A Different Democracy by Steven L. Taylor

Author:Steven L. Taylor [Taylor, Steven L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Fig. 6.1. Ideological distance of Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives over time

Source: Keith Poole, www.voteview.com.

These patterns are clearly evident in figure 6.1, which plots the mean position of each major party’s members in the House of Representatives on a liberal-conservative scale developed by Poole and Rosenthal (1997 and 2007), based on members’ votes on legislation. The farther a party’s mean position lies toward the top of the graph, the more it leans to the conservative (right) side, whereas points near the bottom of the graph indicate a mean position that is more liberal (or left). The graph not only shows Republicans and Democrats as parties, but also breaks out Democrats according to South and North. The degree to which there used to be a centrist Southern Democratic component to the US party system is thus visible. However, this has now mostly vanished, and the great gap between the mean position of each party is evident in the most recent decades. Both parties have moved away from the center, but Republicans more so. While figure 6.1 shows polarization in the House, a similar process has also occurred in the US Senate.15

It is worth noting that this process of polarization has tended to make the United States more like many other democracies, especially in western Europe, in that it means parties are more distinct and focused on national issues, whereas in the past, US parties overlapped in their issue positions and were more internally divided. However, it is probably the case that the overall ideological spread of the two parties remains less than in many of our comparison cases, though measuring ideology across both countries and time periods is difficult (see point 7, subsequently).

To refer back to the previous discussion: The nonhierarchical, or bottom-up, nature of the parties means that the degree to which the parties are polarized or not is a function of the members themselves, not party elites or centrally enforced policy platforms. For example, before the partisan realignment that came about with the 1994 congressional elections, the parties were more ideologically amorphous, as noted earlier, because the result of the bottom-up nature of the parties meant that many conservative southern Democrats influenced the behavior of that party. Once those conservative southern Democrats switched to being conservative southern Republicans, this changed the nature of both parties. Such dynamics mean that factionalism within the parties can lead to changes on policy positions (bubbling from the bottom up), for example, the influence of evangelical candidates within the Republican Party in the 1980s and 1990s and, more clearly, the emergence of the Tea Party faction within the Republican Party in the 2010 election. Faction influence of this nature can be seen in the 2011 fight in the Congress over raising the federal debt limit. In that debate, Republican Party leader Speaker of the House John Boehner appeared willing to compromise with the Senate and the Obama administration on the legislation, but was initially blocked by the Tea Party caucus in the House of Representatives.

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