Insecure Majorities

Congress and the Perpetual Campaign

Frances E. Lee

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226409184
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As Democrats and Republicans continue to vie for political advantage, Congress remains paralyzed by partisan conflict. That the last two decades have seen some of the least productive Congresses in recent history is usually explained by the growing ideological gulf between the parties, but this explanation misses another fundamental factor influencing the dynamic. In contrast to politics through most of the twentieth century, the contemporary Democratic and Republican parties compete for control of Congress at relative parity, and this has dramatically changed the parties' incentives and strategies in ways that have driven the contentious partisanship characteristic of contemporary American politics.With Insecure Majorities, Frances E. Lee offers a controversial new perspective on the rise of congressional party conflict, showing how the shift in competitive circumstances has had a profound impact on how Democrats and Republicans interact. For nearly half a century, Democrats were the majority party, usually maintaining control of the presidency, the House, and the Senate. Republicans did not stand much chance of winning majority status, and Democrats could not conceive of losing it. Under such uncompetitive conditions, scant collective action was exerted by either party toward building or preserving a majority. Beginning in the 1980s, that changed, and most elections since have offered the prospect of a change of party control. Lee shows, through an impressive range of interviews and analysis, how competition for control of the government drives members of both parties to participate in actions that promote their own party's image and undercut that of the opposition, including the perpetual hunt for issues that can score political points by putting the opposing party on the wrong side of public opinion. More often than not, this strategy stands in the way of productive bipartisan cooperation—and it is also unlikely to change as long as control of the government remains within reach for both parties.

CHAPTER ONE

The Ins versus the Outs

The central variable in a party system is the level of competitiveness. — Joseph Schlesinger (1985, 1154)

Today, in 2016, the Democratic and Republican Parties face each other at roughly equal strength. Almost every election offers the prospect of a change of party control over one national institution or another. Since 1980, Democrats and Republicans have each held the presidency about half the time. The Senate majority changed hands seven times between 1980 and 2016, with Democrats and Republicans each in the majority for nine Congresses. The House majority shifted three times during the same period, also with Democrats and Republicans each holding the majority for nine Congresses. Nearly three decades have elapsed since the last presidential landslide. Divided government is the norm. Margins of control in Congress are persistently narrow. Both parties can generally count on receiving between 47 and 53 percent of all the votes cast in congressional elections any given year. In 2002, The Economist magazine dubbed the United States the “50–50 nation,” and subsequent elections have altered the picture little. The two parties remain locked in a ferocious power struggle for control of US national government.

Yet it has not always been so. For decades after 1932, Democrats were, by all appearances, the nation’s majority party. Democrats maintained majority control of both the House and the Senate for nearly a half century between 1933 and 1981, interrupted only by two brief Republican interludes (1947–48 and 1953–54). The Democrats controlled the presidency two-thirds of the time during this period. Divided government was atypical. The Democrats’ margins usually seemed insurmountable. On average, Democrats held 60 percent of the seats and, with some frequency, majorities of 2:1. Even after Richard Nixon won one of the presidency’s largest popular-vote shares ever in 1972, Democrats still held 57 Senate seats and 291 House seats, and their margins swelled further in the 1974 midterms. In the Congress of this era, Democrats were “something of a ‘party of state’” (Mayhew 1974, 104).

The central argument of this book is that these changed competitive circumstances have had far-reaching effects on political incentives in Washington. Intense party competition for institutional control focuses members of Congress on the quest for partisan political advantage. When party control seemingly hangs in the balance, members and leaders of both parties invest more effort in enterprises to promote their own party’s image and undercut that of the opposition. These efforts at party image making often stand in the way of cross-party cooperation on legislation.

The primary way that parties make an electoral case for themselves vis-à-vis their opposition is by magnifying their differences. Parties continually contrive to give voters an answer to the question, “Why should you support us and not the other party?” In some form or another, the answer has to claim, “Because we’re different!” Differences can be defined along ideological lines, and ideological differences are often useful for appealing to party base voters, activists, and donors. However, nonideological appeals accusing the other party of corruption, failure, or incompetence are at least equally valuable and can potentially attract swing voters, as well as fire up the base. Difference drawing by no means entails only a focus on cultivating the image of one’s own party. In a two-party system, one party’s loss is another party’s gain. As such, a party benefits from harming the opposing party’s image. A party looks for ways to make its opposition appear weak and incompetent, as well as ideologically extreme and out of touch with mainstream public opinion. As parties angle for competitive advantage using such tactics, the upshot is a more confrontational style of partisanship in Congress.

Party image making impels an active quest to define and broadcast party messages. Fellow partisans seek issues and talking points around which they can coalesce that will also favorably distinguish their party from the opposition. At the same time, party image making also involves a continual hunt for issues that allow a party to score political points by putting its opposition on the wrong side of public opinion. Parties in Congress routinely try to force recorded votes on issues that will cast their opposition in an unattractive light. When these votes work as intended, they elicit party conflict and foreground party differences. Party image making extends beyond floor votes to the whole arena of communications. Parties’ pursuit of advantage in public relations has fueled the creation and institutionalization of extensive partisan communications operations inside the legislative branch. These increasingly large and professionalized staffs of party communicators produce a steady stream of tough criticism of the opposing party, along with advertising, issue positioning, and credit claiming aimed at burnishing the party brand.

The quest for party differences cuts against bipartisan collaboration on legislative issues. An out party does not win a competitive edge by participating in, voting for, and thereby legitimating the in party’s initiatives. Instead, an out party angling for partisan advantage will look for reasons to withhold support and oppose. If a particular initiative championed by an in party is sufficiently popular, an out party may prefer to dodge a fight on that issue. But an out party nevertheless must stake out some ground on which it can define differences in order to make a case for retaking power.

Partisan calculations such as these will weigh more heavily on political decision making under more party-competitive conditions. When majority status is not at stake, there are fewer incentives to concentrate so intently on winning partisan advantage. Members of Congress have less reason to systematically pursue strategies of partisan differentiation or to establish party institutions designed to drive favorable news coverage. But when majority status is in play, members of out parties tend to think in terms of winning the long game of institutional control rather than the short game of wielding influence by cooperating in policy making in the present moment. When competing for majority status, parties focus more intently on public relations, messaging, and related strategies designed to win the high stakes in contention.

During the long years of the so-called permanent Democratic majority after 1932, Republicans did not see much prospect of winning majority status and Democrats did not perceive much chance of losing their majorities. Under such uncompetitive conditions, one would expect to find scant effort expended on party organization. Party collective action during much of this era was, in fact, quite meager. Parties rarely met in caucus. Legislative party organizations were bare bones. There was little to no partisan communications apparatus in either chamber. Reflecting on his party’s long minority status, Rep. William A. Steiger (R-WI) said in 1976, “The seemingly permanent minority status debilitates party members” (Freed 1976). Jones (1970, 170–74) described the Republicans of the era as struggling with a “minority party mentality,” in which members had given up on efforts to build toward majority status.

“The critical characteristic of a competitive party system is insecurity,” argued Schlesinger (1985, 1167). Insecurity, in turn, motivates partisan exertions. Under competitive conditions, “both parties will put forth a high level of effort” to win; meanwhile, when a single party is dominant, “the effort of the controlling party will be minimal [and] that of the hopeless party will at best be token” (1154). These generalizations apply to parties at many levels. Presidential campaigns ignore states that are not in play (Gimpel et al. 2007; Shaw 2008). Incumbents in districts and states perceived as “safe” often fail to draw quality challengers or any challengers at all (Carson 2005; Jacobson 2013; Squire 1989a, 1989b). Donors give and candidates spend far more money in competitive elections than in uncompetitive ones (Gimpel et al. 2008; Herrnson 1992).

These same incentives apply inside Congress, as members decide whether or not to organize and participate in collective efforts to win or hold majority status. Members and leaders have little reason to invest in partisan enterprises when they perceive no chance for majority control to shift. Competition for majority control, however, incentivizes them to put forth more partisan effort. The prospect of collective reward or punishment gives members stronger motivation to cooperate as a party team. A secure majority party behaves differently from a party that fears losing power. A minority party optimistic about winning a majority behaves differently from a hopeless minority. Members of insecure parties worry more about partisan advantage and work harder to win it.

When neither party sees itself as a permanent minority or a permanent majority, leaders and members invest more heavily in party organization and partisan collective action. As one Senate Republican leader’s communication director put it in 2001, “There’s nothing more important than getting back our majority. It’s an issue that unites all of us on communicating our message, on legislative tactics, and on outreach” (Straub and Fonder 2001). With both parties similarly motivated, the result is a better organized, harder-edged, more forceful style of partisanship in US national politics.

In the simplest terms, then, the thesis of the book is that party competition strengthens partisan incentives and motivates partisan strategic action. In other words, the level of party competition serves as the key independent variable in the analysis. Party competition is measured both objectively, via the outcomes of national elections and the distribution of partisan identification in the electorate, and subjectively, via the perceptions of members and journalists about the likelihood of shifts in party control.

In treating party competition as an independent variable, my goal is not to explain why American politics became more two-party competitive. I view the intensification of party competition as the result of broader forces in American politics external to Congress, primarily the breakup of the New Deal coalition and the partisan realignment of the South. My argument is that this transformed electoral landscape changed the political calculations of members of Congress in a fundamental way. For decades, members of Congress inhabited a political landscape where one party seemed to have a lock on majority control. Since 1980 and 1994, when Republicans finally ousted the long-standing Democratic majorities in the Senate and House respectively, members have served under conditions where the two parties compete for control of Congress at relative parity. Neither party perceives itself as a permanent majority or permanent minority. The argument is that this shift altered members’ partisan incentives and strategic choices in ways that help drive the sharp and contentious partisanship that is characteristic of contemporary American politics.

By itself, no single part of this book offers “smoking gun” evidence in support of the thesis. The central difficulty is that the dependent variables—incentives and strategies—cannot be observed directly. One cannot ascertain intentions and motivations simply from behavioral indicators, such as votes, amendments, staff allocations, or other such data. Instead, the book employs a methodology of triangulation (Denzin 1970; Rothbauer 2008; Tarrow 1995, 473–74), in which an unobserved quantity is ascertained via cross-verification from different data sources. Seeking insight into partisan incentives and strategies during different eras, I turn to historical narratives as well as to data on leadership contests, caucus meetings, the content and frequency of partisan communications, staff organization, floor amending activity, and roll-call votes. Together, these data tell a rich and compelling story about the important changes wrought by increases in party competition.

Specifically, this book turns to five sources of evidence for the key claims:

1. First-person testimony. Members of Congress and their staff frankly admit to strategically pursuing partisan confrontation as a means of making an electoral case for their own party vis-à-vis the opposition. They discuss how the imperatives of party messaging trade off against bipartisan participation in legislating. How a party weighs these trade-offs is affected by its institutional position. Parties with more institutional power place more emphasis on legislating; parties with less power focus more on messaging. Across the board, messaging takes a higher priority when majority control is insecure.

2. Internal party debates after 1980. The surprise Republican capture of a Senate majority in 1980 set off internal debates about strategy and organization within minority parties in both chambers. Senate Democrats and House Republicans began to meet more frequently than they had throughout the 1960s and 1970s to plot strategy, messages, and tactics. These internal party debates and, in key cases, leadership contests largely centered on the choice between partisan confrontation aimed at winning majorities and constructive negotiation to influence policy making. After 1980, forces favoring more confrontation steadily gained advantage, and the minority parties in both chambers became more aggressive in using floor votes and floor debate to define party differences.

3. The creation and institutionalization of partisan public-relations operations. Since 1980, both parties have built an extensive apparatus for generating and disseminating partisan messages in both chambers of Congress. Analysis of the content of these messages reveals a strong emphasis on partisan blaming and finger-pointing. Professional communicators have become increasingly influential players in the Hill’s power hierarchy, at some cost to staff with substantive policy expertise.

4. The rise of the partisan message vote. I examine the increased use of the partisan message vote, meaning votes staged for the purpose of highlighting differences between the parties with no expectation of influencing policy outcomes. Members and staff of both parties candidly acknowledge use of this tactic. Patterns in floor amending activity in the Senate point to wider use of amendments for party message purposes after 1980 than between 1959 and 1980. As a case study in message votes, the book also offers an analysis of congressional behavior on increases in the debt limit since the 1950s. Debt-limit votes were used for partisan position taking throughout the period, but parties have exploited these messaging opportunities more aggressively since 1980.

5. Comparative state legislatures. Given that this book’s argument ought to apply to other contexts beyond Congress, variation across states is examined for evidence of a relationship between party competition and legislative party conflict. Analyses drawing upon an array of different measures show that more two-party-competitive states systematically have more party-polarized legislatures.

Scholarly Perspectives on Washington Partisanship

In the new political order, nothing is more important than either winning or holding a majority. — Veteran Hill-watcher Charlie Cook (2014)

Scholars have not sufficiently considered how the broader competitive environment affects the incentives for members of Congress to engage in partisan conflict. This book argues that when majority status is perceived to be “in play,” members will be more willing to participate in partisan collective action in pursuit of partisan collective gains. As such, the book posits that the struggle for institutional power drives much partisan conflict. This argument stands in tension with political scientists’ standard explanation for the scope and intensity of party conflict: ideological polarization. The ideological distance between the parties is generally viewed as the central challenge for lawmaking and governance (see, e.g., McCarty et al. 2006; Poole and Rosenthal 2011).

The ideological composition of the parties is unquestionably an important driver of congressional partisanship and the activities of party leaders (Cooper and Brady 1981; Rohde 1991). There is no denying that there have been significant ideological changes within and between the two parties. Regional realignment has contributed to the ideological homogenization of party constituencies (Black and Black 2002, 2007; Jacobson 2013; Rohde 1991; Theriault 2008). In particular, the major parties are much more cohesive now that civil-rights issues no longer divide them internally along regional lines (Noel 2013; Schickler 2013). Since the 1970s, the major parties have incorporated new constituencies, including gun-rights advocates, social conservatives, and LGBT-rights supporters, thereby bringing the “culture war” debates into the party system (Karol 2009, 2012). The preferences of contemporary Republican and Democratic Party activists are more distinct from one another than in the past (Layman et al. 2010), as are those of the attentive rank-and-file partisans in the electorate (Abramowitz 2010; Ellis and Stimson 2012; Fiorina and Abrams 2009; Pew Research Center 2014).

The goal of this book is not to call into question the importance of changes in party coalitions and ideologies in American politics. Instead, my purpose is to draw attention to another significant factor: the intensification of party competition for institutional control. Scholars’ nearly exclusive focus on policy preferences as a driver of partisan conflict underestimates the role of strategic behavior and the ways that party strategies are likely to change under different competitive conditions. In advancing this argument, the goal is not to rule out changes in policy preferences as a rival hypothesis. It is instead to insist upon an account that takes both factors into consideration. Ideally, I would like to be able to partition out the variance so as to nail down precisely how much party conflict can be attributable to ideology and how much to party competition. Unfortunately, the question is plagued by problems of observational equivalence. No existing method of measuring members’ ideological preferences can offer traction, because these measures cannot ascertain the reasons the parties vote differently (Aldrich et al. 2014). Political science’s standard measures of ideological preferences cannot differentiate partisan conflict rooted in competitive incentives from partisan conflict rooted in ideology (Lee 2009).

Both ideology and competition are likely to affect members’ behavior for the simple reason that members of Congress have “power preferences” as well as policy preferences. They must also make strategic choices. These choices, in turn, depend in part upon whether members perceive any prospect for winning or losing majorities in Congress. Scholars generally recognize that holding majority status matters greatly to members. Over the past two decades, scholars have made members’ motivations to win and hold party majorities a foundation for entire theories of congressional leadership and institutional organization (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 2005; Green 2010, 2015; Smith 2007). But this literature has not yet considered how members’ concern with winning and holding majority status has differed depending upon the competitive context.

Party competition for institutional control has not been a constant fact of life throughout congressional history. It was not a prominent feature of the long-ago “textbook Congress” (Shepsle 1989). When Democrats seemingly held a permanent majority, members of neither party gave much thought to how they might better compete for majority status. Accordingly, the scholarship on congressional parties and leaders published in the 1960s...