Remember the bad old days of divided government?

We're now six months into One Party Rule - Republican Unified Government.

Hey! Remember all the social and mainstream media cries, lamentations, rending of garments and gnashing teeth about gridlock, divided government and partisan obstruction over the last six years? Guessing everyone is now enjoying our brand spanking new unified government! What? No? Huh.

Look, the Dividist is not one to say "I told you so..." Oh wait. Yes he is...

Americans may have a short memory, but we are once again learning to appreciate the finer points of a politically divided government. It's encouraging to see my fellow citizens coming to that realization much sooner than during the early years of unified government under either Republican Bush or Democratic Obama administrations.

Perhaps this is a good time to step away from the day-to-day West Wing tweet-storm / soap opera and consider some recent thoughtful essays on the nature and benefits of divided government.

Krugman and Klein on how the Scalia Supreme Court vacancy battle will destroy America. Because "divided government." Or something.

 

 Let's start with Paul Krugman and his usual understated dispassionate analysis...

How America Was Lost - Paul Krugman - 2/14/16

Once upon a time, the death of a Supreme Court justice wouldn’t have brought America to the edge of constitutional crisis. But that was a different country, with a very different Republican Party. In today’s America, with today’s G.O.P., the passing of Antonin Scalia has opened the doors to chaos...

In his opening paragraph, in around 50 words,  Krugman manages to blame the GOP for "chaos", a "constitutional crisis", and losing America. All because the GOP controlled Senate may delay confirming a Supreme Court appointment for 9 or 10 months. Even by the standard of Krugman's usual vitriolic, polarizing, partisan hyperbole, that is an impressive pile of horseshit.

Of course this is nothing new for regular Krugman watchers. Who can forget his 2010 classic meltdown on the eve of the Republican takeover of majority control in the House of Representatives:

Gridlock is Good! (exclamation point optional)

In January, the Congressional Budget Office published the 2015 estimate of federal spending, revenues, and deficit. On Groundhog Day, President Barack Obama released the administration's proposed FY 2016 Federal Budget. At the intersection of the two was a White House twitter-storm promoting the budget and taking credit for deficit reduction during the Obama administration.

"Since I took office, we’ve cut our deficits by about two-thirds." —President Obama #2016Budget pic.twitter.com/Lvf0lIkPXs
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 2, 2015

The White House neglected to mention that the deficit reduction was primarily realized over the four years since the GOP took majority control of the House of Representative and divided the government. It takes a special kind of chutzpah for the President to complain about "mindless austerity" and congressional obstruction when they are the very reason for the declining deficit he is bragging about. But he did. The cognitive dissonance is only made worse by a few inconvenient facts:

Gridlock Is Still Good. Kind of. Most of the time.

Illustration from Callander & Krehbiel - Gridlock and Delegation

The Dividist Papers regularly features academic scholarship from political scientists, economists, and historians explaining the benefits of divided government and gridlock.  The first entry in the "Gridlock is Good" series featured economist William Niskanen of the Cato Institute and Ohio University Economics professor Richard Vedder outlining the fiscal and economic benefits of gridlocked government. More recently, we featured University of Wisconsin Political Science Professor Marcus E. Ethridge, who made the case that our inefficient checked, balanced, and divided government is less susceptible to special interest influence and corruption than the more efficient executive branch agency rule-making process.

In this post we offer the latest edition in this series by Stanford professors Steven Callander and Keith Krehbiel.  In a Stanford Business School article Edmond Andrews introduces their paper:

"Americans are angry about partisan gridlock, but they also harbor mistrust about nonpartisan bureaucrats. Steven Callander and Keith Krehbiel, professors of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, see it differently. In a recent paper, they apply game theory to understanding U.S.-style gridlock. Their conclusion: Two of the system’s most unpopular features — supermajority voting (as in the Senate filibuster) and delegation of authority to “unelected bureaucrats” — can together produce good outcomes."

Why do Americans vote for divided government?

UPDATED: 01-January-2019*

Since the end of WWII, including the 2014 2018 midterms, there have been 36 federal elections in the United States.  Over that time Americans elected divided government 24 times. As a consequence, we have chosen a divided government state for 48 of the intervening 72 years or 67% of the time.

As 2014 2016 2018 comes to a close we are in the fourth sixth first year of our most recent iteration of federal divided government. We have a Democratic Republican President, a Democratic Republican majority in the Senate, and a Republican Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Democrat Barack Obama Republican Donald Trump will be our President through 2016  2020. History and recent polls tell us there is no realistic probability that Republicans  Democrats will lose majority control of the House in the 2014 mid-terms through the 2016 2020 elections.* We will continue to “enjoy” divided government for the rest of President Obama's Trump's term. The only question now is whether Republicans can both maintain the Presidency and majority control in the Senate with Donald Trump as their nominee. That seems unlikely.

 One of the more interesting political science questions about divided government is the question of why the American electorate continues to vote for divided government. It is a simple fact that in the modern era we elect a divided government far more often than not. Why we choose divided government and whether we choose it consciously or accidentally is a subject of analysis and speculation. Is it truly a preference? Is it a statistical artifact?  Is it the result of conscious strategic voting?  Or is it the expression of a subconscious preference from an inchoate confused electorate?

It takes two to obstruct.

Image hacked from The Economist 

Brett Logiurato at Business Insider cites a Washington Post/ABC poll and invokes the specter of an all Republican Congress for the last two years of the Obama administration:

"Democrats are at risk of losing control of the Senate this November, after a new poll found that voters prefer a Republican-controlled Congress to check President Barack Obama's agenda when his approval rating is at its lowest point ever."

Democrats are looking for a silver lining, but with no "wave" election in sight, we're likely to have a classic Tip O'Neill "all politics is local" midterm.  This is good news for dividists like your loyal blogger, but there may be even better news lurking in another finding from the poll:

"Democrats, however, do enjoy an overall advantage on voter trust. Voters say they prefer Democrats' stances on health care (43-35), immigration (40-34), and the economy (41-38), among others.  By a 40-34 margin, voters also say they trust Democrats to "coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years."

The Dividist interprets this apparent contradiction as indicating voters are no more inclined to trust Republicans with all the keys to the castle than they are Democrats. Which implies that losing the Senate in 2014 will actually help position Democrats to keep the White House in 2016 and extending divided government into the next administration.  It's a good thing.

But perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. Some Democrats are thinking about what the post mid-term environment on Capitol Hill might look like if the Obama administration is faced with a Republican majority in both the House and Senate. While Republicans in the House usually get the majority of the blame in mainstream media for obstructionism and the "least productive Congress in history", it's instructive to take note of which party is in a panic that Congress might actually "get things done" in the waning years of the Obama administration:

Progressive Pundit Posits Prejudicial Political Polarization

Greg Sargent asks "How 'polarized' is the American electorate?":

"The American people are “polarized.” That idea is repeated so often as an explanation for why Washington seems mired in dysfunction and gridlock that no one even stops to question it anymore. Yes, the system is polarized, in the sense that we have divided government on the federal level, or, as Dan Balz recently noted, in the sense that state governments under an unprecedented degree of one-party control are moving in sharply different directions. But how polarized is public opinion on the issues themselves?"

Sargent makes a fair and balanced assessment of the American body politic by citing progressive pundits spanning the political spectrum from the left to the far left. Unsurprisingly he determines that the United States really is a left of center country with a broad consensus around progressive issues:

"E.J. Dionne’s latest column notes there is majority consensus behind ideas about ”economic justice” and the safety net, but that it’s obscured by the degree to which one party remains captive to a conservative minority that wants to unravel that consensus... Majorities support immigration reform with a path to citizenship. While people tell pollsters they don’t like Big Government, they support getting our fiscal house in order through a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes, as Democrats want, and majorities oppose cuts to Social Security or Medicare. Large majorities support federal spending on infrastructure to create jobs. Majorities backed the core ideas in the American Jobs Act, which included spending on road repair and tax credits for job training, paid for by taxes on the rich."

And of course, with all this broad consensus among Americans in support of a progressive agenda, there is no one to blame for Congress failing to embracing our progressive future but those illegitimately elected GOP cultists in the House of Representatives:

"As David Wasserman explained just after the 2012 elections, geographic voting distribution patterns and redistricting has created a GOP lock on the House by cossetting Republicans away in safe districts, where they enjoy the support of “an alternate universe of voters that little resembles the growing diversity of the country.” ...Add it up and the stalemate in D.C. in the face of major challenges is at least partly due to this unconventional, unbalanced situation, and may be partly in spite of the state of national opinion, not because of it."

"I don’t want to overstate this..." Sargent writes as he wildly overstates this and concludes:

Gridlock is really good. Really.

The Dividist has complained in the past about the propensity of pundits and bloggers to conflate the concepts of "divided government" and legislative "gridlock". The terms are often used erroneously as interchangeable synonyms. Yet, even the Dividist has occasionally employed this semantic shortcut, such as in the July, 2010 post "Gridlock is Good." In that post the beneficial aspects of partisan legislative gridlock was presented in the form of gridlock preventing a negative outcome - specifically stopping bad bills from being passed into law (see legislative abominations - Porkulus and Obamacare as examples of the damage done when one party has the power to pass legislation on pure partisan votes). The underlying common sense notion is that divided government and partisan gridlock prevent the worst instincts of either party from becoming law. When the moderating influence of legislative gridlock is bypassed, we get legislation no one really understands, except the special interests that helped craft it. So we are treated to the spectacle of our legislative leaders explaining that we won't know what sweeping legislation will accomplish until after it is signed into law. Our legislators may not know what they are passing, but once it gets to the agencies administering the law, the special interests do.

In a recent Cato Institute Policy Analysis, Marcus E. Ethridge (University of Wisconsin Political Science Professor) outlines a new positive argument for the inefficient, constitutionally divided, and often gridlocked legislative process. Ethridge offers a compelling case that our inefficient checked, balanced, and divided government is far less susceptible to special interest influence than the more efficient executive branch agency rule-making process preferred by Progressives impatient for rapid change.

Cato Institute Policy Analysis #672 - The Case for Gridlock:

"In the wake of the 2010 elections, President Obama declared that voters did not give a mandate to gridlock. His statement reflects over a century of Progressive hostility to the inefficient and slow system of government created by the American Framers. Convinced that the government created by the Constitution frustrates their goals, Progressives have long sought ways around its checks and balances. Perhaps the most important of their methods is delegating power to administrative agencies, an arrangement that greatly transformed U.S. government during and after the New Deal. For generations, Progressives have supported the false premise that administrative action in the hands of experts will realize the public interest more effectively than the constitutional system and its multiple vetoes over policy changes. The political effect of empowering the administrative state has been quite different: it fosters policies that reflect the interests of those with well organized power. A large and growing body of evidence makes it clear that the public interest is most secure when governmental institutions are inefficient decisionmakers. An arrangement that brings diverse interests into a complex, sluggish decisionmaking process is generally unattractive to special interests. Gridlock also neutralizes some political benefits that producer groups and other well-heeled interests inherently enjoy. By fostering gridlock, the U.S. Constitution increases the likelihood that policies will reflect broad, unorganized interests instead of the interests of narrow, organized groups."

This is an important read but not an easy one. Etheridge challenges conventional thinking about why special interests hold such sway over public policy. He explores the mechanism by which their financial and lobbying muscle are applied to maximum effect influencing public policy and resources in direct contradiction to the public interest and even legislative intent. Distilling his 20 page argument into a blog post is difficult if not impossible. We will instead excerpt a few representative paragraphs, comment briefly on salient points introduced in his analysis and encourage you to read the whole thing.

Markets, Economy, Gridlock and Maria Bartiromo

After the market close on Monday, Maria Bartiromo led a panel discussion on the long and short term implications of a GOP victory and divided government for the market and economy.

First up, looking at the long term, she interviews Brian Belski of Oppenheimer Asset Management. Belski pontificates on in-house analysis looking for correlations between parties in power and divided vs. unified government, with economic metrics like GDP, personal income, employment, corporate profits, and stock market performance.


Frankly, I don't understand why anyone would take this kind of analysis any more seriously than the Hemline Index or the Super Bowl Indicator. The flaw is easy to see. The federal government simply does not control the GDP, private employment, corporate profits, or the stock market. So why should there be any expectation that there is something meaningful to be learned by trying to correlate with parties in power? Yes, the government can certainly have an effect, even large effects on the economy and these metrics. Still, looking for a correlation on this one parameter among all the myriad macro-economic factors that determine economic performance is like trying to determine the relative effectiveness of redheads vs blonds emptying the ocean with a pail in the middle of a hurricane. It's just silly.

OTOH, studies that look for correlation between parties in power and those things that the federal government does directly control (spending, deficits, legislation, armed conflict, and currency) are interesting and informative. For that we can look to political scientists and economists like Niskanen, Van Doren, Mayhew, and Slivinski for answers.

Short term market effects around the catalyst of an election are a different story. Investor psychology and emotion (whether driven by fear or greed or both) can certainly drive market movement in the short term. As I've noted before, if a preponderance of investors believe that divided government is good for the markets, than it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That may be exactly what has been happening to push markets higher in recent weeks.

Maria leads a panel discussion exploring whether this expectation is already baked in the market and how long it might last.
If the GOP fails to take back at least one house of Congress, there are likely to be a lot of fearful and disappointed investors.

Perhaps it is worth considering a hedge position on election day. God knows the GOP has disappointed before.

UPDATED: Fixed spelling and typo mistakes. I cannot seem to fix the embed formatting for the CNBC videos. Oddly, it formats correctly in Chrome, but not in Firefox or Explorer. This is beyond my ken. Added more gratuitous Maria pics to go fishing for a Rule 5 link.

Divided and Balanced.™
Now that is fair.

Gridlock Is Good

UPDATED: 15-July-10

Doyle McManus at the LA Times considers the challenges the GOP must face to press their advantage in November, and the challenges facing the country should they prevail and restore divided government:

A post-November congressional outlook: partisan gridlock

"But there's at least one potential problem for the Republicans: They haven't settled on a unified national message yet — and a quiet civil war is brewing over what, if anything, it should say. In one camp are House conservatives, led by Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House minority whip, who argue that Republicans won in 1994 because the Contract with America laid out by then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) articulated a coherent message around which candidates and voters could rally... Republicans, reportedly including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), worry about finding a tent large enough to include all GOP viewpoints. Trying to come up with a single platform, they believe, could be divisive, and the party should simply embrace a few broad issues such as cutting taxes and spending. We're already winning, they argue; why get too specific and give Democrats a clearer target to shoot at?"

While messaging is important, McManus overstates the significance of the problem. There is simply not a tent big enough to encompass the full spectrum of policy positions held by those opposed to our One Party Democratic Rule, including: fiscal conservatives; social conservatives; Republican partisans; libertarians; independents; and the tea party movement. But there does not need to be a unanimity of policy preferences for the GOP to prevail. All they need in November is a common objective and general agreement that a key issue takes precedence over all others. My take -

• The objective is restoring balance and restraint in our federal government.
• The key issue is restraining the insane growth of spending and curtailing the fiscal irresponsibility exhibited by the Democrats and this administration.

The Tea Party movement is a microcosm of the opposition coalition, willfully misunderstood and mis-characterized by Democratic Party partisans. So far, the Tea Party has shown considerable political acumen and understand that social issues must take a back seat to economic issues in this election. In a nutshell - "It's the spending, stupid" - (Thank you again James Carville).

Chalk up another one for divided government.

Stephen Slivinski, economist, author of Buck Wild, Director of Budget Analysis for the Cato Institute, and DWSUWF favorite, comments on recently released CBO budget estimates in "Finally, Some Not-So-Bad News on the Budget" posted at Cato@Liberty:

The big surprise in the Congressional Budget Office mid-year budget estimates released today isn’t that the year-to-year deficit shrank again. Or that the long-term liabilities in Medicare and Social Security continue to impend. The surprise is that federal spending will only grow about 3% in the current fiscal year that ends this October. That’s a big improvement over the annual average 7% growth we’ve seen since the first day of the George W. Bush presidency. How did that happen? Those familiar with my previous research will probably not be surprised to hear that the new political reality – divided government – has something to do with it... Earlier this year, the new Democratic Congress decided to put the federal budget on auto-pilot until October. Instead of passing new appropriations bills to fund the government for the entire year, they passed what is called a “continuing resolution” to keep the government operating. This didn’t happen because the Democrats were all that interested in spending less money. They just wanted to get the old budget work left to them by the outgoing Republican Congress off the table so they could get on with more ideological-base-friendly legislation, like the minimum wage increase. And the Democrats knew that the president might finally start vetoing legislation, too. A protracted battle over the budget wasn’t something they wanted to spend their energy on in the first half of the year. Thus, the auto-pilot continuing resolution: a piece of legislation that keeps the government running at basically the inflation-adjusted level of the previous year. With the White House veto strategy finally a credible threat, it looks like we might have a similar sort of outcome on spending this year, too. Isn’t divided government wonderful?

Good news. Since its inception, this blog has been in the service of promoting the concept of voting for divided government as a way of limiting the growth of federal government spending, among other beneficial effects. After divided government was re-established in the 2006 midterms we outlined assumptions for continuing to support this concept in the 2008 presidential election in the post - "2008 Election Prologue - Check your assumptions":

Assumption 1) The Divided Government hypothesis holds true to form.

We will have divided government for the next two years. Minimally, we expect to see restraint in the growth of spending and some evidence for more fiscal discipline on the part of the federal government. If that does not happen, the foundation for advocating divided government will collapse, and we will refocus on abalone diving on the Mendocino coast.

Looks like the abalone will have to wait. Divided Government Rules!

Reminder - We are one week away from the next edition of the Carnival of Divided Government. The Carnival of Divided Government Sextus Decimus- Special Labor Day Edition, will be posted on or about September 3rd, 2007. Blog articles may be submitted for the carnival of divided government using the carnival submission form. Past posts can be found here or on our blog carnival index page.

Divided and Balanced.™ Now that is fair.

Technorati tags: divided government, CODGOV,blog carnival, CBO, Federal Spending

All we are saying, is give divided government a chance.

Certainly, disgruntled conservatives are not a new phenomena this electoral season. God knows, this crop of big spending, big deficit, big government congressional Republicans under the mantle of this big spending, big deficit, big government President certainly gives conservatives plenty to be disgruntled about.

But disgruntled conservatives explicitily calling for a divided government in 2006 by voting for a Democratic majority in Congress? That is news. This week in the Washington Monthly, seven conservatives write in "Time For Us To Go" why the GOP should lose in 2006 .

In the lead off essay "Let's quit while we're behind", Christopher Buckley concludes with this stirring admonition:

"My fellow Republicans, it is time, as Madison said in Federalist 76, to “Hand over the tiller of governance, that others may fuck things up for a change.”

I just cannot imagine how tough it is for a conservative to write a column titled "Bring on Pelosi" as does Bruce Bartlett:

"Those who worry that divided government would compromise our efforts in Iraq shouldn’t be overly concerned. As the minority party, Democrats today are free to criticize our efforts in Iraq without having to offer constructive alternatives. But put them in the majority, and they’ll suddenly have to put up or shut up. Let them defund the war and implement an immediate pullout if that’s what they really think we should do. At least it would force the administration to explain itself better and face some oversight, for which the Republican Congress has essentially abrogated all responsibility." [Update: E.J. Dionne in his Washington Post column today "Democrats Answer Cheney", shows the loyal opposition is finally finding its voice.]

Joe Scarborough pulls no punches in an amusing screed "And we thought Clinton had no self-control":

"This must all be shocking to my Republican friends who still believe our country would be a better place if our party controlled every branch of government as well as every news network, movie studio, and mid-American pulpit. But evidence suggests that divided government may be what Washington needs the most."

Can't you just imagine William Niskanen picking up a guitar and singing a duet with Yoko Ono while sitting on a bed in a Montreal Hotel: "Give divided government a chance"? Um. Nevermind. Neither can I. In the article Niskanen repackages and freshens some of his previous work on divided government.