Even if a significant piece of legislation is passed into law, the excess time and debate required to pass that law can problematic for lawmakers and society more generally. The original bill for this historic policy change was introduced on September 17, , but the president did not sign the law until March 23, — days later! The congressional agenda was highly constrained during this time, because debate over the PPACA began long before a bill was introduced, forcing congressional lawmakers to focus most of their attention on a single issue.
The vitriol around this bill and its sluggish progress did not escape the public eye, and, according to Gallup, public approval of Congress dropped from 31 percent to 18 percent over this period. The end result of this process was a bill most experts regarded as imperfect. Keep in mind this law was passed while Democrats controlled the presidency and held a majority in both chambers of Congress. Such periods of unified government likely result in quicker passage of legislation, because the party in power encounters few, if any, legislative hurdles.
On the other hand, divided government causes a host of political and institutional problems the parties must overcome if either party wishes to achieve any of their respective legislative goals. Our analysis of more than 2, important bills from to demonstrates how the presence of divided government affects the speed at which legislation is passed.
As expected, we found divided government slows the legislative process for important bills. Our analysis suggests the average difference in the time to enactment for important legislation between periods of divided and unified government is roughly 60 days. Two full months is a significant amount of time within a two-year congressional session. Obviously, divided government dramatically slows the speed of the legislative process.
Divided government weighs down the policymaking process because it requires compromise between the two parties. Democrats and Republicans must reach some modicum of agreement to create public laws, and it goes without saying there is little common ground between the parties in the current political context. The enormous ideological division between the parties intensifies any barriers to legislative compromise.
Our results show the mere presence of ideological polarization does not affect the time to enactment for important legislation. Instead, the level of party polarization conditions whether or not divided government influences the pace of the legislative process.
As Figure 1 shows, at low levels of polarization, party control of government does not impact how quickly or slowly important bills pass. When the parties are close together ideologically, consensus across the aisle becomes a realistic goal in spite of the presence of divided government.
The normative implications of congressional incapacity are, not surprisingly, generally regarded as unhappy ones. The notion that divided polarization induces legislative gridlock, which disables congressional oversight of bureaucracy, is quite plausible. It is in some tension with—though does not necessarily contradict—research in political science suggesting that divided government in the postwar United States is not clearly associated with lower levels of legislative productivity, and is associated with strategic moves by legislators facing ideologically distant presidents to craft the substance of legislation and design its implementation structures to achieve legislative goals in the face of executive opposition.
Further insights about the influence of divided polarization on legislative capacity, and thereby on administrative power, may be gained by examining the substance and design of legislation, not just the number of statutes passed.
Some later work confirmed this result, and some contradicted it using different methods or measures. McCarty evaluates the relationship between party polarization and the number of significant laws passed per Congress and finds a negative association: more polarized Congresses are less productive.
In the area of civil regulation, I find the relationship between legislative productivity and our era of divided polarization to be more complex. The longitudinal picture presented below is based on statutes passed from to that were identified by Mayhew as significant and that contained any regulatory commands, defined as any mandatory proscription of actions that the legislation seeks to prevent or any mandatory requirement that the regulated population engage in specified conduct.
The upper-left quadrant of Figure 2 shows polarization dotted line alongside the number of significant regulatory statutes passed per Congress. After around , as polarization grew, significant legislative enactments of regulatory laws declined materially. This is consistent with the empirical findings of McCarty and Binder, and the conventional wisdom that polarization in an era of divided government begets legislative gridlock and inaction. I look at three measures that focus on the content rather than the number of laws.
The first is crude but suggestive. The upper-right quadrant of Figure 2 shows the estimated number of pages in the Statutes at Large in the significant regulatory laws enacted per Congress. By this measure, legislative productivity has grown consistently, moving upward in striking tandem with polarization.
It is natural to wonder, though, what content is actually contained in those pages. A second approach to legislative content focuses on actual regulatory commands issued by Congress. In the larger project from which the data are drawn, coders read each law and counted each separate regulatory command, producing a variable measuring the sum of discrete requirements and prohibitions imposed on regulated entities.
By this measure, we again see long-run growth in productivity in parallel with growing polarization. A third approach focuses on the degree of specificity of regulatory content. In the larger project from which the data are drawn, coders read each law and created a word count measuring the degree of specificity of the regulatory commands. The definition and exemptions occupied an additional lines. Congress resolved more policy substance with the command, definition, and exemptions lines than it would have with the command alone six lines.
The estimated total volume of words captured by this specificity measure in each Congress is pictured in the bottom-right quadrant of Figure 2. How does this growth relate to administrative power?
Congress may regulate without agencies by empowering litigants and courts rather than agencies as the implementation vehicle for regulatory commands discussed below. However, Congress in fact relied primarily on agencies to implement the growing volume of regulatory policy. When coders identified each separate regulatory command, they also identified whether agencies were delegated authority to make substantive rules, impose sanctions, or hold administrative adjudications to implement the command.
Figure 3 depicts party polarization dotted line alongside the estimated number of regulatory commands enacted per Congress that were governed by any of the three forms of administrative power, and separately displays the estimated number governed by substantive rulemaking, administrative sanctions, and administrative adjudications. When all three types were aggregated, administrative power to implement the regulatory commands grew steeply; the same is true with respect to rulemaking and administrative sanctions.
The exception is administrative adjudications, which grew steeply starting in the mids, peaked around , and declined thereafter. From to , the estimated number of significant regulatory commands enacted per Congress grew from to , and the number of words specifying substantive regulatory policy and the total number of pages grew by even wider margins.
Along with the number of significant statutes passed, the volume of substantive regulatory law is another partial measure of legislative capacity in the domain of regulation. From about through , during which time polarization increased consistently, Congress passed an increasing volume of regulatory commands that it entrusted to agencies for implementation. Legislative productivity is a complicated concept. These data suggest that, over time, Congress packed more substantive regulatory policy into fewer statutes.
It was less productive in some ways, and more productive in others. The literature on the effect of polarization on legislative productivity and oversight, and by direct extension the effect of polarization on administrative power, would be served by a more systematic theoretical and empirical grasp of the meaning of these multiple dimensions of legislative productivity. U nderstanding how divided polarization has shaped administrative power requires that we consider the character of delegations to agencies as well as their number.
Congressional oversight of agencies can take many forms. A large political science literature emphasizes that one form is for Congress to anticipate the threat of executive subversion prior to passage and diminish the need for active post-enactment oversight by resolving more substantive policy issues in the statute, and by including in the statute procedural rules intended to constrain presidential influence, limit bureaucratic discretion, and stack the deck in favor of the enacting coalition.
A related and recently growing literature focuses on how Congress can constrain bureaucracy by fragmenting implementation. First, more fragmented policy implementation designs rely upon a larger number of distinct actors and entities to carry the law into effect, such as boards, commissions, secretaries, separate administrative officers, judges, and litigants.
Second, power can be fragmented by dividing it over multiple distinctive sources of institutional authority , each of which has a significant measure of autonomy and independence, such as by distributing implementation power across separate administrative agencies.
Under divided polarization, fragmentation of an implementation framework can serve the legislative goal of constraining executive influence on implementers to subvert the preferences of the enacting coalition. This is, in part, because increasing the number of actors and agencies that must be coordinated to accomplish decisive action can, on balance, make significant departures from the policy status quo more difficult.
The parties, it argued, were too similar. Distinct, cohesive political parties were critical for any well-functioning democracy. First, distinct parties offer voters clear policy choices at election time. Second, cohesive parties could deliver on their agenda, even under conditions of lower bipartisanship. Finally, the paper suggested that voters could signal whether they preferred the vision of the current leadership or of the opposition.
Indeed, there was so much overlap between the parties when in office that it was difficult for voters to know whom they should hold accountable for bad results. The article concluded by advocating a set of reforms that, if implemented, would lead to more distinct parties and better government.
While this description of the major parties as being too similar may have been accurate in the s; that is no longer the case. The problem of majority versus minority politics is particularly acute under conditions of divided government.
Divided government occurs when one or more houses of the legislature are controlled by the party in opposition to the executive. Unified government occurs when the same party controls the executive and the legislature entirely. Divided government can pose considerable difficulties for both the operations of the party and the government as a whole. It makes fulfilling campaign promises extremely difficult, for instance, since the cooperation or at least the agreement of both Congress and the president is typically needed to pass legislation.
Furthermore, one party can hardly claim credit for success when the other side has been a credible partner, or when nothing can be accomplished. Party loyalty may be challenged too, because individual politicians might be forced to oppose their own party agenda if it will help their personal reelection bids. Divided government can also be a threat to government operations, although its full impact remains unclear.
A dispute between Republican president Gerald Ford and a Democrat-controlled Congress over the issue of funding for certain cabinet departments led to a ten-day shutdown of the government although the federal government did not cease to function entirely. However, the past several decades have brought an increased prevalence of divided government. Since , the U. Over the short term, however, divided government can make for very contentious politics. A well-functioning government usually requires a certain level of responsiveness on the part of both the executive and the legislative branches.
This responsiveness is hard enough if government is unified under one party. During the presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter — , despite the fact that both houses of Congress were controlled by Democratic majorities, the government was shut down on five occasions because of conflict between the executive and legislative branches.
Shutdowns are even more likely when the president and at least one house of Congress are of opposite parties. During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, for example, the federal government shut down eight times; on seven of those occasions, the shutdown was caused by disagreements between Reagan and the Republican-controlled Senate on the one hand and the Democrats in the House on the other, over such issues as spending cuts, abortion rights, and civil rights.
For the first few decades of the current pattern of divided government, the threat it posed to the government appears to have been muted by a high degree of bipartisanship , or cooperation through compromise. Many pieces of legislation were passed in the s and s with reasonably high levels of support from both parties.
Most members of Congress had relatively moderate voting records, with regional differences within parties that made bipartisanship on many issues more likely. Cross-party cooperation on these issues was fairly frequent. But in the past few decades, the number of moderates in both houses of Congress has declined.
This has made it more difficult for party leadership to work together on a range of important issues, and for members of the minority party in Congress to find policy agreement with an opposing party president. The past thirty years have brought a dramatic change in the relationship between the two parties as fewer conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans have been elected to office. As political moderate s , or individuals with ideologies in the middle of the ideological spectrum, leave the political parties at all levels, the parties have grown farther apart ideologically, a result called party polarization.
In other words, at least organizationally and in government, Republicans and Democrats have become increasingly dissimilar from one another. In the party-in-government, this means fewer members of Congress have mixed voting records; instead they vote far more consistently on issues and are far more likely to side with their party leadership. Either they are becoming independents, or they are participating only in the general election and are therefore not helping select party candidates in primaries.
The number of moderates has dropped since as both parties have moved toward ideological extremes. What is most interesting about this shift to increasingly polarized parties is that it does not appear to have happened as a result of the structural reforms recommended by APSA. Rather, it has happened because moderate politicians have simply found it harder and harder to win elections. There are many conflicting theories about the causes of polarization, some of which we discuss below. But whatever its origin, party polarization in the United States does not appear to have had the net positive effects that the APSA committee was hoping for.
With the exception of providing voters with more distinct choices, positives of polarization are hard to find. The negative impacts are many.
For one thing, rather than reducing interparty conflict, polarization appears to have only amplified it. For example, the Republican Party or the GOP, standing for Grand Old Party has historically been a coalition of two key and overlapping factions: pro-business rightists and social conservatives.
The GOP has held the coalition of these two groups together by opposing programs designed to redistribute wealth and advocating small government while at the same time arguing for laws preferred by conservative Christians.
But it was also willing to compromise with pro-business Democrats, often at the expense of social issues, if it meant protecting long-term business interests. Recently, however, a new voice has emerged that has allied itself with the Republican Party. Born in part from an older third-party movement known as the Libertarian Party, the Tea Party is more hostile to government and views government intervention in all forms, and especially taxation and the regulation of business, as a threat to capitalism and democracy.
It is less willing to tolerate interventions in the market place, even when they are designed to protect the markets themselves. Although an anti-tax faction within the Republican Party has existed for some time, some factions of the Tea Party movement are also active at the intersection of religious liberty and social issues, especially in opposing such initiatives as same-sex marriage and abortion rights.
Although the Tea Party is a movement and not a political party, 86 percent of Tea Party members who voted in cast their votes for Republicans. Vying for the Republican nomination, presidential candidates Ted Cruz a and John Kasich b , like many other Republicans, signed a pledge not to raise taxes if elected.
Movements on the left have also arisen. The Occupy Movement believed the recession was caused by a failure of the government to properly regulate the banking industry. The Occupiers further maintained that the government moved swiftly to protect the banking industry from the worst of the recession but largely failed to protect the average person, thereby worsening the growing economic inequality in the United States.
While the Occupy Movement itself has largely fizzled, the anti-business sentiment to which it gave voice continues within the Democratic Party, and many Democrats have proclaimed their support for the movement and its ideals, if not for its tactics.
Their popularity, and the growing visibility of race issues in the United States, have helped sustain the left wing of the Democratic Party.
To date, however, the Occupy Movement has had fewer electoral effects than has the Tea Party. By most measures, the U. Congress has passed fewer pieces of legislation, confirmed fewer appointees, and been less effective at handling the national purse than in recent memory. If we define effectiveness as legislative productivity, the th Congress — passed pieces of substantive legislation not including commemorative legislation, such as bills proclaiming an official doughnut of the United States.
The th Congress — passed such pieces of legislation. By —, the total had fallen to Shutdowns occur when Congress and the president are unable to authorize and appropriate funds before the current budget runs out. This is now an annual problem. While any particular trend can be the result of multiple factors, the decline of key measures of institutional confidence and trust suggest the negative impact of polarization.
Scholars agree that some degree of polarization is occurring in the United States, even if some contend it is only at the elite level. But they are less certain about exactly why, or how, polarization has become such a mainstay of American politics. Several conflicting theories have been offered.
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