Not long ago, Mark posed a question about the responsiveness of divided government in relation to the discussion that he, Freddie, and I had about size, scope, and effectiveness of government generally. In that post, Mark, with his usual aplomb, suggests that in theory, divided government is generally a desirable state of affairs for citizens of a democratic republic.
Said Mark,
This isn’t to say that divided government is a cure-all that ensures that all our problems will be competently dealt with. Instead, it’s just to say that divided government makes three things more likely: 1. Where there is no national consensus on the existence of a problem, no legislation will try to fix that alleged problem; 2. Where there is a national consensus on the existence of a problem, legislation will be strongly pushed that seeks to solve that problem; and 3. Legislation that passes will be the result of good-faith negotiations about how best to solve the problem.
The challenge with this assertion is that it works in theory. In practice; however, it is, like so many other things, rarely such a clean state of affairs. While I’m not disagreeing with Mark per se (though we tend to agree on so damned much that it would be nice to get a good row going between us), I think looking at a real life example of divided government and the impacts it has on the populace might be instructive.
In keeping with my “home-grown” theme lately, it just so happens that I live in one such instance: oh, Canada…
Here in the frozen tundra, because we have a Parliamentary style of government with five major parties (depending on who you ask), we also have the possibility of forming a a minority government — the ultimate in divided government. And, in fact, for the past five years, Canada has had a minority government in power. In theory, if we follow Mark’s reasoning, this should lead to a more stable and responsive government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Anyone following Canadian politics knows that this has not been the case. Just this past June, the two major parties in Canadian politics, descriptively named the Liberals and the Conservatives (imaginative naming, it just ain’t our thing) found themselves in a game of brinksmanship that nearly brought the country to its fourth federal election in five years for the second time in less than a year!
Stable my eye.
Now, I know that this is not a scenario that would play itself out in the context of US politics as y’all don’t have a parliamentary system where government can fall due to a vote of non-confidence, but he point here isn’t so much about procedure as it is about the atmospheric impacts that divided government can have on political discourse in general. The fact of the matter is that the divided state of government in Canada has not led to a sense that government is either more stable or more responsive, but rather a general feeling of frustration at government’s ineffectiveness and inability to serve the people it is supposed to.
And while government gridlock might be the stuff of dreams for libertarians like Mark and Jaybird, for a majority of Canadians (and I would dare to speculate a majority of Americans) said government inaction due to partisan bickering is an extremely sore point. So much so, in fact, that polling of a cross section of Canadians around their thoughts about going to yet another federal election revealed that a majority of Canadian had grown weary of voting with their conscience and winding up with a divided minority government and would have opted to vote strategically to enable a majority government once again.
In short, the five years plus that Canadians have spent with divided minority government is driving them back in the direction of a US style of majoritarian government.
Weird.
Needless to say, I take that stark reality to be a bit of a fly in Mark’s ointment. I think this reality also drives a bit a stake through the heart of the third party utopia.
I mean, I understand the general distaste of folks like commenter Bob Cheeks with the options presented by the two major parties and I can dig the desire for a real alternative at the ballot box. The opportunity to vote one’s conscience and feel genuinely represented is supposed to be the promise if democracy. And it isn’t a vaulted promise by any stretch if the imagination.
But look, any talk about third parties as an honest means of solving America’s political challenges misses a key point by my lights. Again, Canadians have a choice of five major parties when they go to the polls and the result of late has been a shift away from conscientious voting towards strategic voting.
Why is that?
To my mind, it lies in the fact that Canada’s five parties engage in every bit as much partisan bickering as the US’ two parties. Citizens might feel like their votes are going towards people more closely aligned with their beliefs, but no amount of feeling good makes up for a political debate that comes off as mostly shouting and posturing.
So, at the end of the day, you can have two, five, or twenty parties — if your discourse is hollow, people are likely to wind up dissatisfied.Which, of course, brings us full circle back to my favourite hobby horse: improving our political discourse. The ever vexing question, which has been put to me more than once, is how we go about doing so. I’ve been wrestling with that question of late and think I have what might considered the beginnings of an answer — at least if you squint real hard.
I think part of the problem here lies in how the question itself is formed. To ask, “What can we do to improve our political discourse?” is to implicitly suggestion that there is some kind of silver bullet answer to this quandary; a panacea that if we only found it would give us the one true path towards a political discourse of substance. In other words, to ask the question is to suggest that there is one page we must all get ourselves onto in order to affect a desirable impact on our discourse.
It is this very cure-all for which I’ve personally ceased searching and of whose existence I am increasingly skeptical.
Rather, I am more and more convinced that the process of taking our discourse from a space of vapidity to a space of profundity or substance is a manifold and thoroughly unplannable process in which the primary injunction isn’t conceptual but rather practical. Which is to say that sitting around and asking one another what we must do to change our discourse is, itself, to miss the very point of the critique. Discourse in the political sphere is a praxis and to so to shift its outcome is to simply engage in the praxis itself. Waiting to conceive of the way in which one is to engage in the praxis is a fool’s errand, never to come to fruition: the conception is the practice itself and how that practice takes place is entirely up to the person asking the question, “How am I to engage?”
The act of asking thew question is to enter into said praxis with a degree of reflexiveness that itself breaks from purely reactive mode of non-engagement that demarcates the calcified norms of our political discourse. Real engage is itself an exercise in substance, in weightiness and sincerity that is kept honest by the rigors that true engage itself demands. The desire to first hit upon a “way” of cultivating such an engagement is, by and large, simply another excuse for non-engagement and is, ultimately, to buy into and reinforce the norms of non-engagement that currently prevail.
That is why, in part, I am remain proud of this site. The League, for all its many flaws, is fundamentally a ground for the practice of engagement. In formulating the site, we spent hours trying to hit upon the “right way of doing it”. And yet, at the end of the day, we came to realize that there was no “right way of doing it” that did not involve having the courage to go ahead try doing it in the first place. In other words, we couldn’t plan the success of this site, we had to engage our vision in a full-bodied fashion and navigate what hairpin turns presented themselves, hoping that we might pick up fellow wayfarers along the way.
In my practice of yoga, it is often said that the true practice of yoga happens when you leave the mat and that the physical practice in which we engage in merely a constant practice towards summoning the willingness and openness to engage in what is the primary practice: life.
So too, I think, is this amorphous blog the mat for our practice of a political discourse of substance. A yoga of politics, if you will. It is here that we attempt to practice this discourse in a way that strikes as authentic, as beyond the bric-a-brac that we all recognize to be, at base, a hollow and self-serving cul-de-sac of ideological masturbation. We come here because we seek a way of getting through those banalities: not around or over or away from, but to pass into them and then through them in a meaningful way. We practice because there is no way through that doesn’t involve engagement in an honest fashion.
But if you ask me: how do we improve our discourse? How do we walk the line through vapidity, insincerity, and juvenility and not become, ourselves, vapid, insincere, and juvenile? All I can say is that you have to take your practice off the mat and into your life with the same courage and genuine desire to see what comes of it that I’ve witnessed many times over here. And that is, fundamentally, all that we can really do in this regard.
So to tie all of this together in something approaching a coherent fashion: looking to whether government is divided or unified, large or small, liberal or conservative as our compass point strikes me as wrongheaded. To look outside of ourselves for some kind of given litmus test is nothing other than to reinforce the status quo of non-engagement in which we already whole-heartedly participate. Engagement, as exemplified by a grounded and involved citizenry, for whom the practice of political discourse that is embedded in they very context of our lives is in no way different from an engagement in that practice with the goal of influencing and affecting its outcomes and thereby the outcomes of our own lives: this is the crucible from which we must seek to end our continual game of avoidance.
It is a trickier thing than we might imagine, in no small part because we have spent so much time and energy convincing ourselves that we have already overcome it.
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{ 20 comments }
In my opinion the US does have a parlimentary system…from a certain perspective. Let’s take the last election. Obama managed to stitch together a large coalition of voters, some of whom will always be inclined to vote Democratic, some who are true swing voters and some disaffected folks who normally pull the lever for Republicans. That is temporary and it’s reactionary, which is the defining characteristic of a coalition in my opinion.
There’s very little that a gay man in New York, a tree hugger in Berkley, a pro-union guy in Michigan and a poor black man on the South Side of Chicago have in common. Yet all were a part of the Obama coalition in 2008. Finding the common denominator is how you win elections.
In the sense that coalitions are fleeting, I think this becomes a fair substitute for true third parties in the US. It’s not perfect, but I agree with Scott that the divisive nature of true Parlimentary government equals an inaction that most Americans could not abide.
Multiple parties do not define a parliamentary system. My understanding of a parliamentary system is one in which the legislative picks the executive, usually a prime minister.
The chart found at the link below gives the following information. During the first half of the 20th century the U.S. experienced divided government for a total of eight years, 8/50. During the second half government was divided for 32 years, 32/50. A stark contrast by any measure.
I’m unwilling to venture a guess as to which 50 year period fared better. Indeed I’m unwilling to even entertain the question if divided government or unified government is meaningful in determining when government works better.
http://www.answers.com/topic/divided-government
Ooops. What I wanted to include, but it’s obvious, the U.S. had a unified government 60 years during the 20th century.
Well Scott, the governments are so different between the two countries as to make the discussion almost moot in my opinion. All you have to do is observe that in Canada a divided government is an inherently unstable beast and typically prompt another election (and thus the suspension of government business in favor of electioneering). In the US a minority government will lean towards generating something more like what Mark describes due to the straight jacket of the elections occurring only at set intervals regardless of government performance. Personally I love how in a parlimentary system the government can fall due to being stupid. But on this issue maybe the American system of set election terms looks better.
Just to add to what North says above, with which I fully agree, I think there’s also a key distinction to be made between whether a polity is dissatisfied with their government’s responsiveness and whether that government is actually being responsive.
My argument was that in a divided government, you’re going to likely get less legislation overall, but that the legislation that does become law will be on issues where there’s a national consensus and that said legislation will better be more far-reaching and meaningful than were it passed under a unified government.
Consensus means something far in excess of 50% + 1, though. Indeed, my argument would hold that issues where there was only a slight majority(or, more likely, a plurality) in favor of addressing a particular issue, divided government probably would not address that issue. A unified government, I would argue, would address that issue, but would do so in a pretty half-assed way, which is how a unified government would also address issues where they had a national consensus behind them.
Addressing issues in a half-assed way usually is good enough for a party’s base, though, and probably also enough for people who are interested in the issue but aren’t particularly expert at it. So they’ll feel like government is being responsive even though as a matter of fact, government has done virtually nothing (and has maybe even made matters worse).
I guess what I’m saying is that simply passing a boatload of legislation may make people who support the governing party feel like government is being more responsive but it won’t necessarily be true. In fact, I would argue that it will make the electorate more polarized as more legislation is passed on divisive issues and weaker (and more nakedly partisan) legislation is passed on unifying issues.
Divided government may make people feel like government is being less responsive because less legislation is getting passed into law but in fact it’s more responsive because the areas where there is less legislation will be areas that are basically hobby horses of one side of the aisle or another, while the areas where a consensus exists will have better and stronger legislation on average.
“My argument was that in a divided government, you’re going to likely get less legislation overall, but that the legislation that does become law will be on issues where there’s a national consensus and that said legislation will better be more far-reaching and meaningful than were it passed under a unified government.”
Yes, but can you provide examples of “legislation [that was] better…more far-reaching and meaningful than [that] passed under a unified government?”
In other words, do you find the quality of legislation passed during the 40 years of divided government in 20th century America superior to the legislation passed during the 60 years of unified government. If you answer “yes” what is that legislation?
I know this doesn’t directly address your question, but one thing I’d say is that modern interest group politics play a fairly central role in my argument but didn’t really exist in the first half of the 20th century and really not until the late ’60s/early ’70s.
Still, your point about the first half of the century is a good one that certainly is inconsistent with my theory. Even though I probably take a starkly different view of the New Deal than you, it’s tough for me to deny that the changes were both far-reaching and meaningful (whether they were effective I think depends on the specific reform to which you’re referring).
Paging mw from DWSUWF….
http://westanddivided.blogspot.com
As I said in the comment to my original post, though, I’m not 100% sold on this theory. But except for 2007-2009, we’ve had pretty close to unified government since 2001 (Jim Jeffords notwithstanding). And during that period, I tend to think that the least-bad was 2007-2009. I also thought the mid-to-late ’90s were pretty good, it’s just that outside of welfare reform there weren’t many issues where there was much of a consensus.
Here are a few examples of what I would call “far-reaching” legislation passed during periods of unified government. I’m not going to characterize them as “better” because that is pretty much determined by political philosophy.
1902 New Lands Reclamation Act, Rep.
1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, Rep
1910 Man Act, Rep.
1913 Federal Reserve System, Dem.
1919 Federal Trade Commission, Dem.
1935 Wagner Act, Dem.
1944 GI Bill of Rights, Dem.
1961 Peace Corps, Dem
1964 Civil Rights Bill, Dem.
2003 Medicare Part D, Rep
Mark, I feel like your answer is a bit utopian, for this reason: you assume divided government will result in bills passing only on which both sides can agree, therefore making those bills better. But I think that breaks down in the US when you consider specific difficult issues. Consider Civil Rights or Health Care or 80s deregulation. On each issue, one side of the government was so opposed to or ignorant of a clearly necessary change that no progress on them was possible in a divided government. The only way they could get passed was when one party had control and the votes to move. The political process suffered for this – so in that sense, I agree with your theory. But if the country had waited for the other side to come to the table, we might still be waiting on those reforms (and for health care, we still are). There comes a point when the ideological blinders of a party in question makes necessary action impossible in a divided government.
And getting back to what Scott said, I also wonder about the focus of our representatives. Clearly, the focus of republicans now is not getting good legislation passed, but eliminating all legislation, even those which they might agree with, to prevent democrats from looking good. But is that any different when the government is more divided? We still have the tendency to attribute whatever party has the presidency as the “dominant” party, and most congressmen take that as a cue to sabotage the other side to make the look bad, rather than engage the bills they propose to work out a compromise. And I saw this when Clinton had a divided government, and when we had unified government in most of the 00s. The political culture of the US is to win the battle, and screw the legislation if it isn’t yours. I think that is a discourse problem, as Scott identifies above.
I’m inclined to agree with BCChase, Mark. If the contention is that legislation will only happen when both sides come together, that’s basically an argument for Centrism. I don’t think there’s any evidence to believe the Centrist solution is usually the right one. Quite frankly I think both sides are right to fight for their beliefs from time to time and it’s really the voters who become the arbitrators of the disagreement and in a democracy we should trust that the voters will usually judge things correctly.
I don’t think this is at all an argument for centrism, which is a political view that I probably despise at least as equally as you do, if not more. Instead, I would argue that in a unified government, the real balance of power lies with the centrists, which is why you’ll tend to get more counterproductive and less politically risky legislation in such instances. I’d argue that in a divided government, the incentives are such that the ideologues that make up the bulk of each party are in a situation where they have to negotiate with each other directly on the small handful of issues where they can’t be seen as obstructionist (ie, those issues where there really is a national consensus for some sort of reform). This results in legislation that reflects the normative principles of both sides but nonetheless is likely to be at least somewhat effective rather than legislation that merely reflects what is electorally palatable in the handful of districts represented by true centrists who worry about losing their seats due to the overreach of their party’s strongest ideologues.
I don’t know about utopian – I’m expressing this in terms of likelihoods rather than certainties. Another thing that’s central here is whether we’re talking about issues where there is yet a national consensus on the existence of a problem. On the truly divisive issues, there is obviously no real consensus, just political score settling to be had, which is difficult to do in divided government but easier to do in unified government. But I think in a divided government, on those rare issues where there really is a national consensus, it is more likely that you will get the two sides negotiating in good faith because it will be politically risky for either side to bear the blame for failing to solve a problem that an overwhelming majority of Americans are concerned about. These are, I must emphasize, quite rare issues.
I should add that I agree that we have a discourse problem in general that creates greater polarization, and I’ve seen some pretty strong evidence to suggest that this problem has been getting progressively worse for decades without regard to the division of government. But I do think that a divided government at least forces parties to the negotiating table in a materially different and more constructive way than in a unified government.
Mark, I think it comes down to this: are the issues on which there is some basic level of national consensus, such that good-faith negotiations can be had, too rare for government to function correctly? I would argue they generally are. Moreover, as in the case with health care now and in the last couple of Bush years, even when there is consensus, unhealthy discourse can go a long way towards obscuring or eliminating it. And then where are we? So I might agree with your point on divided government, but its application seems very narrow.
Canada’s government, as I understand it, engaged in massive “throw the bums out” five years back.
The liberal party had a deadlock since Mulroney, pretty much (fun thing to do when visiting in-laws in PEI: say “the last PM worth a damn was Mulroney”). The Liberal party’s coalition since Mulroney was *HUGE*. The Conservatives had, pretty much, Alberta. That’s it. Everywhere else in the country voted Liberal. Why? Because Mulroney screwed stuff up so badly.
This allowed the Liberals something akin to absolute power which, of course, corrupted absolutely. Harper got in because the Canadians were throwing the bums out… and assumed that this meant that he had a mandate. When he did stuff as if he had a mandate, it was brinksmanship (the attempt to get rid of gay marriage comes to mind). When he did stuff as if he had to work with a coalition, the seas got a lot less choppy.
What Canada wanted was Liberals, only not corrupt… and they got forced between Conservatives who, at the time, had not proven to be corrupt and Liberals who had.
Certainly the Liberals got corrupt in the end Jaybird. I agree. But they had a long run in power that was actually highly productive to the overall wellbeing of the country even by libertine standards. The Liberal were able to balance the budget and reduce the deficit (actually reduce, not just keep the same) for much of the 90′s. They also enacted reform of Canada’s pension system (the equivalent of Social Security) which have now permanently put the program in the black. They also oversaw a change in government language and policy that helped them thrash the seperatist movement (though it will never leave now that it’s ensconced in its role as a stick to threaten the country with to extort more butter for Quebec). Certainly by the end of their run they were thoroughly in need of throwing out but over the course of their terms the Liberals did the country a lot more good than harm.
I’m not saying they didn’t.
It was more pointing out that the divided government of Canada is the division of people who want to vote for an uncorrupt Liberal party and are stuck between voting for a (relatively) uncorrupt conservative party vs. voting for a (relatively) corrupt liberal one. Which pride do you swallow? Which flavor of bile do you prefer?
The divided government of the US strikes me as significantly different insofar as you’ve got the Birchers vs the Free Mumia types.
Hell, even Canada’s “conservative” party is about as conservative as the democrats in the 80′s. So the Canadian spectrum runs from “conservatively liberal” to “holy crap that’s liberal”.
The “division” within the divided government doesn’t cover that big of a split (Alberta vs. everybody else, and 20% of Albertans are expat Americans anyway).
I imagine that around the time that the Conservative Party in Canada achieves most of the corruption the Liberals were able to achieve, those bums will get thrown out and Canada will go back to a “healthy coalition”.
(Interestingly, I also made some jokes about Chrétien’s accent and my bro-in-law explained to me that they didn’t hear “provential” but “sneaky/cunning” in his accent. I still grin when I think about that.)
Yeah, I’d agree with you on a lot of that. Chrétien was a character but he got a lot done. Now mind you he was a crook but what the heck, that’s politics for you.
I’m inclined to posit even that Canada is not so much a 5 party country as it is a one party country. The Liberals have been the natural governing party ever since Mulrooney quite literally destroyed the Tories. The Liberals did a tolerable job on the subject of actually running the country were essentially thrown out of power by the voters to wring the most horrible incompetents and crooks out of their ranks.
I mean look at the other 4 parties;
The Conservatives: Zombie remnants of the old dead Federal Tories plus imported Americans and Albertans. you might as well call them the Bloc Alberta.
The Bloc: Aka the “wring numnums from the country for Quebec” party. I don’t think they even campaign outside of Quebec. Nuff said.
The NPD: Our beloved commie hippies playing tug of war with the Conservatives with the Liberals playing the role of the rope.
The Greens: An even more environmentally obsessed version of the NDP. It’s like Ralph Nader got hired by Greenpeace and PETA to form a political party.
There’s not much threat to the ol Liberals in that lot if the Liberals would ever get serious again.
Canada’s minority governments are unstable because our winner-take-all voting system encourages parties to roll the dice one more time. Thirty-eight percent of the votes will get you a “majority” government and unbridled power for five years.
New Zealand has had five minority governments since they switched to proportional voting in 1993. All lived out their full term (3 years).
This is embarrassing. I missed this post completely. No excuses, I can only attribute this to my haphazard blogging habits. To make up for it, I have added Scott’s post to my periodic but irregularly scheduled Divided Government compilation, and will close the loop by paraphrasing my inexcusably late reply here, focusing primarily on his Canada/USA comparison:
First point: It is not clear to me that a “stable government” should be considered a primary objective and a positive good. Totalitarian governments can be notoriously stable, sometimes for decades, until they suddenly become unstable due to revolution, war, or economic collapse. It strikes me a “stable government” is the exact opposite of a “responsive government” in a dynamic pluralistic society.
Second point: The distinction between the Canadian example and the USA, is that our constitutional government was designed from the ground up to be a divided government as explained clearly by constitutional architect James Madison in Federalist #51. If partisan unity overrides the checks and balances built into the Constitution, then our government is not working as designed. Historian Joseph Ellis coined a beautiful phrase that succinctly sums up how our unique constitutional government is conceived – the “enshrinement of argument“.
What a perfect phrase to describe our Constitution and our national zeitgeist – “the enshrinement of argument”. In this rancorous health care debate, with the mind numbing and meaningless appeals to “unity” amid the disparagement of partisanship and polarization, it is useful to recall that this country was built (and the constitution designed) on the expectation and promotion of continuous conflict and argument. For the founders, “unity” and “government power” was a dangerous mix to be feared and avoided. It smacked of monarchy. Checks, balances, divided government and pitting “ambition against ambition” was exactly the state they sought to enshrine. Frustrating? Certainly. I consider that an indicator that our government is operating within design specifications.
A parliamentary government, by contrast, is designed to elect a unified government for as long as the electorate considers said government to be representative of the majority. One could argue that a divided partisan government is contrary to the spirit and design of a parliamentary system, while a unified partisan government is contrary to the spirit and design of the U.S. Constitution.
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