Note 21. Congressional Parties

Theoretical Perspectives

What should we think about congressional parties? Why do they exist? Why do they have a role in policy making and why does that role change over the decades?

Like most enduring forms of human organization, congressional parties are likely to serve multiple purposes for their members. When they lose utility, they tend to fade in their importance or even disappear; when they gain utility, they tend to become more central to congressional activity. Their behavior changes as the relative importance of their various purposes changes, itself a product of developments of the larger political environment, inside and outside of Congress.

Let’s break this down. What do legislators want from their parties? What behaviors on the part of parties and their leaders do the motivations induce? What produces changes in the importance of parties in policy making?

Some Basic Concepts about Legislators and Parties

Parties are conduits for action on legislators’ political goals, personal and partisan.  For good reason, we often think of legislators’ personal goals as reelection, good public policy, and power.  Legislators seeking to enact certain policies are advantaged if their party wins majority control of Congress, its committees, and scheduling mechanisms.  Legislators seeking reelection are advantaged if the public has a favorable view of their party’s legislative record. And they have more influence if their party is in the majority and controls important institutional positions. These connections between legislators’ personal goals and collective party goals are represented in Figure 21-1. 

Gaining or maintaining majority control and passing or blocking legislation are collective goals that legislators usually share with fellow partisans. These common goals are “public goods”—that is, they require group action to be achieved. No individual legislator can win legislative battles by him- or herself. No individual legislator can acquire majority status for his or her party. The collective action is required. It is pursued--more or less effectively--through organization and leadership.

In mobilizing collective efforts, members of a party can suffer from the problems of coordination and transaction costs.  The party’s members must somehow coordinate activity with each other, but coordination is not without cost.  High transaction costs can prevent a collective choice and the realization of benefits from a public good .  Interaction among legislators can be so time consuming that some collective decisions are not made.  Meetings must be organized, responsibilities delegated, information disseminated, and leaders held accountable—all of which may be viewed as costly to busy legislators.  Organizational innovations, such as arranging for regular meetings of committees to make decisions for the larger party caucus, may improve the efficiency of collective choice by reducing transaction costs.  

Over the long run, competitive pressures from the other party encourage legislators to invent ways of organizing their party for collective action and successful innovations in one party are readily adopted in the other.  Each party creates committees, task forces, and leadership and staff positions to bolster its ability to compete with the other party in the electoral and legislative arenas.  

Theories of Congressional Parties

In developing explanations of party activity in Congress, political scientists seek to find the essence, the core features, of that activity. Necessarily, this involves simplication, an effort to find a few generalizations that allow us to predict how legislators and their parties will behave. If we do not simplify to some degree, every behavior will seem wholly idiosyncratic. Simplification makes political science frustrating for practitioners and even makes political science look naïve at times, but it represents a serious and difficult effort to understand how humans operate in an institutional setting like the one created in the American democracy.

The simplification most common in theories of congressional parties involves the primary motivation or goal of legislators. In some accounts, that goal is favored policy outcomes. What kind of parties would we have if legislators were single-minded in their pursuit of their policy objectives? In other accounts, the goal is reelection. What kind of parties would we have if legislators were single-minded in their pursuit of reelection? 

Given that policy and reelection probably motivate all legislators to some degree and therefor encourage them to support party electoral and legislative efforts, both kinds of theory, when developed smartly, yield predictions that find confirmation in our observations of party activity. Moreover, because legislators’ electoral and policy goals usually are compatible (liberal districts elect liberal legislators…), we would not be too surprised that they predict similar behavior.

Nevertheless, policy- and reelection-based theories have different emphases and predict somewhat different patterns for change in the role of parties in policy making. Let me review some possibilities.

Policy-based theories, a subset of which are spatial theories (see Note 13), assume that legislators only care about the policy outcome. They are not concerned about anything or anyone else, such as voters, lobbyists, and presidents who may care about the outcomes and affect their reelection prospects. Parties have little short-term value for these policy-oriented or ideological legislators except to facilitate coordination among like-minded legislators. If we assume that coordination is not costly, then parties have little value, their organizations are moribund, and party leaders have little influence. 

We might consider parties to be long-term policy coalitions, with party members engaging in gains-from-trade or logrolls that their parties arrange and enforce. Because legislators may care about some issues more than others and legislation takes time to enact, legislators must wait their turn to get action on the issues they care most about. Two legislators or two factions that are willing to exchange support on their priority issues must allow one to go first. A party with some ability to reward and punish its members can facilitate confidence that everyone will get their turn and that any understanding about mutual support will be honored.

The ability of policy-based parties to act effectively turns on the degree of agreement on policy objectives, or at least the compatibility of the varying policy objectives, among partisans. The two parties can vary in their policy heterogeneity.  As it does, parties will vary in how party loyalty is defined, in their willingness to empower their parties and party leaders to orchestrate legislative strategies and implement incentives for party loyalty. It is all a matter of the parties as a utilitarian vehicle for achieving legislative goals.

Reelection-based theories are often tied to David Mayhew’s popular book, Congress: The Electoral Connection. Mayhew emphasizes that legislators do many things to get reelected—advertise themselves, take popular positions on issues, getting federal benefits for their constituencies—that do not depend on winning legislative battles. To the extent that their interest in reelection does motivate legislative success, it is likely to be limited to the issues most important to their electorates, which may vary widely from place to place. In that case, legislators can organize themselves into committees, each with a unique policy jurisdiction, that allows legislators with similar issue interests to craft policy for Congress.

However, to the extent that a party’s reputation in the general public, or in specific publics, affects the election prospects of its members, its members have an incentive to coordinate their behavior in a way that enhances that reputation. Coordination requires organization or leadership. Successful efforts to protect the party reputation may require incentives for members to cooperate with the party to avoid the appearance of being fractionalized or unable to govern.

Central to a majority party’s strategy is its ability to control the agenda. Living up to promises to address certain issues and the ability to avoid issues that would cause votes on that create problems for the party—perhaps even more than winning on the issues—may be important to enhancing or protecting the party’s reputation. This requires coordination among party members about the issues to raise or suppress, coordination that might be provided by party leaders. In the House, this coordination can be accomplished with the speaker’s right of recognition and control of special rules (Note 20). In the Senate, this is not so easily done, thanks to the ability of the minority to filibuster and offer nongermane amendments to get its issues addressed.

Over time, parties will vary in the degree to which their members represent constituencies with similar expectations and the degree to which their reputations influence election outcomes. These sources of variation will affect the need for coordinated party strategies and the ease of doing so.

Bringing Things Together

You have surely spotted the fact that these theories are closely related, even largely compatible. If legislators’ policy preferences originate in the nature of the home constituencies, the demands of personal policy commitments and the demands of reelection are likely to be compatible. There clearly is a difference in emphasis—getting the best possible policy outcome and getting reelected—but legislators with sufficient resources can often pursue both without serious conflicts. Similarly, parties may typically be able to work to enhance its national reputation while seeking to achieve their policy objectives.

However, there is another important angle to consider. A party that seeks both majority party status and policy objectives always must be concerned about tradeoffs—tradeoffs of many kinds. For example, accepting a compromise to obtain the best possible legislative outcome, given a party’s mix of policy views, may not be the outcome that helps a party gain a chamber majority by winning a few elections in key states or districts. These tradeoffs generate lively debates within parties. In fact, addressing such tradeoffs is a challenge that may be assigned to party leaders. This suggests—and I think this is correct—we cannot account for important party activities without accounting for both electoral and policy interests. Unfortunately, whenever we complicate theory that much, we find that it is more difficult to make clean predictions.