Weak Parties, the Rise of Safe Seats, and Dysfunction in the U.S. Congress

• In Event: Constituents and Representation

Abstract

What explains the growing dysfunction of the U.S. Congress? Much of the existing literature implies that, under increasing polarization, stronger parties can be an impediment to legislative performance and responsible policymaking (for a review, see Binder 2015). Contrary to these prevailing accounts, we hypothesize and demonstrate that weaker political parties as indicated by the rise of safe seats in the U.S. Congress instead contribute to its inability to enact programmatic policy and provide national public goods. In particular, we theorize that the decrease in electoral competitiveness between parties across House districts (as a result of path-dependent geographic development or other processes, Rodden 2019) leads to the greater misalignment of median voter preferences between individual districts, parties, and the country as a whole, which both weakens parties and inhibits their legislative capacity.

To test our account, we first provide the most comprehensive evidence on the share of safe seats in U.S. House districts and its increase over time by using a number of alternative competitiveness measures over the last century. According to our descriptive analysis of the CLEA and other datasets supported by the expanded Cook Partisan Voting Index, we find that that electoral competitiveness has been, with a few fluctuations, almost steadily decreasing since the end of the 19th century. Then, we rely on the available ANES (1948-2016) and CCES (2006-2018) data to show that the rising share of safe seats is associated with the greater misalignment of the median district preferences, the median party preferences, and the median national voter preferences across time. In turn, we also show that the increase of safe seats is associated with less ability to enact programmatic policy and provide national public goods as indicated by the less frequent passage of landmark legislation in Congress after WWII (Mayhew 2005) or lower rates of delivery by the majority party on their policy agenda (Congressional Majority Party Agendas, Curry and Lee 2020). Finally, we complement our macro account with a more detailed case-study of the politics of natural disaster response, which is characterized by both clear indicators of responsible policymaking and substantial district-level variation. As previously demonstrated by Healy and Malhotra (2009), the proportion of federal government spending allocated to disaster preparedness as opposed to disaster relief within a district is indicative of the efficiency of government spending on public goods. In line with our argument, we demonstrate that more competitive districts provide a significantly greater share of total spending toward disaster preparedness. This relationship further holds even after accounting for the incidence of natural disasters, partisanship, overall spending, and other major confounding variables. In the end, we discuss the implications of our findings and complementary explanations including polarization and divided government.

Binder, S. (2015) ‘The Dysfunctional Congress’, Annual Review of Political Science, 18(1), pp. 85–101.
Rodden, J. A. (2019). Why cities lose: The deep roots of the urban-rural political divide. Basic Books
Mayhew, D. R. (2005). Divided we govern: Party control, lawmaking and investigations, 1946-2002. Yale University Press.
James M Curry & Frances E. Lee (2019). The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era. Blackwell’s
Healy, A. and Malhotra, N. (2009) ‘Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy’, American Political Science Review, 103(03).

Authors

• Alexander Kustov, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

• Akhil Rajan, Yale University

• Maikol Cerda, Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs

• Frances McCall Rosenbluth, Yale University

• Ian Shapiro, Yale University