Politics

/

ArcaMax

Voters want compromise in Congress -- so why the brinkmanship over the debt ceiling?

Laurel Harbridge-Yong, Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University, The Conversation on

Published in Political News

There’s progress on the debt limit. There’s no progress. Conservatives have revolted. Liberal Democrats are angry. Negotiators actually ate a meal together. That’s a good sign. No it isn’t. Who’s up? Who’s down?

Much of the breathless news coverage of the debt limit crisis relies on leaks, speculation, wishful thinking and maybe even the reading of tea leaves. The Conversation decided to tap an expert on congressional behavior, Northwestern University political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong, and ask her what she sees when she looks at the negotiations. Harbridge-Yong is a specialist in partisan conflict and the lack of bipartisan agreement in American politics, so her expertise is tailor-made for the moment.

The difficulty that Congress and the White House are having in reaching compromises highlights two aspects of contemporary politics. The first: Since the 1970s, both the House and Senate have become much more polarized. Members of the two parties are more unified internally and further apart from the opposing party. You don’t have the overlap between parties now that existed 50 years ago.

Even as we’ve had rising polarization, we still have important differences within the parties. Not every Democrat is the same as another and not every Republican is the same.

This relates to a second point: Members’ individual and collective interests shape their behavior. For Republicans in more competitive districts, their own individual electoral interests probably say, “Let’s cut a deal. Let’s not risk a default that the Republicans get blamed for, and which is going to run really poorly in my district.”

On the other hand, House Freedom Caucus Republicans come from really safe districts, and they care more about their primary elections than they do their general elections. So their own electoral interests say, “Stand firm, fight till the bitter end, try to force the hand of the president.”

 

These kinds of electoral interests occur at the individual and collective levels for members of a party. Since the 1980s, and accelerating into the 1990s, there’s been a lot more competition for majority control, and as a result the two parties don’t want to do things that let the other party look good. They don’t want to give the other party a win in the eyes of the voter.

So you now have many Republicans who are more willing to fight quite hard against the Democrats because they don’t want to give a win to Biden.

Democrats are also resistant to compromising, both because they don’t want to gut programs that they put in place and also because they don’t want to make this look like a win for Republicans, who were able to play chicken and get what they wanted.

These dynamics, layered on top of policy interests, all contribute to the problems that we’re seeing now.

...continued

swipe to next page

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus