In 2008, Barack Obama's calls for a new postpartisan era struck a chord with many Americans. Yet President Obama has struggled with Congress to produce even bipartisan outcomes. The reigning wisdom on partisanship would suggest that this is because the ideological divide between the parties is simply too stark. Frances Lee's thoughtful new book, which is a study of Senate voting behavior from 1981 through 2004, offers an alternative interpretation, one that validates public skepticism of inside-the-beltway party politics. Her claim is that much of the congressional partisanship is about politics and power, rather than ideological differences. Collective political interests within each party predispose Democrats and Republicans to oppose each other, even on votes with no ideological content. If true, then public distaste for “partisan bickering” is reasonable, and much of the conventional scholarly understanding of congressional partisanship is wrong.
Lee begins by historicizing and challenging the methodological individualism now dominating studies of Congress for ascribing legislator vote behavior to individual policy preference and treating party cohesion as ideological cohesion and party difference as ideological difference. As she astutely points out, the problem with this conceptualization is that it reads ideology into every partisan dispute. Rather than assuming ideological content based on the observed behavioral patterns of votes, Lee uses legislative language and Congressional Record debates to distinguish, a priori, those roll call votes that bear on liberal/conservative debates over the economy, social issues, and foreign policy from those that do not. What she discovers is that a full 44% of party votes are over issues of no identifiable ideological significance (p. 65).
Surmising that something “beyond ideology” must be at work, the author devotes Chapters 4 through 7 to an exploration of other sources of partisanship. Among her discoveries is that when presidents discuss an issue in the State of the Union Address, partisanship on that issue rises. This is true for issues that are ideologically divisive and those that are otherwise not. She finds that issues of “good government” generate some of the greatest partisanship. Procedural votes are a great source of partisan division as well, for reasons above and beyond their contribution to substantive outcomes. Some ideological issues (economic votes) generate more partisan division than others (social votes), and she contends that recent increases in partisanship are partly due to the greater proportion of these more divisive issues on the Senate agenda.
Lee's findings lead her to conclude that Democrats and Republicans often fight to advance their party's political interests in being perceived as effective or being associated with popular outcomes. The party, in her view, is a “political institution” (p. 182), a team of members who have gotten better at working together to advance collective electoral and political goals. Thus, one party will regularly disagree with the other simply to make the president look bad (or good), to discredit the opposition's integrity, to attempt to control the debate, or to burnish its image. In short, today's parties fight because there is political payoff even if there is no ideological reward. When we understand this, we see why bipartisanship is so hard to come by.
Lee designs her research carefully and rigorously. For example, in determining whether to count a vote as ideological, she digs deeply into the public record to learn if senators discussed any aspect in ideologically identifiable terms. In coding nonideological votes, such as “good government” votes, Lee excludes those that may be even partially about ideology, such as nomination fights in which part of the debate was about the nominee's policy views and part was about credentials or ethics. Expansive ideological categories make for a harder test of her argument, as do narrower nonideological categories.
There are some elements of the research, though, where greater clarification would be especially useful (some might claim critical). Most important is the description of nonideological votes. According to the author's method, these votes account for a sizable majority—nearly 60%—of all Senate votes in her time period (p. 65), and thus are central to her argument. She provides some textual description of the types of issues included (e.g., good government, institutional powers, some federal programs), but knowing more about these votes and how they break down, similar to what she usefully provides for ideological votes, would be helpful in evaluating her argument. One suspects that in any given political moment, a putatively “nonideological” partisan battle over an ethics investigation or presidential power is actually a proxy war about the party-in-power's liberal (or conservative) agenda. While the nominal issue at hand may, in principle, defy left/right categorization, the vote is nevertheless very much about ideological commitments. Context is everything, and without knowing more details of this broad category, it is difficult to ascertain whether an issue is as free of ideological portent as the public record suggests.
In her analyses, too, Lee is careful, controlling for alternative hypotheses and couching her interpretation of findings in appropriately modest terms. One might quibble nonetheless with some of her conclusions. For example, in assessing the impact of agenda content on partisanship, she argues that in recent years, increases in the economic content of the Senate agenda are the result of the strategic emphasis by party leaders on issues that produce party unity, rather than the result of external influences, such as the economy itself. Yet different economic measures (she uses GDP and deficit measures) might alter results. Inequality has increased dramatically in recent decades, despite GDP growth, and it is reasonable to hypothesize that the parties vote on, and fight more about, economic issues today not for unity's sake but because the stakes of economic distribution have become higher for their respective constituencies. A measure of income inequality, which arguably evokes constituency and ideological disputes to a greater degree, might have more relation to the number of votes on economic issues.
On the other hand, in finding that presidential leadership increases already existing issue partisanship, Lee concludes that this is about supporting or opposing a particular president (p. 100). Yet the increase might have more to do with lawmakers' sensitivity to heightened media attention to the issue as a result of its inclusion in the State of the Union. Lawmakers are arguably under greater pressure to toe the party line and demonstrate their ideological bona fides when they know the public is watching. Thus, for example, moderately hawkish lawmakers might become adamantly hawkish when they know that their constituencies have been made attentive by the president's State of the Union Address and subsequent media coverage. Yes, it is about politics, but even more, it is about ideological signaling.
For analytic purposes, it is useful to be able to distinguish politics from ideology. Lee convincingly shows how most scholars of Congress fail to see this and, therefore, unknowingly build their conclusions into their method, rather than find them in a truly empirical assessment of political life. Yet it is important that we not lose sight of what politics is ultimately in service of—the advancement of ideological goals or material interests. The question of whose ideas and interests drive the parties to engage in such intense politicking rises inevitably from Lee's work. Not only should her book undermine the dominant paradigm in congressional studies but it should also further stimulate the debate about whose interests and ideas are served by today's parties.
