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Solving Congressional Partisan Polarization One Caucus at a Time

Solving Congressional Partisan Polarization One Caucus at a Time. Project Motivations. Follow-up from forthcoming book Bridging the Information Gap: Legislative Member Organizations as Social Networks in the United States and European Union , U. Michigan Press, 2013.

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Solving Congressional Partisan Polarization One Caucus at a Time

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  1. Solving Congressional Partisan Polarization One Caucus at a Time

  2. Project Motivations • Follow-up from forthcoming book • Bridging the Information Gap: Legislative Member Organizations as Social Networks in the United States and European Union, U. Michigan Press, 2013. • Is the proliferation of caucuses in Congress a response to increased partisan polarization? • If so, do caucuses alleviate the effects of partisan polarization?

  3. Congress is Polarized

  4. Caucuses are Growing

  5. Caucus Growth and Polarization Correlation

  6. Caucuses are Bipartisan

  7. A modestResearch Question • Are opposite-party legislators who share caucus memberships more likely to vote together than those who don’t share caucus memberships? • Today: 103rd-111th Congresses (2004-2010)

  8. Co-voting • The frequency with which any pair of legislators casts the same vote. • Descriptive • Similar to NOMINATE, but dyadic • Raw roll-call inputs • 864,879 dyads • Mean = 0.68, (Stand. Dev. = 0.21)

  9. Co-votingby co-partisans

  10. Argument • MCs have strong incentives to maintain communication and relationships with cross-partisans (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1987; Mutz2006; Ringe, Victor, and Gross 2013) • Caucuses are voluntary, non-voting groups. • When Congress is more polarized, MCs have stronger incentives to join bipartisan groups. • As partisanship increases, the bi-partisan caucus system will grow. • The increased participation in bi-partisan caucuses reduces overall partisan polarization.

  11. Argument Increased Partisan Polarization (in roll calls) Seek Bipartisan Relationships via Caucuses Bi-partisan Caucuses Grow Partisan Polarization Declines (in ??)

  12. Today’s Inference • If the argument is true, the we should observe increased co-voting among caucus-connected opposite-partisans.

  13. Control for other known covariates • Joint Committee Membership • From the same state • Ideological distance • Same gender • In leadership (party leader, committee chair)

  14. Dyadic Regression for Opposite-Party Pairs N= 430,943; R-Squared= 0.75; Pr(F) = 0.00; fixed effects for time included, errors clustered on dyad

  15. Interpretations • There is an association between opposite-party voting and caucus participation. • BUT… • Autocorrelation in the errors (how to build a better statistical model)? • How to test that caucuses are a result of increased partisanship? • If MCs join caucuses to overcome partisanship, should we observe it in the roll calls? Causal feedback.

  16. Can Both be True? • Can it be that partisan polarization remains in the face of increased cross-party voting by caucus members? • If so, how many MCs would have to participate in the caucus “inoculation” before we would see an effect in roll calls?

  17. Moving Forward • Treat caucus membership as an experimental “treatment” effect. Measure the voting behavior of co-members before and after joining the group. • Include cosponsorship as a covariate. • Better control for regional covariation. • Aggregate ties between MCs?

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