Non-Party Government: Bipartisan Lawmaking and Party Power in Congress

Abstract

Majority leaders of the contemporary Congress preside over parties that are more cohesive than at any point in the modern era, and power has been centralized in party leadership offices. Do today’s majority parties succeed in enacting their legislative agendas to a greater extent than the less-cohesive parties of earlier eras? To address this question, we examine votes on all laws enacted from 1973–2016, as well as on the subset of landmark laws identified by Mayhew. In addition, we analyze the efforts of congressional majority parties to pass their agendas from 1985 to 2016. We find that enacting coalitions in recent congresses are nearly as bipartisan as they were in the 1970s. Most laws, including landmark enactments, continue to garner substantial bipartisan support. Furthermore, majority parties have not gotten better at passing their legislative programs. Contemporary congressional majorities actually fail on their agenda items at somewhat higher rates than the less-cohesive majority parties of the 1980s and 1990s. When majority parties succeed on their agenda priorities, they usually do so with support from a majority of the minority party in at least one chamber and with the endorsement of one or more of the minority party’s top leaders.

Reframe policymaking dysfunction through bipartisan-inclusion leadership

“…The two original game participants played 100 times, and after a learning period, with some later defections requiring punishment, mutual cooperation was the most common albeit not dominant outcome victory for President or a Congressional majority offers the winner a considerable time for asymmetrically large payoffs from a dominant position. The growth over time of multiple policymaking powers concentrated in the "imperial presidency" and "executive federalism" has significantly enhanced the one-party-dominant policymaking potential gained through electoral victory of the Presidency (Schlesinger 1973;Modie and Curcy 2011;Friedersdorf 2016;Cost 2018;Head 2019a, b;Blow 2019;Thompson et al 2018). Particularly when a party holds the White House and both houses of Congress with sufficient party loyalty in votes, the losing party's acquiescent "cooperation" on opposed policy matters is guaranteed as the losing party can only "resist with insufficient power," e.g.…”

“Closer” or Context? Explaining Donald Trump’s Relations with Congress

“…Majority parties have not gotten better at enacting their legislative programs, and there are only modest differences between the success of unified and divided governments. Most of the time, congressional majorities achieved none of what they wanted to achieve, and it is unusual for them to achieve most of what they set out to accomplish (Curry and Lee ).…”

“…Most legislation that passes, including landmark legislation, does so with a majority of the minority party in support, even under unified government. “Even those majority parties who possess the unusual advantage of unified party control do not pass much landmark legislation on partisan lines” (Curry and Lee ). They rarely enact priority agenda items over the opposition of a majority of the minority.…”

Policy and the structure of roll call voting in the US house

“…Finally, scholarship that demonstrates that there is a large degree of bipartisanship in the legislative process (Adler and Wilkerson 2013;Harbridge 2015;Curry and Lee 2019) suggests that the content of legislation cannot be classified by a simple left-right divide. And, without some understanding of the content of bills, it is difficult to disentangle ideological stories about polarisation from the (possibly) changing content of legislation.…”