INTRODUCTION

For democracy in a large republic to succeed, many believe that responsible party government is needed, with each party offering voters a clear alternative vision regarding how the polity should be governed and then, if it wins the election, exerting sufficient discipline over its elected members to implement its vision. America was once thought to have disciplined and responsible parties. Indeed, students of nineteenth-century American politics saw parties as the principal means by which a continental nation had been brought together: “There is a sense in which our parties may be said to have been our real body politic. Not the authority of Congress, not the leadership of the President, but the discipline and zest of parties has held us together, has made it possible for us to form and to carry out national programs.”

Since early in the twentieth century, however, critics of American politics have often argued that congressional parties are largely moribund.

The debate over whether to enact a tax and expenditure limit (TEL) in California has been one of the key policy battles of Arnold Schwarzenegger's governorship. During the recall campaign, Schwarzenegger voiced his support for a limit as a cold turkey cure for the legislature's “addiction” to spending. Soon after his election, he threatened to propose an initiative capping total expenditures, though he eventually compromised and worked with Democrats to enact a tighter balanced-budget requirement. Two years later, he followed through on his threat and put a spending limit on the ballot, only to see it lose badly when voters blanched at the school funding cuts that it might deliver. Rarely mentioned in this debate over whether California needs a TEL, however, is the fact that it already has one.

Proposition 4, the “Gann limit,” was passed in 1979 as part of the state's famed tax revolt and established a formula limiting the growth of expenditures of tax dollars. Although its formula has been modified, the Gann limit is still in effect, and Poterba and Rueben's cross-state analysis of TELs still categorizes it as “binding.” Yet California's fiscal history – along with the current debate over a spending limit – suggests that the Gann limit has not constrained the growth of state government. Since its passage, total spending in the state has continued to exceed the national average by about the same margin.

The literature on recorded votes in Congress is vast (for surveys, see Collie 1984; Thompson and Silbey 1984; Poole 2005). Most of it, including that portion that deals with the postwar House of Representatives, concludes that party is the single best predictor of congressional voting behavior (Turner 1951; Truman 1959; Matthews 1960; Marwell 1967; Turner and Schneier 1970). At the same time, however, those who take a historical view emphasize the declining importance of party voting in Congress during the twentieth century (Cooper, Brady, and Hurley 1977; Brady, Cooper, and Hurley 1979; Collie 1988a; Clubb and Traugott 1977; Collie and Brady 1985). Collie (1984, 8) summarizes research in this vein up to the 1980s as showing “an erratic but overall decline in the levels of both intraparty cohesion and interparty conflict since the turn of the century.”

Our purpose in this chapter is threefold: first, to discuss some recent work dealing with trends in party voting since 1980, a period not included in the literature cited previously; second, to review the methods used and results found in the literature on the pre-1980 period; and third, to provide a new perspective on historical trends in party voting since the New Deal. We argue that this new perspective centers on the activity of party leaders rather than party majorities. Thus, for example, instead of focusing on such standard measures as the number of party votes – roll calls in which a majority of Republicans oppose a majority of Democrats – we look at party leadership votes, defined as roll calls in which the Republican and Democratic leaderships oppose one another.

One of the primary building blocks of the committee government model is the idea that members, once appointed to a standing committee, are automatically ensured security of tenure and promotion by seniority. The role of seniority has of course changed considerably in the last generation. In the early postwar House, seniority was the “single automatic criterion for selecting chairmen” of the standing committees (Hinckley 1971, 6). Beginning in the 1970s, however, other criteria – in particular, the preferences of the majority party's caucus – became more salient. Three long-time chairs of the House were deposed by the Democratic Caucus in 1975, and by our count uncompensated violations of committee seniority occurred in six of the seven succeeding Congresses.

In this chapter, we first review the evidence from the early postwar era of the “Rayburn House” (Cooper and Brady 1981) and then turn to more recent developments.

Many students of American national politics have noticed the cozy arrangements between congressional committee members, executive agents, and interest group lobbyists that seem to dominate decision making in a wide range of policy arenas. These “iron triangles” or “unholy trinities,” also known by the less pejorative tag of “subgovernments,” are thought to be largely independent of presidents, party leaders, and other “outside” influences.

In the standard analysis, subgovernments stem from a set of early twentieth-century congressional reforms that redistributed power from party leaders to committee chairpersons. The most important of these reforms came with the revolt against “czar rule” in 1910 and 1911, when Progressive Republicans united with Democrats to strip the Speakership of much of its power. After a brief period during which the majority party caucus was active in determining policy, the House entered the era of “committee government,” during which “each committee was left to fashion public policy in its own jurisdiction” (Dodd and Oppenheimer 1977, 22) and party leaders acted “as agents for, rather than superiors to, committee leaders and members of the inner club” (Shepsle 1989, 246). Policy in the decentralized, postrevolt House was “incubated and crafted by interested members who monopolized the berths on committees important to their constituents' concerns.” The end result was a “gigantic institutional logroll” that “sanctified the division of labor that permitted policy making by subgovernments” (Shepsle 1989, 246–7).

Starting with this and the next chapter, we begin to articulate a view of parties as legislative cartels. This metaphor seems apt to us in part because both cartels and parties – indeed organizations in general – face a variety of collective dilemmas that must be solved if the organization is to operate effectively. This chapter accordingly deals with the general topic of organizational design and structure. The next chapter then focuses more specifically on legislative parties.

Social scientists from a variety of disciplines study institutions such as legislatures, business firms, public and private bureaucracies, armies, and trade associations. This chapter reviews what we consider to be the most satisfying and comprehensive theory of institutional origins and design: what we shall refer to as the neo-institutional or neocontractarian theory. This theory, exposited fully in no single source, appears in remarkably similar form in a variety of fields. It will be familiar to normative political theorists as a generalized version of the Hobbesian theory of the state, to positive political theorists as a variant on the idea of a “political entrepreneur,” and to industrial organization economists as an elaboration on the Alchian/Demsetz theory of the firm. Our purpose here is to underscore the similarity of these various theories – all of which seek to explain institutional features in terms of the choices made by rational individuals facing collective dilemmas – and to examine the answers given to two key questions: How do institutions “solve” collective dilemmas?

Definitions of political parties have been offered from two main perspectives: one emphasizing structure; the other, purpose. The structural perspective defines parties according to various observable features of their organization. Studies of the historical development of parties, for example, take pains to distinguish “premodern” parties from “modern” ones, typically by pointing to the increasing elaboration of extraparliamentary structures in the latter (Duverger 1954; LaPalombara and Weiner 1966). The purposive approach, in contrast, defines and categorizes political parties by the goals that they pursue. Typical examples include Edmund Burke's definition of a party as a group of men who seek to further “some particular principle in which they are all agreed” (Burke 1975, 113); Schattschneider's definition, whereby a political party is “an organized attempt to get … control of the government” (Schattschneider 1942, 35); and that of Downs, whereby “a political party is a team of men seeking to control the governing apparatus by gaining office in a duly constituted election” (Downs 1957, 25).

Neither the structural nor the purposive definitions of parties are suited to the needs of this chapter. The structural definitions take as defining features the kinds of things that we hope to explain. Moreover, these definitions generally turn on extraparliamentary organization rather than on the intraparliamentary organization that is our main concern. The purposive definitions of party, on the other hand, assume too much about the internal unity of parties.