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Political Partisanship Has Never Been Higher (Why It's Getting Worse)
While it has been widely reported that partisanship in the United States Congress is at an historic high, a new study finds that despite short-term fluctuations, partisanship or non-cooperation in the U.S. Congress has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years with no sign of abating or reversing.
As The Study notes, Americans today are represented by political figures who struggle to cooperate across party lines at an unprecedented rate, resulting in high profile fiscal and policy battles, government shutdowns, and an inability to resolve problems or enact legislation that guides the nation’s domestic and foreign policy.
Partisanship has been attributed to a number of causes, including the stratifying wealth distribution of Americans; boundary redistricting; activist activity at primary elections; changes in Congressional procedural rules; political realignment in the American South ; the shift from electing moderate members to electing partisan members movement by existing members towards ideological poles; and an increasing political, pervasive media.
The individual representative’s role in facilitating partisanship is less clear. Party affiliation significantly shapes a legislator’s voting record, so much that in some cases, a change in a legislator’s party affiliation results in an immediate and significant realignment of voting behavior towards the new party agenda. This change is too rapid to be attributable to contemporaneous changes in constituent ideology, indicating a disconnection between the representative and his or her constituency. Party leaders also ensure obedience by offering incentives such as the prospect of assigning a member to a favored committee or promoting legislation crafted by the member to reach final voting stages, i.e. bringing legislation ‘to the floor’. As many have concluded, much is at stake with this type of party-driven arrangement.
Despite party-level pressures, there are incentives for individual representatives to vote with members of the opposite party on issues that are specific to a district’s geography, such as aging populations, natural resource management, veterans’ affairs, or regional concerns. Moreover, regardless of party affiliation, pairwise relationships may form as a result of social interactions such as sponsoring bills, interacting with lobbyists, creating trust networks for communication, sharing ideas, garnering support for initiatives, negotiating provisions and sharing one’s own sense of ethics and orthopraxy. Vote trading, also known as logrolling, is another incentive for cross-party cooperation. Though difficult to quantify because vote trading discussions are not public information, these would result in increased inter-party cooperation on ideological votes.
But the division of Democrat and Republican Party members over time shows things are getting worse...
As co-operation collapses and disagreements soar...
As the study concludes:
Our analysis shows that Congressional partisanship has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years, and has had negative effects on Congressional productivity. This is particularly apparent in the steady reduction of the number of bills introduced onto the floor, suggesting that the primary negative effect of increasing partisanship is a loss of Congressional innovation.
This increase in non-cooperation leads to an interesting electoral paradox. While U.S. voters have been selecting increasingly partisan representatives for 40 years, public opinion of the U.S. Congress has been steadily declining. This decline [30] suggests that voters cast their ballots on a local basis for increasingly partisan representatives whom they view as best representing their increasingly partisan concerns, leaving few if any moderate legislators to connect parties for a more cohesive Congress. Elected representatives are increasingly unable to cooperate at a national Congressional level but are re-elected at least 90% of the time, reflecting an evasion of collective responsibility.
Voters might believe that highly partisan candidates will ‘tip the scale’ in one party’s favor. However, based on correlations shown here, a partisan candidate may lack cooperation needed to pass legislation. More moderate legislators may have a competitive advantage in negotiating for their party’s legislation.
A fundamental reversal of increasing non-cooperation, over time, might require either a change in local ideological perspectives (resulting in a selective shift to fewer partisan representatives), or a fundamental change in how the electorate votes (from concerns focused on party issues to concerns focused on global effectiveness).
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Competing crime families. They may squabble, bicker and try to fuck each other over, but in the end, they will still break your knees if you don't pay up. Any real squabbles over important issues probably have more to do with which oligarchs funded who's campaign.
A deserving Hollywood sequel: Mr. Smith & Wesson Goes to Washington
So, basically, our country is undergoing cellular mitosis.
I always wondered if it hurt when a cell went through that process. I guess now we know. Hurts like a bitch.
“What I was looking at was a tussle between two groups of mass-men, one large and poor, the other small and rich. As judged by the standards of a civilized society, neither of them any more meritorious or promising than the other. The object of the tussle was the material gains accruing from control of the State’s machinery. It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it; and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.” - Albert Jay Nock - Memoirs Of A Superfluous Man - 1943
Too bad the marching morons are unable to see panarchism as the solution.
Why? Because the two political parties are two faces of the same bought-and-paid-for government. The extreme exaggeration of irrelevancies into red/blue 'sides' is necessary to give the illusion of a democracy as oppossed to the reality of a single party state.
Hurts like a bitch.
Harry Reid approves this message.
Which eye was it?
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0LEV0Nf1ThVR5AAzsFXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEzOGFmdWM2BGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDVklQNjE3XzEEc2VjA3Nj?p=Harry+Reid+Black+Eye&fr=yfp-t-901-s
For a moment I thought it said Political Partnership has never been higher.
Anyway... the simple cure to all of that is just have Netanyahu as the Presidential candidate for both parties...
This nonsense. There are a 1 or two Constitutional conservatives in the Senate and probably 30 to 40 in the House. The Dems and the rest of th RINO NeoCons are all the same. There is no two party system or real elections.
yes, it is best to just be realistic. understand that there is a great effort to get american men to use their guns so the tyranny can really lock down. prison planet and so much more are really there to get us to do just that. endure and bide time is what the founders would say.
But ZH keeps telling me there is no difference between producers and parasites.
Again, competing crime families. I think it is a much more apt metaphor than opposite sides of the same coin, because there are differences between them, yet none of those differences make a rat's ass difference to the people that they impact. At the worst, what you see is kabuki theater when one side bitches about the other doing the same thing that they're doing. At best, it's just blaitant hypocracy and a blindness to their own actions.
Do you really care if the thug busting your knees is part of the Colombo family or the Gambino crime family?
Someone else on another thread had an observation that fits here. You may see differences on social policies (abortion, same sex marriage, etc), but you see much more like mindedness on things like bank bailouts and war, meaning things the true powers that even care about. The rest is theater to keep people entertained and at each other's throats while the raping of the world takes place.
The difference always comes down to one thing,
who pays the bills?
"...who pays the bills?"
Tell me about it. The re-thugs are typically spineless when it comes to say, the budget or illegal immigration. Imagine my (un)surprise when they grew a pair over the Iran agreement and standing firm for the right of some foreigner to speak before OUR Congress. Indeed, WHO pays their bills????
It's heartwarming the way they always manage to put aside their "differences" when it comes to restricting ballot access and limiting the ability of third-parties to compete in elections. Like squabbling Italian mafia families coming together to prevent the Yakuza or the Russians from moving in on their operation.
This article may be one the worst I've ever read here.
What complete bullshit. Now Tyler is falling for the "divide and conquer" sham? Wow...
kaiserhoff But ZH keeps telling me there is no difference between producers and parasites.
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Where in this article do you see producers? Government produces waste and corruption. You are truly fucked the head if you think otherwise.
Oh shit, I guessed I missed your sarc tag. So you are either that stupid or I should just assume so.
Does the word libertarian have meaning in your world?
Better to know who people are, than piss in all directions.
OK - for those waiting for my very clever quips - the first chart is so fuzzy - obviously I'm in a little worse shape than usual so I'll move on. Geezuz - Knuckles - is every night like this for you?
FYI - The Politically Correct spelling for the name of our only lord and savior is:
Hay Soos. Please make a note of it;)
(Can't speak for knucks, but I always play the sax better if I'm a little lubricated)
I'm guessing he's Navy- we think of them as water taxis - kind of like Venice. Lord and Savior no - that's air cover. All the same - LMAO- cheers!
Air Superiority uber alles.
Darn right. Air Superiority = everything is a target - men, women, children, mud huts, wedding pariies, funerals, etc.
Those overlays look like, Squid-GDP swirl~O~gram's... My bad. I've just been informed those are Central Africa, Ebola trend plotters.
write in v for president. start a grassroots campaign. tell everyone you know.
It's time to start over. Time to get rid of them all. No new president is going to solve the problem. We need a crack down on the entire government system.
Bukkake theater and you end up getting the facial.
This ain't your father's Gallagher.
You had to go and mention Bukkake... Ok.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3QXK2iUJn0
I think this phenomenon is also happening in non-Congress critters too. I have noticed increasingly vehement and absolute opposition among ordinary people on political and religious issues.
Partisanship is so high because nothing changes for the better, things just get worse, even though they keep electing the same crony equivocators.
People still think that elections and politics matter, that voting has an effect, not realizing it is a distraction and that both sides are bought and paid for.
They clamor and cluster to the left or right side of the pen thinking it will help them escape the shearing and the slaughtering.
We have a winner! The more they push the false narrative the worse it gets.
There is ZERO choice when picking Red and Blue. None.
"(from concerns focused on party issues to concerns focused on global effectiveness)."
And much use of the words 'cooperation' and 'collective'.
No thanks. I'd rather see dueling make a reappearance as a common way to settle irreconcilable political differences, than being forced to suck 'global-citizen' Cock...
Our election system is antiquated and even the idea of "Representative" government needs to be re-examined and replaced. Back in the horse & buggy days that made sense, but distance is no longer a factor. We must develop a way to manage the people's business FOR THEIR BENEFIT without the influence of money. In my perfect world, lobbying would be held to a minimum and the "revolving door" would be slammed shut, as well as insider trading ability. That's at the crux of what's fucked up and shit.
What am I missing here? Framing this as "partisanship keeps getting worse" implies that bi partisanship is somehow a better outcome. Unless we are going to get more liberty and less taxes, I will gladly take a "do-nothing Congress".
>>>
Our analysis shows that Congressional partisanship has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years, and has had negative effects on Congressional productivity. This is particularly apparent in the steady reduction of the number of bills introduced onto the floor, suggesting that the primary negative effect of increasing partisanship is a loss of Congressional innovation.
>>>
I think of Dennis Miller's line about German reunification - "I wasn't too impressed with their previous work, and I'm not really looking forward to the new shit."
Bipartisanship = double penetration. While some might like it, I suspect most would prefer to just say no.
Voting doesn't mean shit. You vote, you consent to assrape. Do you really think "they" represent you? But hey, if it makes you feeeeeeel good then do your bullshit civic duty and Vote. Just don't complain when you try to pick the moldy semen filled rubber out of your ass.
Looks like some weird fossil record of primitive cellular life. Surely these times of cabals, corporations, groups,empires, republics, societies, bands, conspiracies, freemasons,whites, blacks, pagans, jews ,gentiles, protestants, catholics, muslims, demonologists ad nauseum; surely this time has ended due to the free access to knowledge and information; or disinformation.
Looking at the graph, my theory confirmed... it went off the rails when the Democrats were successful in railroading Nixon. Dick brought it on himselft, but he was a piker compared to LBJ and the Democrats knew it.... they just had the press on their side and they weren't about to let fair play keep them from bringing Nixon down. It took till Reagan for the GOP to find it's footing, but the Democrats would have none of it. It was politics for the sake of politics and the Dems played for keeps. Follow that all the way through. One side playing politics and the other side trying to get along with the Washington hub bub crowd. Meanwhile, the country goes right in the crapper.... and the Fed decides it wants to try some new ideas out... what could go wrong?
President Nixon, while a good anti communist, was from a domestic public policy standpoint, a dyed in the wool Progressive. Yes, the GOP was rolled in 1973. A Dem coup. Much of the GOP are collaborators, they're deathly afraid of the DemProgs.
Bullshit! Were any of this true, the US gov't would have been shut down for weeks on end, the POTUS would have been impeached, and the Speaker would have gone on national television and called for mass demonstrations in defense of the Constitution. Anyway, in more practical terms...have not the GOP funded every morsal of the Executive Branch's budget requests, including the foreign felon welcome wagon? Which writer coined the term "manufactured consent?"
The illusion of conflict following the illusion of choice?
It's said that the bitterest feuds are held over the smallest stakes. Every policy on every important issue in the US is made by the people who control the money supply. The rest is theatre designed to provide the illusion of a democracy which has been a cruel joke since (at the latest) 1865.
At least successful armed rebellion was still possible. With the atomic bomb even that option was closed. If South Carolina tried to secede now, Columbia would be a smoking, highly radioactive ruin within the hour.
really the 70's were the time of Awesome....who knew. Scorched Earth Obama is far away the worst....makes Nixon seem down right like Mr Roberts. Good time for a 3rd party candidate....there is someone out there....or we are done!
Seems to coincide with the rise of the statist agenda no?