"Going bipartisan": Politics by other means

Political Science Quarterly

Volumn 120, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 433-453

  Trubowitz, Peter ^a   Mellow, Nicole ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

^b WILLIAMS COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 25144524660     PISSN: 00323195     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1002/j.1538-165X.2005.tb00553.x     Document Type: Review

References (86)

1. "Oral History Interview with Dean Acheson," 30 June 1971, accessed on the website of the Truman Presidential Library at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/acheson.htm, 15 May 2004.
2. "The Myth of Bipartisanship," July/August 2001, accessed on the website of the Cigar Aficionado Online at http://www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/CA_Archives/CA_Show_Article/0,2322,1067,00. html, 17 April 2004.
3. But see James M. McCormick and Eugene R. Wittkopf, "Bipartisanship, Partisanship, and Ideology in Congressional-Executive Foreign Policy Relations, 1947-1988," Journal of Politics 52 (November 1990): 1077-1100.
4. Also, Melissa Collie, "Universalism and the Parties in the U.S. House of Representatives," American Journal of Political Science 32 (November 1988): 865-883.
5. There is also a literature on Congress that treats divergence and convergence of leaders and representatives. See William R. Lowry and Charles R. Shipan, "Party Differentiation in Congress," Legislative Studies Quarterly 27 (February 2002): 33-60;
6. Bernard Grofman, William Koetzle, and Anthony J. McGann, "Congressional Leadership 1965-96: A New Look at the Extremism versus Centrality Debate," Legislative Studies Quarterly 27 (February 2002): 87-105.
7. Karen Tumulty, "End of Unity," Time, 15 October 2001, 75.
8. John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
9. Gary W. Cox and Matthew D. McCubbins, Legislative Leviathan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993);
10. Richard Fenno, Home Style (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1978);
11. Morris P. Fiorina, Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1974);
12. Benjamin Ginsberg, "Elections and Public Policy," American Political Science Review 70 (March 1976): 41-49;
13. John Kingdon, Congressmen's Voting Decisions, 3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989);
14. Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
15. David Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
16. Fenno, Home Style;
17. Fiorina, Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies;
18. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
19. Jacobs and Shapiro, Politicians Don't Pander.
20. On the first, see Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
21. On the second, see Martin P. Wattenberg, The Decline of American Political Parties: 1952-1994 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
22. There is a well-established literature on the relationship between changes in general economic conditions and political outcomes, including incumbents' political fortunes, party policies, and politicians' strategies. On the relationship between the economy and electoral fortunes, see Robert S. Erikson, "Economic Conditions and the Presidential Vote," American Political Science Review 83 (June 1989): 567-573;
23. Edward R. Tufte, Political Control of the Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978);
24. Donald Kinder and D. Roderick Kiewiet, "Economic Discontent and Political Behavior: The Role of Personal Grievances and Collective Economic Judgments in Congressional Voting," American Journal of Political Science 23 (August 1979): 495-517.
25. For an account that focuses on economics and the class bases of the two parties, see Douglas Hibbs, "Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy," American Political Science Review 71 (December 1977): 1467-1487.
26. See also James Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1983).
27. Others have focused on the strategic calculations that politicians make in response to economic conditions and their implications for their parties. See Gary Jacobson and Samuel Kernell, Strategy and Choice in Congressional Elections (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981).
28. For an account that examines the effects of economic conditions on party conflict specifically (but which argues that isolated economic problems bring the parties together), see John Coleman, "The Decline and Resurgence of Congressional Party Conflict," Journal of Politics 59 (February 1997): 165-184.
29. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System.
30. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper Collins, 1957).
31. "Bush's 50.1% Solution," Business Week, 17 September 2001, 60.
32. Samuel C. Patterson and Gregory A. Caldeira, "Party Voting in the United States Congress," British Journal of Political Science 18 (January 1988): 111-131;
33. David Brady, Joseph Cooper, and Patricia Hurley, "The Decline of Party in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1887-1986," Legislative Studies Quarterly 4 (August 1979): 381-407;
34. Lowry and Shipan, "Party Differentiation," 33-60.
35. V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 1949).
36. Interview with Sidney Blumenthal, Frontline, 27 June 1996, accessed on the website of the Public Broadcasting Service at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice/bob/blumenthall.html, 22 January 2003.
37. The tendency of redistricting to create safe seats, for both majority and minority parties, also undoubtedly decreases the prospects for bipartisanship, inasmuch as members are free to focus on catering to their traditional partisan supporters and bringing home district pork. See, for example, David Mayhew, "Congressional Representation: Theory and Practice in Drawing Districts" in Nelson W. Polsby, ed., Reapportionment in the 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971);
38. Edward Tufte, "The Relationship Between Seats and Votes in Two-Party Systems," American Political Science Review 67 (June 1973): 540-554.
39. See Paul J. Quirk and Bruce Nesmith, "Divided Government and Policy-Making: Negotiating the Laws" in Michael Nelson, ed., The Presidency and the Political System, 4th ed. (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1995), 550.
40. Quirk and Nesmith point out that, on any given issue, moderates carry the "pivotal votes" necessary for the president to construct a winning coalition. And as they describe, "Divided party control ... ensures that both liberal and conservative views are influential and that the policies adopted are ideologically moderate. In an important sense, these middle-of-the-road policies are more in tune with the public's wishes than the one-sided outcomes that either party would impose if left to its own devices." Thus, for a president to pass his agenda during divided government, his target audience in Congress will typically be the moderate members with, relative to the party extremes, "middle-of-the-road" views. On the importance of the median voter in Congress, also see Keith Krehbiel, Information and Legislative Organization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).
41. It should be noted that the alternative argument, that divided government produces partisanship and stalemate, has also been advanced. See, for example, James L. Sundquist, "Needed: A Political Theory for a New Era of Coalition Government in the United States," Political Science Quarterly 103 (Winter 1988-1989): 613-635.
42. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, Inc., 1969).
43. Calculated from data generously made available by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, accessed at the website http://voteview.uh.edu, 11 July 2002 and 5 March 2003.
44. The second criterion has also been referred to as "cross-partisanship." See, for example, Joseph Cooper and Garry Young, "Partisanship, Bipartisanship, and Crosspartisanship in Congress Since the New Deal" in Lawrence Dodd and Bruce Oppenheimer, eds., Congress Reconsidered, 6th ed. (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1997).
45. This recent steady decline in bipartisanship is consistent with the growing number of scholarly accounts of the rise in partisanship since the 1970s. See Rohde, Parties and Leaders',
46. Coleman "Decline and Resurgence";
47. Poole and Rosenthal, Congress;
48. Aldrich, Why Parties.
49. 1). This produces the rate of growth and allows us to control for exponential growth in per capita GNP over time. One difficulty with this measure is that current dollars are used, because chained dollars, annual amounts that are standardized to one selected year, were not available in a consistent fashion for the entire time period. Although taking the rate of growth is a useful corrective, periods of rampant inflation may drive the number up in ways that do not necessarily indicate positive economic news.
50. Our regional classification is roughly consistent with Richard Bensel's well-known "core-periphery" distinction. See his Sectionalism and American Political Development: 1880-1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
51. The Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific Coast include the following states: CA, CT, DE, IL, IN, ME, MD, MA, MI, NH, NJ, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI, VT, WA, and WI. The South, Great Plains, and Mountain West include: AL, AZ, AK, CO, FL, GA, ID, IO, KA, KY, LA, MN, MS, MO, MT, NE, NV, NM, NC, ND, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, and WY. Alaska and Hawaii were left out of the analysis, inasmuch as they were not added to the Union until the 1950s. See also J. Clark Archer and Peter J. Taylor, Section and Party: A Political Geography of American Presidential Elections, from Andrew Jackson to Ronald Reagan (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1981);
52. Fred M. Shelley, J. Clark Archer, Fiona M. Davidson, and Stanley D. Brunn, Political Geography of the United States (New York: The Guilford Press, 1997);
53. Harvey S. Perloff and Vera W. Dodds, How a Region Grows: Area Development in the U.S. Economy: Supplementary Paper No. 17 (New York: Committee for Economic Development, 1963).
54. The formula as it applies to Republicans (Rs) in the core is: LQ [core] = ((# of R in core/# of R in US)/(# of representatives in core/# of representatives in US)). A number greater than 1 indicates over-representation in the region (relative to the national average), and a number less than 1 indicates under-representation. This same formula was used to produce LQs for Republicans in the periphery and Democrats in both regions. See Dan Griffith and Carl Amrhein, Statistical Analysis for Geographers (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1991).
55. To this end, we calculated the absolute difference between the two regional location quotients for Democrats and, separately, between the two regional location quotients for Republicans. If, within a party, there is no difference between the two regions, the resulting number will be zero, and the party is distributed evenly in both regions; the higher the difference between the two regions (within one party), the more concentrated the party is in one of the regions. Once we had a single number to represent the degree of regional concentration for each party, we added these two numbers together to create an index. The result is a single measure of polarization within the party system. Two highly concentrated parties, when combined, will result in a system that is polarized along regional lines. Alternatively, the more regional heterogeneity within the parties, the lower the overall polarization (and the more competitive the party system).
56. John Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: John Wiley, 1973).
57. Rohde, Parties and Leaders.
58. Rules changes were instituted in the early 1970s, but we lagged this variable slightly to allow time for the effects of the accumulated changes to be felt.
59. 2) in the latter time period.
60. Data used to create the variables in the model are from the following sources: Bipartisanship and Regional Polarization: data provided by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal at the website http://voteview.uh.edu;
61. Unemployment and GNP Growth Rate: George Thomas Kurian, Datapedia of the United States, 1790-2005: America Year by Year, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Bernan, 2001);
62. International Crisis: Harold Stanley and Richard Niemi, Vital Statistics on American Politics, 2001-2002 (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2001);
63. Party Dominance: Patricia Heidotting Conley, Presidential Mandates: How Elections Shape the National Agenda (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
64. The Durbin-Watson d-statistic for the model (1.38) is indecisive; however, results of the Geary test indicate no evidence of autocorrelation at the .05 significance level. Running the model under Prais-Winston improves the d-statistic to 2.0 and produces only one noteworthy change in variable significance (rule change becomes insignificant). Diagnostics also suggest mild multicollinearity between rule change and regional polarization (the correlation between the two variables is 0.739 and the condition index is 12.463, which puts it just into the range of moderate multicollinearity (confidence interval, 10-30).
65. A 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate leads to a more than 1 percent decrease in the degree of bipartisanship, ceteris paribus.
66. Because party dominance can be expressed in different ways, alternative formulations were also tried in the model, including measures of the size of the House majority; the percentage of seats in the House held by the president's party; and the average of the percentage of seats held in the House and Senate by the president's party. Of these, only the last was significant (at the p < .10 level). We speculate that the reason for the difference has to do with the importance attached to party control of an institution: the party with a small majority in the House has the same rule- and agenda-setting privileges of the party with a large majority. Thus party "ownership" of the institutions of government appears to be the more influential factor in determining the parameters of lawmakers' behaviors.
67. During this period, Southern Democrats often voted with Republicans. In the 1940s and 1950s, Eastern Republicans typically crossed party lines to vote with Democrats. Both are expressions of bipartisanship by our definition.
68. Two alternative measures were tried in the model as well. The first, a measure that more closely resembles a moving average, produced no appreciable differences in the results. The second measure, which measured the percent of the population on active duty, was not significant.
69. The theory of "war-weariness" has a long tradition. See Geoffrey Blainey's discussion in The Causes of War, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan Press, 1988).
70. In addition, scholars have noted the limited duration of the "rally" effect. See Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion.
71. Aaron Wildavsky laid out the core argument for this in "The Two Presidencies," in which he argued that presidents enjoyed greater deference from members of Congress on matters of foreign policy than of domestic policy both because they possess an information advantage and because representatives tend to be more interested in domestic affairs. See Aaron Wildavsky, "The Two Presidencies," Trans-Action 4 (November 1966): 7-14.
72. Later empirical studies provided mixed results for this thesis, and Wildavsky himself has since suggested that the findings may have been time-bound. See Steven A. Shull, ed., The Two Presidencies: A Quarter Century Assessment (Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1991).
73. Also see Richard Fleisher and Jon R. Bond, Polarized Politics: Congress and the President in a Partisan Era (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2000).
74. Others have developed the argument by focusing on the consensus that existed during the Cold War and prior to Vietnam on the authority of the president to exercise American power abroad. See, for example, I. M. Destler, Leslie H. Gelb, and Anthony Lake, Our Own Worst Enemy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).
75. Also David W. Rohde, "Partisanship, Leadership and Congressional Assertiveness in Foreign and Defense Policy" in David A. Deese, ed., The New Politics of American Foreign Policy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).
76. Votes were labeled as foreign or domestic using the issue categorization schema of Aage Clausen, as employed by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal in their data. Foreign and defense policy votes constitute the first category, whereas domestic policy includes votes on the broadly defined categories of government management, social welfare, agriculture, and civil liberties.
77. The Durbin-Watson d-statistic for the foreign policy model is 1.62, and for the domestic policy model, 1.48, and Geary tests suggest no significant sign of autocorrelation.
78. John Cochran, "Legislative Season Drawn in Solid Party Lines," Congressional Quarterly Weekly, 7 January 2004, 10-11.
79. The logic of this link is not surprising, given that defense spending has been a large component of the country's overall economic health, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century. Decisions about military contracts, bases, and overseas involvement have direct implications for workers and businesses throughout the country, and this clearly affects political calculations. See, for example, Alex Mintz and Alexander Hicks, "Military Keynesianism in the United States, 1949-1976," American Journal of Sociology 90 (September 1984): 411-417;
80. Ann Markusen, Peter Hall, Scott Campbell, and Sabina Deitrick, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
81. We hasten to add, though, that as with domestic policy, divided government is significant only at the p < .10 level.
82. Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
83. David R. Mayhew, Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigations, 1946-1990 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991);
84. Keith Krehbiel, Pivotal Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
85. William Howell, Scott Adler, Charles Cameron, and Charles Riemann, "Divided Government and the Legislative Productivity of Congress: 1945-94," Legislative Studies Quarterly 25 (May 2000): 285-312;
86. Sean Q. Kelly, "Divided We Govern? A Reassessment," Polity 25 (Spring 1993): 475-495.