Why do we have a divided government

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While this description of the major parties as being too similar may have been accurate in the s; that is no longer the case. The problem of majority versus minority politics is particularly acute under conditions of divided government. Divided government occurs when one or more houses of the legislature are controlled by the party in opposition to the executive. Unified government occurs when the same party controls the executive and the legislature entirely.

Divided government can pose considerable difficulties for both the operations of the party and the government as a whole. It makes fulfilling campaign promises extremely difficult, for instance, since the cooperation or at least the agreement of both Congress and the president is typically needed to pass legislation. Furthermore, one party can hardly claim credit for success when the other side has been a credible partner, or when nothing can be accomplished. Party loyalty may be challenged too, because individual politicians might be forced to oppose their own party agenda if it will help their personal reelection bids.

Divided government can also be a threat to government operations, although its full impact remains unclear. A dispute between Republican president Gerald Ford and a Democrat-controlled Congress over the issue of funding for certain cabinet departments led to a ten-day shutdown of the government although the federal government did not cease to function entirely. However, the past several decades have brought an increased prevalence of divided government.

Since , the U. Over the short term, however, divided government can make for very contentious politics. A well-functioning government usually requires a certain level of responsiveness on the part of both the executive and the legislative branches. This responsiveness is hard enough if government is unified under one party. During the presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter — , despite the fact that both houses of Congress were controlled by Democratic majorities, the government was shut down on five occasions because of conflict between the executive and legislative branches.

Shutdowns are even more likely when the president and at least one house of Congress are of opposite parties. During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, for example, the federal government shut down eight times; on seven of those occasions, the shutdown was caused by disagreements between Reagan and the Republican-controlled Senate on the one hand and the Democrats in the House on the other, over such issues as spending cuts, abortion rights, and civil rights.

For the first few decades of the current pattern of divided government, the threat it posed to the government appears to have been muted by a high degree of bipartisanship , or cooperation through compromise.

Many pieces of legislation were passed in the s and s with reasonably high levels of support from both parties. Most members of Congress had relatively moderate voting records, with regional differences within parties that made bipartisanship on many issues more likely.

Cross-party cooperation on these issues was fairly frequent. But in the past few decades, the number of moderates in both houses of Congress has declined. This has made it more difficult for party leadership to work together on a range of important issues, and for members of the minority party in Congress to find policy agreement with an opposing party president. The past thirty years have brought a dramatic change in the relationship between the two parties as fewer conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans have been elected to office.

As political moderate s , or individuals with ideologies in the middle of the ideological spectrum, leave the political parties at all levels, the parties have grown farther apart ideologically, a result called party polarization. In other words, at least organizationally and in government, Republicans and Democrats have become increasingly dissimilar from one another. In the party-in-government, this means fewer members of Congress have mixed voting records; instead they vote far more consistently on issues and are far more likely to side with their party leadership.

Either they are becoming independents, or they are participating only in the general election and are therefore not helping select party candidates in primaries.

The number of moderates has dropped since as both parties have moved toward ideological extremes. What is most interesting about this shift to increasingly polarized parties is that it does not appear to have happened as a result of the structural reforms recommended by APSA. Rather, it has happened because moderate politicians have simply found it harder and harder to win elections. There are many conflicting theories about the causes of polarization, some of which we discuss below.

But whatever its origin, party polarization in the United States does not appear to have had the net positive effects that the APSA committee was hoping for.

With the exception of providing voters with more distinct choices, positives of polarization are hard to find. The negative impacts are many. For one thing, rather than reducing interparty conflict, polarization appears to have only amplified it.

For example, the Republican Party or the GOP, standing for Grand Old Party has historically been a coalition of two key and overlapping factions: pro-business rightists and social conservatives. The GOP has held the coalition of these two groups together by opposing programs designed to redistribute wealth and advocating small government while at the same time arguing for laws preferred by conservative Christians. But it was also willing to compromise with pro-business Democrats, often at the expense of social issues, if it meant protecting long-term business interests.

Recently, however, a new voice has emerged that has allied itself with the Republican Party. Born in part from an older third-party movement known as the Libertarian Party, the Tea Party is more hostile to government and views government intervention in all forms, and especially taxation and the regulation of business, as a threat to capitalism and democracy.

Although an anti-tax faction within the Republican Party has existed for some time, some factions of the Tea Party movement are also active at the intersection of religious liberty and social issues, especially in opposing such initiatives as same-sex marriage and abortion rights. Although the Tea Party is a movement and not a political party, 86 percent of Tea Party members who voted in cast their votes for Republicans. Former presidential candidates Ted Cruz a and John Kasich b , like many other Republicans, signed a pledge not to raise taxes if elected.

Credit: modified image from OpenStax American Government. Movements on the left have also arisen. The Occupy Movement believed government moved swiftly to protect the banking industry from the worst of the recession but largely failed to protect the average person, thereby worsening the growing economic inequality in the United States.

Credit: modification of work by David Shankbone. While the Occupy Movement itself has largely fizzled, the anti-business sentiment to which it gave voice continues within the Democratic Party, and many Democrats have proclaimed their support for the movement and its ideals, if not for its tactics.

To date, however, the Occupy Movement has had fewer electoral effects than has the Tea Party. Scholars agree that some degree of polarization is occurring in the United States, even if some contend it is only at the elite level.

But they are less certain about exactly why, or how, polarization has become such a mainstay of American politics. This historical evidence and the combative nature of the relationship between President Trump and House Democrats captured well by the imagery of weapons on the TIME cover certainly suggested that we would see substantial oversight activity in the House in the th Congress.

To investigate whether legislators actually conformed to our expectations—and to answer other questions about how, and on what issues, Congress engages in oversight—we launched the Brookings House Oversight Tracker in March Using data on both hearings held by and letters sent on behalf of House committees and subcommittees, this report analyzes the quantity, type, issue focus, and quality of oversight of the executive branch in the House of Representatives during the th Congress — We conclude with some observations about developments related to congressional oversight and the federal courts that have implications for how investigations might proceed in the future.

Report Produced by Governance Studies. Viewed as a leading, independent voice in the domestic policymaking sphere, the Governance Studies program at Brookings is dedicated to analyzing policy issues, political institutions and processes, and contemporary governance challenges.