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The Partisanship of Bipartisanship: How Representatives Use Bipartisan Assertions to Cultivate Support

Political Behavior (2021)Cite this article

Abstract

How do representatives reconcile public expectations of bipartisan lawmaking with the lack of compromise in recent congresses? Representatives—constrained by the actual content of legislation—position partisan legislation to increase public support. Because constituents reward this behavior, representatives reap the rewards associated with bipartisanship through rhetoric alone, providing little incentive to engage in actual substantive compromise. With 434,266 floor speeches I show that bipartisanship is evoked uniformly across the ideological spectrum and that there is no relationship between a legislator's propensity for bipartisan rhetoric and her propensity for bipartisan action. Instead marginal legislators who need to secure support from opposition voters are most likely to make bipartisan appeals. With experiments I show that bipartisan appeals increase support and decrease perceived ideological extremity even for overtly partisan legislation with trivial opposition support. Bipartisan assertions influence public opinion far more than actual evidence of opposition support.

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Notes

  1. For example, bipartisanship might be a strategy of representational self-presentation by endangered legislators, where legislators reassure their constituents that they are “overcoming partisanship” to “forge compromises.” In another form bipartisanship functions as a messaging strategy where legislators point to efforts to work with the other side while also maintaining a general perspective that the leaders of the other party hate America too much to work with us en masse.

  2. Responses that indicated that bipartisanship is (1) political and (2) a political outcome/process were marked as correct. Example responses are included in the Supporting Materials. Participants were also told not to consult outside resources.

  3. Floor speeches were downloaded from the Library of Congress. I started in 1992 because of limits to digital access prior to this point.

  4. I focused on the House because it is a more discursive chamber and because it considers a greater number of votes. When analysis was extended to Senate data, the same patterns emerged.

  5. The importance of media coverage of floor speeches is clear from the dramatic uptick in floor speeches after the start of C-SPAN coverage (Garay 1984).

  6. Following Harbridge and Malhotra (2011), leaners were treated as partisans. Independents and non-partisans with no partisan leanings were randomly assigned to read a speech from the Democrat or from the Republican.

  7. Infrastructure projects were selected, as highway spending is not a common source of public partisan disagreement, thus mitigating concerns of pre-treatment effects.

  8. A pretest showed that an overwhelming majority correctly identified the partisan treatments as partisan and correctly associated the treatment with the intended party.

  9. Participants were randomly assigned to each of the three treatment arms.

  10. To minimize pre-treatment effects, I use a relatively obscure agency in the federal bureaucracy.

  11. As with Study 1, these results are consistent for ideological and partisan groups, though in magnitude Democrats are less supportive of the policy than Republicans (see Appendix Tables 6 and 7).

  12. In the experiment the number of Democrats was limited to 100, which is just over 50% of the 188 Democrats currently in the House of Representatives.

  13. The supporting materials provide additional information on this study.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Kyle Dropp, Justin Grimmer, Shanto Iyengar, Yphtach Lelkes, Solomon Messing, and Jonathan Mummolo for helpful guidance and feedback.

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  1. Department of Government at Dartmouth College, 211 Silsby Hall 3 Tuck Mall, Hanover, NH, 03755, USA

    Sean J. Westwood

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Westwood, S.J. The Partisanship of Bipartisanship: How Representatives Use Bipartisan Assertions to Cultivate Support. Polit Behav (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09659-6

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Keywords

  • Polarization
  • Bipartisanship
  • Public opinion