In 1950 the American Political Science Association issued a report titled “Toward a Responsible Two-Party System.” The key problem identified by the report, which was spearheaded by E. E. Schattschneider, was that politicians from the same party around the country were advocating for different policies; a voter might elect a Democrat to Congress thinking he would help strengthen civil rights laws only to see a fellow Democrat actively work against expanding voter protections. State and local party organizations had only loose ties to their national organizations, which hindered coordination on messages and agendas. The APSA report argued that a system lacking clearly distinct and cohesive parties creates problems for effective democratic governance; if a voter does not know what to expect from the politicians for whom she votes, how would she know who to vote for?
The 1950 report was controversial at the time, even within the APSA, but today we seem to have the Congress for which the report advocated: party leaders have gained more control over the committee assignment process and the structuring of legislative debate; each chamber’s party faction has a “policy committee” responsible for developing sets of issue priorities and proposals; particularly in the House of Representatives, we have seen party leaders present national agendas to the public for electoral purposes, such as Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” Nancy Pelosi’s “Six for ’06,” and Paul Ryan’s “Better Way”; and legislators exhibit more polarized voting patterns along party lines than at any point in US history. As the party factions have become more cohesive and given their leaders more authority to develop legislative agendas, we would reasonably expect that lawmaking has changed to reflect the new partisan realities.
James Curry and Frances Lee’s new book provides a wealth of data that requires us to rethink both the public perceptions of partisanship in today’s Congress and the link between party “strength” and legislative output. As they write (p. 18), “parties may be more influential in the contemporary Congress, but lawmaking has not become more partisan.” Curry and Lee are interested in party capacity: Is the majority party able to enact its stated agenda priorities most, some, or none of the time? They have two main and related findings on this score that challenge conventional views of today’s Congress: the majority party is getting “none” of what it wants with increasing frequency, and legislative outputs tend to have bipartisan support. With two exceptions since the early 1970s (1993–94 and 2009–10), laws (even “landmark” measures) tend to receive 50% or more of the minority party’s support on average.
Having challenged our understanding of how Congress operates in chapter 2, the remainder of the book proceeds as anyone else might: trying to understand where the majority party is more or less successful and why our picture of lawmaking is so distorted. Curry and Lee combine quantitative and qualitative data to analyze why majority parties sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. Their answer is a combination of constitutionally derived veto points and an electoral system that elevates individuals from geographically diverse single-member districts, thereby complicating intraparty coalition-building efforts. Every chapter is rich in data; Curry and Lee measure congressional party priorities with a multipronged approach using bill introductions, floor speeches, and media coverage and add to those data novel measures of both a proposal’s outcome and reasons why and how it succeeded or failed. The elite interviews help add to Curry and Lee’s “why” and illustrate how important bipartisanship is to the key actors themselves. Any attempts to measure priorities, success, and failure undoubtedly invite discussion, and the authors’ transparency is one of the book’s many strengths; several appendices present the specific agenda priorities and how they were coded, as well as additional information about the interviews and interviewees.
As a study of congressional lawmaking, The Limits of Party easily could be read in conversation with David Mayhew’s Divided We Govern (2005), Barbara Sinclair’s Unorthodox Lawmaking (2016), and Laurel Harbridge-Yong’s Is Bipartisanship Dead? (2015). Scholars who want to focus on Curry and Lee’s argument regarding electoral incentives and intraparty bargaining might also consider Tracy Sulkin’s Issue Politics in Congress (2005) and The Legislative Legacy of Congressional Campaigns (2011) or Ruth Bloch Rubin’s Building the Bloc (2017).
Curry and Lee provide clear evidence that we do not necessarily know what we thought we knew about the state of parties in Congress today; yet in so doing, they may lead some readers to wonder whether lawmaking alone is an adequate unit of analysis. Their book is addressed mainly at public perceptions of congressional partisanship; Curry and Lee refer to David Rohde’s conditional party government, Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins’s party cartels, Gregory Koger and Matthew Lebo’s strategic party government, and Keith Krehbiel’s pivotal politics as examples, but Schattschneider is their main target. Yet the 1950 APSA report, like Schattschneider’s Party Government (1942) and The Struggle for Party Government (1948), considered parties from a wider scope that included their relationship to democratic accountability and the policy process.
Curry and Lee note toward the end of their book that “majority parties do not have to get what they want out of the lawmaking process for parties to matter or be ‘outcome consequential’” (p. 187). Although their statement refers to parties and party leaders’ agenda-setting and deal-brokering functions, Congress is just one venue in which party actors can pursue their agendas and their goals. Republicans have fared poorly in trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act wholesale through congressional lawmaking, for example, but a combination of how the law was implemented under Republican congressional majorities, state GOP officials’ decisions about participation, and judicial rulings have dramatically limited the law’s scope and effects. Bryan Jones, Sean Theriault, and Michelle Whyman’s The Great Broadening (2019) situates contemporary congressional partisanship and lawmaking within changes to the broader media and policy environments that both complement and raise further questions about the story told in The Limits of Party.
Curry and Lee frame their study in terms of party capacity, or “whether today’s stronger, more cohesive parties in Congress are indeed more capable as policymakers” (p. 3). Compromise, or gaining minority party support, is defined as “failure.” Related questions we might ask not just of these authors but also of our own work are how we define success and whether the majority party should be able to get whatever it wants, particularly when doing so involves disenfranchising Black, Hispanic/Latino, and Indigenous populations and restricting legal rights for gay, lesbian, and transgender people or religious minorities.
The Limits of Party provides a valuable corrective to public perceptions of contemporary congressional lawmaking; it is also a welcome prompt for anyone who thinks about legislatures, parties, and public policy to ask deeper questions, find new measures, and rethink assumptions. Highlighting the bipartisan nature of most of Congress’s legislative output represents one step. It is now time for us to reconsider what we should expect from political parties and party-driven government, as well as the purposes of legislative governance.
