The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This “Author Meets Critics” session will focus on a forthcoming book from James Curry of the University of Utah and Frances Lee of Princeton University entitled, "The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era." This book will be published by the University of Chicago Press in the summer of 2020. It builds on the path-breaking work that that Curry presented in "Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the U.S. House of Representatives" (2015) and that Lee presented in "Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign" (2016), books that were also published by the University of Chicago Press.

In their new volume, Curry and Lee will present important and counter-intuitive findings that scholars working on Congress, political parties, and American government and politics more broadly will need to reckon with. The authors recently summarized what they have found in their latest research and will be sharing in The Limits of Party as follows:

"What we have learned the most about are the remarkable consistencies and continuities of congressional lawmaking over the past three to four decades. Much is made in journalistic and scholarly circles about how much Congress has changed, in particular the erosion of bipartisanship, norms, and comity. However, we continue to be struck by how much things are the same today as in the past. Across our various analyses, we continue to find that little has changed with respect to congressional lawmaking:

• Congressional majority parties fail to enact party agenda priorities for the same reasons as in the past. Both intra-party disagreements that disrupt the abilities of majorities to unify behind party proposals, and obstructionist tactics from the minority party, have and continue to play a role in majority party failures on agenda items. Neither reason for failure has become more or less common over time.

• Congressional majority parties succeed on agenda items in the same manner as in the past. Largely, they either seek broadly supported, bipartisan proposals, or work across the aisle to come to bipartisan compromises. Cases of the majority party steamrolling the minority party and passing laws over persistent opposition are rare and have not become more common in recent years.

• While Congress has adopted more unorthodox and centralized legislative processes to achieve lawmaking successes, these new processes have yielded the same bipartisan outcomes as traditional processes did in the past. Unorthodox legislative tactics are best thought of as a different means to achieving the same ultimate legislative ends.

• We also find that members of Congress talk about legislative successes in a manner similar to the past. We find that lawmakers frequently express negativity and dissatisfaction with legislative outcomes, but that this was just as true in the 1980s as it is today."

Sub Unit

• Division 22: Legislative Studies

Chair

• Daniel D. Stid Hewlett Foundation

Presenters

• Frances E. Lee Princeton University

• Nolan McCarty

• Molly Reynolds Brookings Institution

• Eric Schickler University of California, Berkeley

• Alan E. Wiseman Vanderbilt University

• James M. Curry University of Utah