Partisan Polarization: Is It Crippling Congress? (with Frances E. Lee)
The topic of this episode is: “Partisan polarization: Is it crippling Congress?”
My guest is Frances Lee. She is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and a top scholar on Congress. She is the author and co-author of many articles and books on Congress, and has written for popular publications including the Atlantic magazine and the New York Times. Most recently she and James Curry published, The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era (Chicago 2020), which analyzes and addresses the subject of this episode—polarization in our national legislature.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
Professor Lee, welcome to the podcast.
Frances E. Lee:
Thank you, Kevin. It's great to be here.
Kevin Kosar:
Let's start by ensuring that we all are on the same page: you, I, and listeners alike. When we speak of Congress, what do we mean by the term partisan polarization?
Frances E. Lee:
Partisan polarization has multiple meanings and I think that's probably why you began with this question.
A layman's or a dictionary definition of polarization means division into two sharply contrasting groups. Congress is clearly polarized in this sense. Congress sees much more partisan conflict. Conflict in Congress breaks down more reliably on partisan lines than it did throughout most of the 20th century. We routinely see votes that pit 90% or more Democrats against 90% or more Republicans, a partisan divide that's more deep and predictable than we used to see.
However, by partisan polarization, political scientists often mean something more technical. In its most rigorous form, the concept of polarization is grounded in spatial theory. It rests on a theorized choice space in which policy preferences are ranged on an underlying continuum from left to right. In this sense, parties become more polarized as the preferences of members become more distinctly bimodal, and as the two parties’ modes move farther apart from one another.
It's far from clear that parties are polarized in this second sense. The problem is that the issues at stake in congressional politics are diverse. On some issues, the congressional parties have moved closer together and on some issues, they've moved farther apart. There's little doubt that the post-Trump parties in Congress are
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