David R. Mayhew - Partisan Balance: Why Political Parties Dont Kill the U.S. Constitutional System

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Partisan Balance

Princeton Lectures in Politics and Public Affairs

Cosponsored with Woodrow Wilson School
of Public and International Affairs,
Princeton University

Partisan Balance: Why Political Parties Dont Kill
the U.S. Constitutional System
BY DAVID R. MAYHEW

David R. Mayhew

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2011 by Princeton University Press
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work
should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom:
Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

Jacket illustration by BB Sams, SEPS, licensed by
Curtis Licensing, Indianapolis, IN

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mayhew, David R.
Partisan balance : why political parties dont
kill the U.S. Constitutional system /
David R. Mayhew.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-691-14465-8
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Executive-legislative relationsUnited States.
2. Political partiesUnited States. I. Title.
JK585.M39 2011
328.7307456dc22
2010044113

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Janson Text LT Std
Printed on acid-free paper.
press.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

TO MY WIFE
Judith

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
The Electoral Bases

CHAPTER 2
President and Congress

CHAPTER 3
House and Senate I

CHAPTER 4
House and Senate II

CHAPTER 5
Reform

APPENDIX
Sources for Presidential Proposals

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

TABLES

FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people assisted me in this work. Jon Menitove supplied the basic material for and is listed as coauthor there. Joe Sempolinski brought valiant service to the projectfact-checking, data analysis, and policing of the logic and style. The Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale funded the work by Menitove and Sempolinski. Peter Aronow brought his skills to the statistical calculations. Lew Irwin as a graduate student wrote an insightful paper. Gary Jacobson supplied an election dataset. Scott Adler, Sarah Anzia, David Brady, and Matt Levendusky helped me hunt for data. Insights came from Steve Ansolabehere, Charles Cameron, Justin Fox, Alan Gerber, Matt Green, Karol Kucinski, Joel Middleton, Eric Patashnik, and Luke Thompson. Eric Schickler offered exceptionally constructive advice on the whole manuscript, as did two anonymous reviewers. I profited from comments at a Princeton conference by Doug Arnold, Nolan McCarty, Tom Romer, Keith Whittington, and Julian Zelizer. In the background are many conversations over the years with Bob Dahl. Of great help were the libraries at Yale University and Boston College.

INTRODUCTION

In the United States, the presidency, the House, and the Senate have their own independent electoral bases. A separation-of-powers system thus rooted in voters can generate patterns of both dissonance and skew in the conduct of government. Dissonance can occur when different sectors of society enjoy special favor in different institutions. Skew can occur when the summary favor of the government tilts to one side. In modern times, the sectors or sides of chief relevance are the political parties. Politics tends to sort into an us versus them contest between two parties (or, in some countries, coalitions of parties) associated with ideologies. This being the case, a constitutional system that is not perceived to accommodate its party sides fairly may run into legitimacy trouble. A government needs to be poised appropriately on an electoral base.

How does the United States stack up in these considerations? In this book, I weave a complicated argument. Perhaps it is best characterized as an exploration. At least during recent times, I argue, using a particular diagnostic lever, both the dissonance and skew at the core of the American government as regards the parties have been very small, perhaps surprisingly small. Beneath everything else that we see, the governmental system has bent toward both convergence and symmetry. Notwithstanding its separation-of-powers arrangements, the United States has bent toward being a typical democratic country.

That is the skeleton of my argument. But there are complexities and qualifications. I dwell on the parties in this account, but at times I reach beyond contestation between the parties to discuss other coalitional frictions. I probe into congressional processes that are not found in the Constitution. Most important, I advance the idea of corrigibility to go along with those of convergence and symmetry. In the realm of policymaking, significant impediments can arise to the working out of these latter two logics. But, given time, many such impediments are tackled and overcome. This process of overcoming is an additional key aspect of the American regime.

What are the implications? One is the following. If the U.S. Constitution and the countrys party system are more or less in sync, we might expect to see a scarcity of discontent with the Constitution. A century ago, that old institutional blueprint of 1787 came under considerable fire. One of the sides of that time, the Progressive left, targeted it. Thanks to Charles Beard and others, its class origins came to be suspect.1 The Senate and federal courts were said to be fundamentally biased. At the least, they needed to be overhauled. We have forgotten the force of this old Progressive-era case. In our own time, nothing like this oppositional drive exists. Thoughtful critiques of the Constitution are being written, but they do not seem to resonate.2 For the general American public, constitutional reform as a pressing concern seems to rank somewhere near vanishing polar bears and rising cable TV prices. Now in its third century, the U.S. Constitution is riding high. I cannot prove it, but I would guess that one reason is its congruence with the party system. A seriously disgruntled partyor, as in the case of a century ago, an ideological sidecan raise a major ruckus.

That is my conceptual rubric. My time span in this work is the decades since World War II. Dwelling on relations among the presidency, the House, and the Senate, I address in sections of the analysis a particular topic: the fortunes of domestic legislative proposals that the various American presidents during those decades have championed and cared about. This is a somewhat narrow focus. A great deal of governmental activity is left out. Congress and the presidency can clash otherwise: consider Watergate.3 Governments pursue foreign as well as domestic policies. The courts can have their own policy agendas. Presidents often make policy by themselves: Truman installed a strict antiespionage program and desegregated the armed services; Eisenhower desegregated the District of Columbia and sent troops to Little Rock; Obama has reorganized the auto industry.

Yet the realm I address is large and important. Domestic legislating at the behest of government leaders is probably as close to the heart of politics as one can get, and a system that does not get it right in this sphere, that does not win substantial legitimacy for what it does, is probably a system in trouble. The specifics in my treatment range from Trumans Fair Deal in 1949 through the Great Society of the 1960s, the Reagan revolution of the early 1980s, and George W. Bushs drives to cut taxes and partly privatize Social Security in the 2000s. Note that lawmaking is not just a domain of Democrats or welfare-state builders. From Alexander Hamiltons bank, Calvin Coolidges tax cuts, and Eisenhowers spur to a private atomic energy industry through the BushPaulson bailout of Wall Street in 2008, the leaders of a capitalist economy have seen need to keep making laws. My analysis does not reach systematically into 2009, yet the centrality of the Obama administrations drives for an economic stimulus package, cap-and-trade regulation, and health insurance reform will be obvious.

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