Two recently published books by University of Chicago Press display the vibrancy of the literature on congressional dysfunction. Both books accept the broad edifice of that literature while making important novel contributions to it. In this review, I describe Frances E. Lee’s Insecure Majorities before reviewing Adam J. Ramey, Jonathan D. Klinger, and Gary E. Hollibaugh’s More Than a Feeling before discussing what they could learn from each other.

Frances Lee has published another tour de force. Building upon her argument in Beyond Ideology (2009) (and the other literature from the last few years surrounding it), she adds an important wrinkle into the current divide between the parties in Congress. While policy preferences clearly divide Democrats from Republicans on Capitol Hill, so, too, does their quest to become the majority party. In making this argument, Lee leaves behind the comfort of crunching roll-call votes to depict the divide of much less concrete data. She also marshals her skill as a close reader of history—both political science and journalism—and interviewer of participants in the partisan games to sketch out a compelling narrative of how that quest has obliterated the “Textbook Congress,” which had come to characterize the Congresess of the 1950s and 1960s, where bipartisan compromise flourished in addressing major public policy problems.

As readers of Lee have come to expect, she lays out her argument in a very methodical way. The groundwork for the entire enterprise is predicated on the relative parity between the parties since 1980, the first year since the 1950s that the Republicans won a majority in one chamber of Congress. Since then, “Neither party . . . has suffered from the defeatism that characterized Republicans for so much of the preceding post-New Deal era” (Insecure Majorities, p. 39). What Lee argues is almost as important as the actual seat count in the House and Senate is the perception of the players. With Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980, the Republicans no longer accepted their role as the permanent congressional minority. Once contestation for being the majority party started, the fragile coalitions that forged so many of those earlier compromises faltered.

Lee argues that many of the norms during Congress’s heyday were predicated upon the minority party faithfully engaging the legislative process. She outlines how such policymaking fell as a consequence of strategic confrontation. From 1980 to 1992, 13 of the 18 different leadership elections in the House Republican Conference pitted someone who espoused confrontation politics against someone who had a reputation of crossing party lines to forge compromises. Prior to 1988, the Republicans opted for the latter in all six such contests; after 1988, they opted for the more confrontational member in six of the seven contests.

While the Republicans were the party that had to break the consensus that reigned during the Textbook Congress, the Democrats were not reluctant to join them on the partisan battlefield. Lee shows the communication strategies (Chapter 5) and the floor voting strategies (Chapter 6) molded to expectations once the battle for the respective chambers was underway.

Once she has fully explicated her argument, Lee tests it in two distinct cases: the politics of raising the debt limit (Chapter 7) and politics across state legislatures (Chapter 8). She finds that the quest for majority party status has had distinct and predictable consequences in both venues.

What Lee does exceedingly well in this book is suggest that understanding current congressional politics cannot be accomplished without an eye toward the strategies that the parties employ to become the majority. While she is not the first to suggest that everything changed when Republicans believed that they could become a governing majority, her book is the first to give the topic the attention and rigor that it deserves.

What Lee does not do as well—and perhaps it is unfair to expect her to—is to tie her argument to party polarization in Congress. She argues that “party conflict is necessary for party messaging” (p. 45), but it is not clear how that electoral conflict interplays with the ideological divide. Is “the perpetual campaign” the cause of polarization “beyond ideology”? Most formal theorists would suggest that closely divided parties hoping to become a majority should race to the ideological middle. Lee shows that this clearly is not the case (at least for Congress and state legislatures), but does not explain as thoroughly why that is the case.

Although dancing around some similar themes, Ramey, Klingler, and Hollibaugh offer a much different look at the U.S. Congress. Policy preferences, so they argue, only motivate part of the ways in which members of Congress act. They maintain that the individual personalities of the members are also an important component in predicting member behavior. To operationalize personality, they use textual analysis based on floor speeches to derive measures for each member on the “Big Five” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability (or, its inverse, neuroticism). Such a study goes beyond “treating members as more than just walking DW-NOMINATE scores, but as individuals with recognizable and modelable individual differences” (More Than a Feeling, p.17).

After offering a defense of their theory (chapter 2) and operationalizing it (chapter 3), the authors show how various stages of the congressional career can be examined through the lens of personality. Understanding who wards off quality challengers, how much money to spend campaigning (Chapter 4), who gets placed on which committees (Chapter 5), who proposes and who is successful in passing legislation (Chapter 6), how to communicate with their constituents (Chapter 8), and deciding when to retire (Chapter 6) are all activities for which the Big Five offer insight.

Each stage of members’ careers interacts with the various components of the Big Five in mostly predictable ways, though in a few instances the results are downright puzzling (which the authors readily admit). In the end, the reader cannot but agree with the authors when they write in the conclusion that “personality matters both theoretically and empirically” (p. 202) in understanding member behavior.

The most provocative part of the book, regrettably, is less well developed: explaining institutional change in Congress. It occupies one chapter—entitled “Cooperation, Obstruction, and Party Discipline: Shifting Norms in the US Congress”—but is sprinkled throughout the book. Using the Big Five, the authors analyze party loyalty, bipartisan cosponsorship, and support for cloture in the Senate. Again, not surprising, the analysis including their measures for the Big Five “explain a great deal of variation in observed rebellion and obstruction” (p. 149). While their analysis is at the micro individual level, the concepts that they hope the Big Five can illuminate are at the institutional level.

Although they do not quite link “students of political institutions” to “the rich literature on individual difference” (p. 9), the authors should be commended for at least beginning the dialogue. Rather than focusing the link between these two literatures on a narrower set of questions, the beginning of this dialogue opens up many more questions than it answers.

These two books and their authors are different. Lee is a sage congressional expert building upon her long research record to say something new about why today’s Congress is so dysfunctional. Ramey, Klinger, and Hollibaugh are at the beginning of their careers writing about a subject that is only one part of their research agendas. They provide keen insight into what makes the individual members of Congress tick.

Lee marshals compelling evidence at the macro level to show how insecure majorities make governing exceedingly difficult. The individual differences among members in Lee’s analysis are relatively unimportant as they merely contribute to the bottom line of how many members each party has in each chamber. After Ramey, Klinger, and Hollibaugh’s introduction, I was hopeful that they would provide the micro-level analysis that would explain how members’ individual-level behaviors have led to the institutional trends that Lee is so good at describing. In the end, though, these two books are closer to two ships passing in the night than they are to two adjacent building blocks in our pyramid of understanding today’s congressional paralysis.

Their solutions to the impending congressional predicament are as different as their approaches. Lee suggests that the perpetual campaign and its pathologies are here to stay until one party again becomes a permanent minority—and, more importantly, recognizes and is resigned to that fate. If Ramey, Klinger, and Hollibaugh’s findings are to be believed, we should hope for more open, less emotionally stable, and more extroverted members who represent competitive districts for bipartisanship to reemerge in congressional deliberations.

In the end, the reader of both books will walk away with a better understanding of what motivates individual members and the consequences of pursuing majority party status (almost at all costs), but neither book richly informs the other. But why should they? Lee’s purpose is to explain why bipartisan cooperation is so utterly absent from today’s Congress, and Ramey, Klinger, and Hollibaugh simply want Congress scholars to appreciate the individual differences among members above and beyond their policy preferences. On the tasks that motivated their respective studies, both books have wildly succeeded. As the authors take their next steps in their respective research programs, they would learn much by reading each other’s books.