Partisan Polarization: Is It Crippling Congress? (with Frances E. Lee)
Partisan Polarization: Is It Crippling Congress? (with Frances E. Lee)  
Podcast: Understanding Congress
Published On: Tue Jan 03 2023
Description: The topic of this episode is: “Partisan polarization: Is it crippling Congress?”My guest is Frances Lee. She is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and a top scholar on Congress. She is the author and co-author of many articles and books on Congress, and has written for popular publications including the Atlantic magazine and the New York Times. Most recently she and James Curry published, The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era (Chicago 2020), which analyzes and addresses the subject of this episode—polarization in our national legislature.Kevin Kosar:Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.Professor Lee, welcome to the podcast.Frances E. Lee:Thank you, Kevin. It's great to be here.Kevin Kosar:Let's start by ensuring that we all are on the same page: you, I, and listeners alike. When we speak of Congress, what do we mean by the term partisan polarization?Frances E. Lee:Partisan polarization has multiple meanings and I think that's probably why you began with this question.A layman's or a dictionary definition of polarization means division into two sharply contrasting groups. Congress is clearly polarized in this sense. Congress sees much more partisan conflict. Conflict in Congress breaks down more reliably on partisan lines than it did throughout most of the 20th century. We routinely see votes that pit 90% or more Democrats against 90% or more Republicans, a partisan divide that's more deep and predictable than we used to see.However, by partisan polarization, political scientists often mean something more technical. In its most rigorous form, the concept of polarization is grounded in spatial theory. It rests on a theorized choice space in which policy preferences are ranged on an underlying continuum from left to right. In this sense, parties become more polarized as the preferences of members become more distinctly bimodal, and as the two parties’ modes move farther apart from one another.It's far from clear that parties are polarized in this second sense. The problem is that the issues at stake in congressional politics are diverse. On some issues, the congressional parties have moved closer together and on some issues, they've moved farther apart. There's little doubt that the post-Trump parties in Congress are farther apart on immigration than they were. There's a growing partisan divide opening up on transgender issues. Clearly, the parties are farther apart today on issues relating to the COVID pandemic than they were in March 2020.But on other issues, the parties have moved closer together. Republicans and Democrats differ less on trade policy today than they did in the past, with the Republican Party having moved more toward a more protectionist stance under Trump. The budget deficit and government spending became less partisan during the Trump years as both parties came together around an unprecedented response to the COVID pandemic. Trump presided over a significant reform of criminal justice policy. It was bipartisan. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have worked together on foreign policy a lot over the past decade from sanctions on Russia to the huge Ukraine aid package under Biden. There's reporting in the lead-up to the congressional elections of 2022 that the Republican Party has given up on the issue of Obamacare repeal.So have the parties moved farther apart or are they closer together? I have no idea how to characterize the parties in an absolute sense. It depends on what issue you're talking about. I'm not sure how you go about averaging across all the diverse issues on the congressional agenda to say that the parties are farther apart ideologically than they used to be. I think it's clear that Republicans and Democrats are more partisan in their voting behavior, but what that means in terms of ideology is contested.Kevin Kosar:It sounds like one temptation we have is to associate stark differences in voting behavior with the legislators themselves believing very different things rather than the possibility that some are simply voting strategically, voting with their crowd, or for other reasons—perhaps getting through the primaries or something. Is that right?Frances E. Lee:That's right, absolutely. Of course, nothing produces more reliable partisan voting than questions of procedure—who's going to control the floor agenda? The majority party supports its leadership in controlling the floor and the minority party contests it, and that continually produces party line voting. But what does that mean in terms of the party's larger ideological agendas? It's not clear. It's this contest for power over the agenda.There’s also positioning related to elections. Elections are zero-sum, so you can cast votes with an eye toward the stance that you want to portray your party as having on an issue, rather than expecting those votes to have any effect on public policy.Kevin Kosar:Right. We shouldn't confuse symbolic action in some cases with the essence of the matter and assume that people have lost negotiating space that may actually exist.I feel like those of us who pay attention to Congress have read so many articles—of one sort or another—which say we are a way more polarized Congress or a way more polarized nation than ever before, or at least in...