The Congress of the United States is, without doubt, the most powerful rep- resentative assembly in the world today. This is not merely to reiterate the fact of the power and wealth of the United States – it is also recognition of the fact that, as a legislature, Congress continues to exercise a degree of independent decision-making power far greater than that retained by the other legislatures of the Western democracies. It is true that, like all legis- lative bodies in the complex modern world, its power has declined relative to that of the so-called ‘executive branch’ of government. Increasingly, it is the president and his administration that initiate policy and provide leader- ship in legislative affairs, but the Congress makes effective decisions upon domestic and foreign policy, upon the role of government in society, and the way in which government activities will be financed. The president can ini- tiate policy, and he can urge it upon Congress with all the resources at his command, but he cannot determine what legislation shall pass, when it will be passed, or in exactly what form it will pass. Once legislation has been intro- duced into the British House of Commons by the government it is virtually certain that it will be passed, but one can only predict what might happen to legislation in Congress, and such predictions, however well-informed, may well turn out to be wrong.
The parameters of congressional power
The power of Congress as a policy-making body is, of course, the result of the whole context of the constitutional and political forces within which it oper- ates. The internal structure of power and the organisation of the Congress reflect this context. We have seen that the Constitution of the United States gives to each of the two Houses of Congress a high degree of legal autonomy, in relation both to each other and to the president. The president has no power to dissolve Congress, nor does he have any direct legislative author- ity. He can send messages to Congress requesting action, and he has a lim- ited power of veto over congressional acts of which he disapproves. The two Houses of Congress have equal power under the Constitution, except that
the Senate is given the function of ratifying treaties on behalf of the United States, and of confirming the appointments to senior federal executive and judicial posts. The Constitution also provides that all bills for raising revenue must originate in the House of Representatives, but the Senate retains the right to amend or reject such proposals. Just as important for congressional autonomy, however, is the fact that the decentralised party system provides no basis for the effective disciplining of Senators or Congressmen. No single person or group of leaders at the national level can endanger the political ca- reer of a legislator simply because he has refused to follow their leadership.
From time to time Congressmen are disciplined by their congressional party.
Representative John B. Williams, a Democrat from Mississippi, supported the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1964, and as a consequence the caucus of the Democratic Party in the House stripped him of his seniority in the party. But no one in Congress or in the administration could prevent, or even consider attempting to prevent, his re-election to Congress in 1966.
The method of selecting candidates, in particular the system of primary elec- tions, places the effective power of discipline in the hands of the local party, or of the Congressman’s constituents, and not in the hands of national lead- ers. The diversity of the local political systems that we have surveyed and the truly local basis of power in those systems are the fundamental guarantee of congressional autonomy.
The most important consequences of this constitutional and political con- text are, first, that there is no single united source of leadership in Congress comparable to that exercised by the government in a parliamentary system.
Second, Congress has organised itself to allow full play to the sectional and local interests that dominate the fates of its members, and to the group pres- sures that fill the vacuum left by the absence of strongly party-oriented pro- grammes. Third, the changing patterns of voting in Congress on the issues that come before it are determined by a very complex interaction between local, sectional and pluralistic influences, by the individual characters of Congressmen, and by the influence of the president and the administration.
Thus the individual Senators and Congressmen stand at the centre of a great web of relationships, constitutional and political. Some of these relationships greatly strengthen their ability to exercise judgement independently of the overriding authority of any person or group, but of course the exercise of this judgement is a matter of the highest political sensitivity. Members of Congress can exercise their judgement only in a political context, which has a number of dimensions. Members of the same party as the president will feel the pull of allegiance to the national leader of the party; but they will also have a loyalty to the congressional leadership of the party in the House or the Senate. The extent of the loyalty owed to these two types of party leader will depend upon a number of factors, and they will not always coin- cide. The Senators and Representatives will be particularly concerned with their perception of constituents’ attitudes, and also with the views of interest groups that may put those views to them with varying degrees of importunity.
They will be concerned also with the positions adopted by other members of Congress with whom they have some affinity, the other members of the committees upon which they sit, the other members of the state delegation of which they form a part, or the views of other members whom they respect as authorities upon particular subjects.
This is the context within which senators and representatives operate, and their exact reaction to a particular legislative proposal will depend upon the relative importance of these differing factors in the light of their own personal circumstances. Often the cues that they receive from party lead- ers, constituency, or pressure groups will conflict, and they must make up their minds which to respond to. This decision may depend upon how near they are to re-election, the relative strengths of the reactions from these differing sources, or their perception of the importance of a particular issue.
Potentially the study of congressional behaviour is the description of how 535 men and women, each in a different political context, will react to particular situations. Fortunately for us, however, the patterns of congressional behav- iour are not random or haphazard, and we can discover the political and institutional structures that give a relative stability to the way in which the legislature goes about its business. We shall look at the influence of parties, and at the other determinants of congressional voting behaviour, then at the organisational structure of power in Congress, and finally at some concrete examples of the way in which the complex decisions on modern legislation are taken.
Party discipline and party unity
The extent to which the American system of government allows the indi- vidual members of the national legislature to make up their own minds and to vote accordingly on the issues that come before them can be measured in two ways. First, by the extent to which individual Senators or Congressmen follow the dictates of the leaders of their parties; second, by the extent to which the members of the president’s party in Congress follow the lead of their nominal head, or the extent to which members of the other party op- pose him. By looking at the way in which members of Congress voted in the 1997 session of the legislature, we can gauge the extent of party unity, and the reality of party discipline (or the lack of it) in the Congress. In fact in that particular year, the first year of President Clinton’s second administration, party unity in Congress was not as high as it had been in the immediately preceding years, but ideological and policy differences between the two par- ties were still sharp. The Republicans had kept the control over both Houses of Congress that they had gained in the mid-term elections of two years ear- lier, in spite of the fact that President Clinton had won re-election by a large majority over his Republican opponent, Bob Dole. The congressional Repub- licans had fought the election on the basis of the ‘Contract with America’ of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, setting out their legislative programme, and
they wished to show that, in spite of the fact that they did not control the presidency, they were the effective government of America. The Democrats in Congress wished to demonstrate their support of the first Democratic President to gain re-election in twenty-eight years.
Both congressional parties wished to demonstrate their unity. It may be surprising, then, for those used to a European style of politics, to observe the extent to which the voting discipline of Senators and Congressmen fell far below the kind of party unity normally to be found in parliamentary systems of government. In the latter, party discipline would normally be measured by the extent to which the voting support of members of a political party for the policies of its leaders fell below the ‘norm’ of 100 per cent. When British political parties fail to achieve this norm there is a great deal of comment and analysis. However, very few votes in the United States Congress would come near to this standard of party cohesion. In the 1970s party unity was very low, in the 1980s there was a gradual increase in partisanship, but it was in the 1990s that the battle between the parties became more intense.
Nearly 50 per cent of the recorded votes – roll-call votes – taken in the 1997 session were actually bipartisan votes, that is votes in which a majority of the Republicans were voting the same way as a majority of the Democrats, opposed by minorities from both parties. Only half the votes taken, there- fore, were ‘party votes’. The Congressional Quarterly, from which these figures are taken, defines a party vote as one in which a majority of the Republicans is opposed to a majority of the Democrats, which is thus a test of party unity.
Even in the case of these ‘party’ votes, however, the cohesion within each of the two parties was far from complete. In 1997 the average Democrat in the House of Representatives voted with a majority of his or her own party on only 82 per cent of the recorded votes taken during the session, and the average Republican 88 per cent of the time. Individual Congressmen and Senators varied greatly in the degree of their support for the party major- ity. In the Senate five Republicans voted with a majority of their party on fewer than 50 per cent of the votes taken, and Senator D’Amato of New York voted with a majority of his party on only 33 per cent of the votes taken. Two Republican members of the House of Representatives, both from New York State, voted with the majority on only 30 per cent of the votes taken; to put it another way, they voted against their party 70 per cent of the time. The opposition of Senators to the policies of their own parties reflected strong regional and ideological divisions within the party. The Republican Senators who voted most against their party’s position came from the Northeast. The sectional element in American politics is far from dead, and it is most visible in congressional politics.
The first term of President George W. Bush should have signalled an in- crease in party unity in the legislature. There were three factors in the elec- tion of the year 2000 that suggested a new approach to party discipline and to a greater degree of loyalty to the president from his party in the Congress.
First, alongside the election of a Republican president, the Republicans
maintained a majority in the House of Representatives (221 Republicans;
212 Democrats) and in the Senate the two parties were initially equally balanced with 50 seats each. The long experience of ‘divided government’
seemed to be ending. However, in May 2001, Senator Jeffords of Vermont an- nounced that he was leaving the Republican Party to become an independent and would vote with the Democrats on the organisation of the Senate, giving the Democrats the slimmest of majorities in the Senate. In the mid-term election of 2002 the Republicans took control of both Houses of Congress.
The attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 and President Bush’s reaction to it had raised his public approval rating to 90 per cent and, contrary to the usual expectation that the president’s party will lose ground at mid-term, the Re- publicans gained seats in the House and won back control of the Senate.
The second factor was the continued realignment in the politics of the South and the increasing grip of the Republicans on the Southern Senate seats. A major consequence of this development is the concentration of conservatives in the Republican Party and the diminution of intra-party strife among the Democrats. Finally, the dominance of the neoconservatives in the admin- istration and in a number of congressional seats gave an unusually strong ideological coherence to the Republican Party, which influenced a number of the less ideological Republicans to go along with their leaders’ policies.
Surprisingly, however, the coming together of all these factors did not result in a significantly higher degree of partisanship in Congress than during the Clinton administration. In the Senate, on average, Republicans voted with a majority of their party only on 84 per cent of the party votes, and Demo- crats on 83 per cent. In the House, party unity scores were higher but only marginally. As always, Southern Democrats were most likely to vote against a majority of their own party. One Democratic Senator from Georgia, Senator Zell Miller, voted with a majority of his party only on 40 per cent of the party votes in which he participated. As the next election loomed, Senator Miller announced that, although he intended to remain a Democrat, he would vote for George W. Bush in 2004.
The second aspect of the nature of party loyalty and identity that we can observe is the extent to which the president, who is a party leader as well as head of state and chief executive, wins the support of Congress for his poli- cies. One measure of this support is the presidential success rate calculated by the Congressional Quarterly. This measure is based upon the number of votes taken in the Congress upon issues where the president has clearly stated his position, so that it can be seen whether the majority of Senators and Representatives have accepted his recommendations. This measurement of the relations between president and Congress has its limitations. It deals only with those issues on which the president has made a clear public expres- sion of his position, and it takes no account of those issues upon which the president and the administration have abandoned all hope of convincing the Congress, and have therefore decided not to press their views. Nevertheless,
the presidential success rate gives a useful insight into the extent to which presidents are able to get their way.
The clearest evidence of the extent of party support for presidential poli- cies can be seen during the administrations of presidents who have faced a majority of their own party in both Senate and House. This is the situation most closely comparable to parliamentary government. Such a situation ex- isted under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton during the first two years after his election in 1992, and George W. Bush after 2002. Of these, President Johnson had the greatest success rate. In 1965, 93 per cent of the votes on which he had taken a clear position went his way. In other years he was less successful, falling to a success rate of 75 per cent in 1968, the final year of his presidency. President Kennedy, for all his charisma, could not rise above 87 per cent of the votes going in his favour, and some of those that went against him were of much greater significance than those that he won. President Carter’s success rate never even climbed into the 80 per cent range. President Clinton, working with a Democratic Congress in 1993 and 1994, achieved a success rate of 86 per cent, but when the Republicans gained control of Congress in the 1994 election his success rate fell to little more than 36 per cent in the following year.
The other side of the coin is that presidents faced with a majority of the opposing party in Congress can still achieve some of their aims, a situation inconceivable in a parliamentary system. The experience of President Rea- gan in the 1981 session of Congress is particularly interesting. Here was a Republican president with a Republican majority in the Senate, but a Demo- cratic majority in the House of Representatives. Nevertheless, in 1981 Presi- dent Reagan had a success rate of over 81 per cent, indicating that, on those issues on which he had expressed a clear view, the Congress had agreed with him four times out of five. Thus the Republican President Reagan, on this measurement, was more successful over all, facing a Democratic House and a Republican Senate, than Mr Carter, who had only had to cope with both Houses of Congress dominated by his own party. True, the Republican Senate had agreed with Mr Reagan on more occasions (87.5 per cent of the votes) than the Democratic House of Representatives (72 per cent of the votes), but this situation indicates very clearly the fact that party, though important in the American political system, is by no means the only important element in its operation.
Influences on congressional voting behaviour
It is very clear from the evidence that issues that come up for decision by Congress are not simply decided on party lines. Each vote is the result of the complex of pressures acting on Congress, and the patterns of voting differ from issue to issue. Coalitions within Congress form and re-form to decide particular questions of policy. Party allegiance is an important, but
by no means determining factor in the way in which these patterns form.
The effect of party loyalty is at its greatest on procedural or organisational votes: for example, the election of the Speaker, or the control over commit- tee assignments. On substantive issues of policy, however, the alignments in Congress depend upon the issue under consideration, and the importance of party membership as an influence upon voting behaviour will depend upon the nature of these issues. What then is the significance of party on the way in which Senators and Representatives vote?
It is impossible to give an answer to this question in a straightforward way that would suggest a simple causal relationship between party membership and voting. It has been shown that there is a greater statistical correlation between party and congressional voting patterns than between the latter and any other single factor. Yet we have shown above that Senators and Congress- men habitually vote against the majority of their party without any adverse effects, either from the leadership of their party or from their constituents.
Why then should party allegiance affect voting at all? There are a number of reasons. First of all, particularly for members of the House, there is an important relationship between constituency attitudes and party image.
Representatives do not have the publicity exposure of Senators. They must rely to a large extent upon the image that the electorate has of their party.
Often particular Congressmen can rise above this and make a personal im- pression on the electorate, but they are bound to be concerned with the party attitudes that many of their constituents have. This image will vary to some extent from one part of the country to another, but the behaviour and poli- cies of the president will be an important component of that image. When there is no strong constituency opposition to the president’s policy, therefore, the member of Congress will tend to go along with the party leader. If, how- ever, constituency attitudes are clearly opposed to the president’s policy, then the member of Congress will put constituency loyalty first and party loyalty second. On very many issues that come to a vote in Congress the members’
constituents will be ignorant or apathetic, and in such circumstances legisla- tors are free to listen to the urgings of pressure groups, or to vote the way the administration or congressional leaders wish. The president has induce- ments to offer – patronage or support for federal expenditures in their states or districts – and congressional leaders can provide publicity, good commit- tee assignments, help at election time, and special facilities on Capitol Hill.
Thus there will be a natural tendency for the members of the legislature to go along with their party, unless there is some strong reason to the contrary.
Groups of Congressmen of the same party who come from similar con- stituencies will naturally tend to react in the same way to the issues that confront them. The most important result of this is the way in which intra- party blocs form on overlapping sectional and ideological lines in Congress.
The relative freedom of members of Congress from party discipline means also that coalitions can be formed across party lines by groups of Senators or Representatives who take the same view on an issue in spite of the fact that