In a Times op-ed on Sunday, Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor at National Journal and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, wrote that “the public strongly prefers divided government.”
It does? Really?
Rauch’s evidence: “In all three of the most recent earthshaking midterm elections—1994, 2006 and now 2010—the same candidate won,” that candidate being, yes, “divided government.”
In other words, the fact that our system has often produced divided government proves that the public wants divided government.
Well, our system has also produced a huge national debt. Does that prove that the public wants a huge national debt?
I guess it depends on what the meaning of “the public” is. Is the public (a) an entity whose wants and preferences exist independently of the wants and preferences of living, breathing members of the public? That is, an entity capable of wanting and preferring things that a large majority of its members do not want and do not prefer? Or is the public (b) made up of individual human beings and groups of human beings who have wants and preferences of which they are aware?
If it’s (a), as Rauch’s argument certainly seems to assume, then I’m not sure what the difference would be between “what the public wants” and “what the public gets.” “What the public wants” becomes close to meaningless.
If it’s (b), though, then you would expect there to be a substantial-to-decisive number of actual people whose voting behavior reflects the preference for divided government that Rauch discerns. You would expect, for example, that such people would express their preference by voting for Presidential and Congressional candidates of different parties.
Shortly before the 2008 election, John Sides, at the supersmart poli-sci blog The Monkey Cage, posted this chart:
The data cover from 1952 only through 2004. But there’s no reason for the pattern to have changed wildly since then. The percentage of voters opting for divided government ranges between 10 and 30 per cent.
Which is to say that between 70 and 90 per cent of voters do not prefer divided government. Some prefer united Republican Party government. Others prefer united Democratic Party government. All, presumably, would prefer having part of the government controlled by the party they support to having all of the government controlled by the party they oppose. But that hardly means they think that divided government is somehow desirable in and of itself.
Sides’s chart draws exclusively on Presidential election years, the only ones that offer voters an opportunity to choose between divided and undivided government. If there is evidence that there is a big group of midterm voters who suddenly discover a liking for divided government per se (as opposed to a government that is either more Republican or more Democratic than the one they’ve got), I’d very much like to see it.
Rauch goes on to posit two “modes” of government under today’s ideologically polarized party conditions. (Emphasis mine.)
In Mode 1—unified government—the minority party in Washington, shut out of power, has every incentive to make the majority’s life difficult, and does so. Its partisans, with no stake in whether anything gets done in Washington, treat the government as if it were under control of an invading army…. Democrats, when in total control, have little choice but to govern from the left. Republicans, who are even more conservative than Democrats are liberal, govern from the right. Policy is driven toward the edges, instead of the middle.
Since Obama’s election, however, the right has not been shut out of power. For all but seven of the last nineteen months, it has had, and has wielded, the veto power of the Senate filibuster. Even during those seven months, liberals had nothing like total control. A shaky, fragile coalition of liberal Democrats and moderate-to-conservative Democrats had fitful, occasional control.
In Rauch’s Mode 2, divided government,
the dynamic is reversed. Both parties, responsible for governing, have a stake in success. Forced to negotiate and compromise, they drag policy toward the center, allowing moderates to feel represented instead of ignored.
Under the circumstances of the next Congress, both parties do indeed have a stake in success. But it depends on how you define “success.” All the evidence is that the Republicans define success as defeating Obama in 2012. Since the next two years are going to be economically nightmarish no matter who does what, they will do whatever they can to persuade the public that Obama alone is responsible for governing, while they, the Republicans, can meet their responsibility, as they see it, simply by striking poses and preventing him from being able to meet his.
Nor is it self-evident—not to me, anyway—that the center is where “policy” always should be. I suppose that “moderates” are as entitled as anybody else to feel represented, but an entitlement to feeling (and being) represented is not an entitlement to getting one’s way as a matter of course.