For decades now, congressional parties have been the most significant political organisations on Capitol Hill as class and cultural issues have produced increasingly sharp ideological divisions between Democrats and Republicans... more
For decades now, congressional parties have been the most significant political organisations on Capitol Hill as class and cultural issues have produced increasingly sharp ideological divisions between Democrats and Republicans engendering congressional parties that are cohesive and ideologically polarised parties to an extent that would have been unknown to members of the Congress in the mid-twentieth century and to the framers of the US Constitution in the late eighteenth century.
As we have moved into the second decade of the twenty-first century, both partisanship and partisan polarisation in the Congress have strengthened even further from 10 or 20 years ago, at the same time that American voters care neither for the Congress as an institution nor its parties. Polarisation, however, has not been symmetric: For, typically ignored in many journalistic accounts, congressional Republicans have moved much more sharply to the right than have congressional Democrats to the left, never more so than since the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. There is no shortage of examples of the effects of asymmetric partisan polarisation on contemporary policymaking in Washington, most notably, over the debt increase in late 2011. This episode also demonstrates the level of political uncertainty that polarisation engenders: policy outcomes in each chamber have necessarily become much more volatile while the probability of congressional-presidential agreement in writing major legislation decreases under conditions of split-party government, whereas it increases significantly. This pattern of policymaking is a far cry from the naïve anti-party expectations of the US Constitution’s framers; and, apparently, not what most Americans want.
