorative legislation and that sort of stuff. This was all real bills. So,
yes, the Congress is polarized, and yes it’s very partisan, but it’s only on a small segment of the
public agenda.
Baker: I think that I’ve got to enforce regular order. We’re running against the clock, and I see
that my enforcer, Fred Greenstein [unintelligible]. I’d like to thank the panelists very much and
thank you for your questions.
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