Veto Exceptionalism, Constitutional Folk Wisdom, and Inequality in U.S. Politics

• In Event: Institutions, Inequality, and Policy Action and Inaction

Abstract

Generations of scholars have noted the deeply fragmented nature of the US constitutional system, one riddled with multiple and overlapping veto points that can create opportunities for preference intense political minorities to disrupt the preferences of majorities. Yet, ironically, popular contemporary narratives celebrate this veto-riddled system for its democratic accountability. American civics education lauds the system of checks and balances—e.g., separation powers, federalism, judicial review —for minimizing concentrations of power by constraining the scope of governmental authority and distributing power broadly and deeply.

We refer to this contemporary narrative as constitutional folk wisdom and argue that it masks the undemocratic and elitist nature of the U.S. political system and inhibits both popular and scholarly understanding of American politics. The folk wisdom is the most recent in a long history of political struggles between advocates and opponents of more robust national government action to ensure broad democratic participation and to address changing economic and social conditions. For much of American history, these struggles included sustained critiques of the political structure of American politics, in particular the ways in which institutional fragmentation produces a powerful status quo bias and hobbles effective state-building in response to social change. Over the past half century, however, celebrations of the fragmented checks and balances system, the folk wisdom, has largely colonized public discourse without a coherent rejoinder.

In this paper we contrast the folk wisdom with an understanding of American politics as a system of veto exceptionalism. This distinction allows us to understand the persistence of uneven access to power and to observe how dominant political narratives perpetuate the system that generates power differentials in the first place. Our approach draws on the growing field of American political economy (APE), which offers fresh insight into the interaction of institutional configurations, market economies, and racial power over time. Understanding both the temporal and spatial dimensions of veto exceptionalism and the folk wisdom provides an opportunity to observe the systematic biases they engender, including how veto exceptionalism widens the asymmetrical access to power that elites already enjoy over ordinary voters, how the folk wisdom facilitates an enduring anti-democratic and elitist politics, and how greater attention to the gap between the folk wisdom and veto exceptionalism challenges fundamental assumptions in American politics scholarship.

In particular, we argue that the pervasiveness of veto opportunities in the U.S. is more systematic and significant than generally understood in the discipline, that the folk wisdom both utilizes and strengthens veto exceptionalism on behalf of economic elites and white nativists, and that greater attention to both offers insights into collective action problems, institutional stasis and change over time, the persistence of material race and class inequality, and democratic backsliding.

Author

• Lisa L. Miller, Rutgers University, New Brunswick