The Electoral Roots of America's Dysfunctional Government

The government in Washington is dysfunctional. That is one of the few things that Democrats and Republicans can agree on these days. Our nation faces major challenges in dealing with such problems as continuing high unemployment, growing inequality, an aging population, climate change, deteriorating infrastructure, poorly performing schools, lack of access to affordable health care, and gun violence. Yet Congress and the president seem incapable of agreeing on policies to address these challenges (Mann and Ornstein 2012). But while there is widespread agreement that our national government is not working well and has not been working well for some time, there is considerable disagreement about the causes of this problem and what, if anything, can be done to remedy it. Some scholars and observers of American politics have laid the blame for gridlock in Washington squarely on the nation's political leaders. According to this view, the problem affecting American government today is excessive partisanship: Democratic and Republican elected officials are unwilling to compromise with each other in order to address the nation's pressing problems because they are primarily concerned about protecting their own power and positions in Washington, and they fear a backlash from party leaders, liberal or conservative media outlets, financial contributors, and ideologically extreme primary voters if they are seen as cooperating with members of the opposing party. The solution, according to this theory, is to change the rules of Congress and/or the electoral process to reduce the incentives for partisan behavior and increase the incentives for bipartisan compromise (Edwards 2012; Eilperin 2006). In this article, I will present evidence that this elitist theory of government dysfunction is deeply flawed. While party leaders, media outlets, financial contributors, and primary voters have played a role in the development of gridlock, they are not the main causes of dysfunctional government in Washington. As a result, reform proposals that focus primarily on changing electoral rules or congressional procedures are unlikely to be effective in reducing gridlock. The main cause of dysfunctional government in Washington today is partisan polarization--the deep ideological divide that exists between Democrats and Republicans--and that ideological divide in turn reflects the existence of deep divisions within American society. The Rise of Partisan Polarization and Its Consequences There is widespread agreement among students of American politics that the ideological divide between the Democratic and Republican Parties in Congress has widened considerably over the past several decades (Dodd and Oppenheimer 2009; Sinclair 2009). Perhaps the most important evidence of this comes from the statistical analyses of congressional voting patterns by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal (1997). Their methodology extracts the dimensions underlying the voting patterns in each Congress. In the modern era, the first and most important of these dimensions--the one that accounts for by far the largest share of the variance in congressional voting--corresponds to the liberal--conservative divide over the size of the welfare state and role of the federal government in the economy. Poole and Rosenthal's DW-Nominate scale measures the locations of members of the Senate and House of Representatives on the first dimension extracted from all of the recorded votes in each Congress. This score measures the position of each member on a liberal-conservative continuum that ranges from -1 on the far left to +1 on the far right. We can therefore use this scale to measure the distance between the average Democrat and the average Republican in each chamber in each Congress. The data displayed in Figure 1 show very clearly that over the past 36 years, there has been a substantial increase in the distance between the parties in both chambers and especially in the House of Representatives: the distance between the average Democrat and the average Republican almost doubled between the Ninety-Fifth House (1977-79) and the 112th House (2011-13), while the distance between the average Democrat and the average Republican increased by almost 50% between the Ninety-Fifth Senate and the 112th Senate. …