In Congress, a split party doesn’t always mean weak leadership.
That’s the key finding of the new book Divided Parties, Strong Leaders, from University of Chicago Assoc. Prof. Ruth Bloch Rubin. By analyzing nearly a century of legislative history, Bloch Rubin finds that party heads are sometimes able to overcome members’ disagreement to wield significant power over congressional affairs.
The book explains when and why this happens, challenging existing theories of party power along the way.
“The conventional wisdom is that you'll have strong leaders when a party is unified—that is, when members are in line ideologically—and weak leaders when a party is divided,” Bloch Rubin said. “But what I find is that this just does not fit the empirical reality.”
Traditionally, scholars have thought that party divisions reflect underlying disagreements about the substance of politics—the more disagreement about a particular policy or procedural question, the more divided the party.
But Bloch Rubin argues there is more to party divisions than members’ ideological preferences. She also refers to a collaborative dimension of party divisions: Distinct from the ideological dimension of politics, the collaborative dimension maps the choice every member makes about whether to pursue their goals independently or to instead join forces with like-minded co-partisans to get their way.
Sometimes, multiple members who agree with each other about something—what she calls a faction—will work closely together. But other times they won’t, and Bloch Rubin suggests these choices create a collaborative landscape that shapes leader power.
“The big idea is that we can describe parties in terms of collaborative configurations,” she said. “Sometimes leaders are going to govern parties that are asymmetrically divided—that is a party where only one faction is working together. But leaders can also confront a symmetrically divided party, where all factions are collaborating on roughly equal terms.”
The contemporary Republican conference is an example of an asymmetric division. Conservative Republicans are well organized, engage with each other and work together regularly. Moderate Republicans, by contrast, have been unwilling to do the same.
According to Bloch Rubin, leaders are generally able to get more of what they want under conditions of party symmetry than under conditions of party asymmetry.
Thinking about politics in this way, she notes, can help us to understand why recent congresses have seen so much variation in how leaders of divided parties perform.
“Nancy Pelosi governed her party for almost 20 years, and as speaker, racked up a ton of legislative accomplishments,” Bloch Rubin said. “But it is notable that her Republican counterparts, from John Boehner to Mike Johnson, have really struggled. The challenge for political scientists is that we can’t just blame polarization or party divisions for their trouble, because Pelosi dealt with a polarized Congress and her House Democrats were divided too.”
For Bloch Rubin, the key is that Pelosi’s party grew more symmetric over the past decade. While moderate House Democrats have long collaborated extensively, progressives have significantly augmented their collaborative efforts. Republican leaders have been less fortunate.
While members of the party’s right flank work well together, Republican moderates have generally shunned the kinds of collaborative activities that would allow them to act as an effective counterweight. The result is that Republican leaders have routinely found they are at the mercy of their most conservative members.
Bloch Rubin says that better understanding how members’ collaborative choices structure leadership in Congress can also help us to see deep continuities in its institutional structure.
“It is really tempting to think that everything about our present politics is new or a major break from the past, but these collaborative dynamics are timeless,” she said. “Different periods in time present their own governance challenges, but the core organizational logics that structure legislative life matter for leaders across time in ways that are unchanging.”
In addition to the more current examples, Bloch Rubin also reflects on the careers of leaders such as Sam Rayburn, who was the longest serving speaker in United States history, and Tip O’Neill, who is credited with being the first modern speaker to govern in an era of higher transparency and sharpened inter-party disagreement.
“By revisiting these important leaders and showing that we can understand their performance on the basis of their parties’ collaborative dynamics, I think it provides additional evidence that there are real analytic payoffs to thinking about legislative politics in the ways that I'm encouraging readers to do,” Bloch Rubin said.
In addition to reaching political scientists, she hopes the book will be read by both citizens and reformers. For those concerned about ineffective leadership, extremism and political polarization, Bloch Rubin recommends investing resources in helping Congress’s existing moderates to work together productively.
“One lesson from this book is that voters shouldn’t assume that the lawmakers chosen to lead divided parties can’t govern their members well,” she said, “as leaders have some agency in moving an asymmetrically divided party into a party that has greater symmetry.”
This article was originally published on the Department of Political Science website.
