Unlike parliament-centered governments, in which the chief executive is a ‘prime minister’—a member of the legislature, usually the head of the majority party—American republicanism separates executive from legislative powers, with the legislature itself separated into two branches. This means that different parties might control those branches of government, leading to ‘divided government.’ In America, one-party control of both houses of Congress and the presidency can result only from sweeping victories at the polls.
From 1800 to 1945, such victories were common. Sharply divided government—which I am defining as the circumstance in which the president is of one party and both houses have majorities of another party—occurred only five times during that period: 1849-50, when the Whigs Taylor and Fillmore were presidents and the Democrats held Congress; 1865-68, when Johnson, a Democrat elected on the Republican ticket, was president and the Republicans controlled Congress; 1879-80, when the Republican Hayes was president and the Democrats controlled Congress; 1895-96, the last two years of the Democrat Cleveland’s second term, in which Republicans controlled Congress; 1919-20, when the Democrat Wilson, disabled by a stroke, was president and faced a Republican Congress. Short periods of time, all of them. The longest was during the Johnson Administration, which only occurred because President Lincoln had been assassinated in the first year of his second term.
From 1945 to the present, within the lifetime of the postwar generation, ‘sharply divided’ government has occurred much more frequently, and for more extended periods of time: 1947-48, the last two years of Truman’s first term; 1955-60, the last six of Eisenhower’s eight years; 1969-76, all the Nixon and Ford years; 1989-92, all of George H. W. Bush’s one term; 1995-2000, the last six years of the Clinton Administration; the last two years of George W. Bush’s second term; and the last two years of Barack Obama’s second term.
Modern-day divided government was prefigured during World War II by the erosion of the New Deal coalition in Congress in the period beginning in the midterm election of 1942. At that time the North-South fissure in the Democratic Party began to widen sufficiently to show up in election results. The Democrats, and the Southern Democrats in particular (it will be recalled), faced a serious dilemma coming out of the Civil War. They were the party of treason: rebels in the South, Copperheads in the North. This gave Republicans a rhetorical bludgeon in northern and western States, and they backed up their rhetoric with organization–not only the party itself but the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans’ organization whose members were rewarded with generous pensions from the federal government (cf. Skocpol, passim). From the Civil War to the Depression, only two Democrats won the White House: Cleveland and Wilson. Both presidencies were flukish, in the sense that they were beneficiaries of major splits in Republican ranks.
Thanks to the Depression and the magnetism of FDR, the Republicans were finally discredited and the Southern and Northern Democrats could unite in a coalition that appealed to broad elements of American society. But the legacy of the Civil War persisted, just beneath the surface. Or, rather, the legacy of one major cause of that war, race-based slavery and racial prejudice, persisted. The tension between the Northern and Southern wings of the party had to surface in some way at some point. They were united inasmuch as both sides agreed that the role of the federal government should be expanded dramatically in order to meet the challenges of the domestic and international economies, as well as the challenges of national defense in a world where worldwide conflicts were now technologically feasible. The South had never been economically isolationist; its far-flung cotton trading drove the regional economy. With the political success of the TVA and other New Deal programs, ‘big government’ was no economic threat to the South. But a strong central government also entailed a relative weakening of state governments, and state governments were the bulwarks of racial segregation and of domination by Southern whites over Southern blacks. Big government threatened the social and political structure of the South.
FDR temporized by leaving the Southern states alone; he could afford to do so because the war against Old Man Depression, and then the war against rightist tyrannies in Europe and Asia, galvanized the nation throughout his tenure. But Truman faced a different set of problems, nationally and internationally.
The Cold War against Soviet Union-based international communism gave impetus to the divided government that was only potential during the World War. Elements of the New Deal state apparatus in Washington—specifically, those associated with FDR cabinet secretary and 1948 presidential hopeful Henry Wallace—had been too close ideologically and politically to the Soviet Union, which had been an ally-of-convenience during the war. The Hiss-Chambers case and other espionage cases—some real, some invented—enabled Republicans to compete plausibly with Democrats on foreign-policy territory, despite the Democrat-led victory in the war and despite the key Truman victory of the period, the Marshall Plan. This Republican strategy was fully consistent with their long and consistent history of nationalism, dating from the origins of the party in the 1850s. It was also consistent with their successful strategy of painting Democrats as not quite patriotic enough, an image Democrats had resisted by fighting a couple of world wars. The issue of communism revived a problem for Democrats which might have been supposed to have been put to rest. But the ‘Progressive’/historicist foundations of the twentieth-century Democratic Party, seen not only in FDR’s attempt to court Stalin during the war but in the party’s Popular-Front strategy in the mid-1930s, left it vulnerable to criticism from Republicans. By 1948, the Democratic Party had split three ways: mainstream New-Deal, anti-communists led by President Truman; left-wing ‘Popular-Front’ Democrats led by Wallace; and segregationist ‘Dixiecrats’ led by Senator Strom Thurmond. Truman eked out a victory over a lackluster Republican candidate, but the seams in the New Deal coalition were fraying.
War and international politics generally empower the executive, a point well known to the old Whigs including, in America, the Jeffersonians. An atmosphere of perpetual ‘Cold War’ against the international Left thus put Democrats at a disadvantage in presidential elections. Former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first Republican to demonstrate the truth of this. Democrats retained domestic-policy popularity, as they could rightly take credit for the New Deal welfare state, and voters still recalled the Depression and linked it with Hoover and the Republicans. But Eisenhower did not attack the still-popular welfare state. Rather, he concentrated voters’ minds on the Korean War quagmire—Democrats’ botched anti-communism—while also benefitting from, while deftly distancing himself from—the Senate investigations into communist infiltration of government agencies led by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Democrats tried to beat Republicans at their own game in 1960. John F. Kennedy successfully accused Richard Nixon of countenancing a (fictitious) ‘missile gap’ vis-à-vis the Soviets, but his successor Lyndon Johnson’s overextension of American military involvement in the Vietnam War reproduced the Korean-quagmire dilemma, with a difference: This time, not the Republicans (who were hawks) but liberal Democrats split off. Simultaneously, the same liberals were driving Southern Democrats out of the party with their support for federal-government intervention in the civil rights struggles of the South. To put it another way, the Kennedy-Johnson political strategy was to shore up party support among African-Americans by backing their legitimate aspirations respecting civil rights, but at the same time to appeal to conservative Southerners with a strong anti-communist effort in Vietnam. The strategy didn’t work because Southern Democrats cared more about segregation than they did about communists, and Northern liberal-Progressive Democrats cared more about promoting civil rights and ending the war—both popular causes in their constituencies—than they did about keeping the Southerners in the fold.
Republicans inherited many Southern Democrats without losing their anti-communist edge. Alienation from the Democratic Party also entailed substantial party ‘dealignment,’ as well; in the mid-1950s, 20% of voters were ‘independents’ (more precisely, ‘undeclareds’). By 1970, the number was up to around 30%. The jarring shifts in policy seen among Democrats, and especially the social and political dislocations of the 1960s, eroded partisan allegiances along with other bonds of social trust.
Meanwhile, the liberal-Progressive Democats who gained undisputed control of the party by the late 1960s were again vulnerable to the charge of softness on communism. The party’s 1972 nominee, George McGovern, resembled Henry Wallace rather too much to make a plausible major-party candidate, and Nixon buried him that November. But voters hadn’t turned against the New-Deal welfare state, and Democrats continued firmly in control of Congress. Democratic Congressional leadership, sensing they were in for a long siege, began building bigger staffs. In the 1970s House staff tripled, Senate staff doubled (Jones 17-21).
The characteristic technique of an aggressive Congress facing off against an enemy president is the investigation. This has been true since James Madison led the Jeffersonians against the Federalists during the Adams Administration. If conducted shrewdly, Congressional investigations hamstring an enemy president by making him look bad—evil and/or inept. There is a downside, as McCarthy demonstrated, but that only proves that you need to be reasonably intelligent in employing the tactic, and even Tailgunner Joe got a fair amount of play while he lasted. The large Congressional staffs can always find rich sources of scandal in large executive-branch staffs, inasmuch as who is always doing whatever to whom.
Reagan reinvigorated the presidency in the 1980s, faced off successfully against Congressional Democrats discredited by their own scandals. More than one observer considers the Iran-Contra affair to have been the central event in the constitutional history of divided government in the 1980s, as a more-assertive presidential staff clashed with a still-assertive legislative staff over the issue of who would control foreign policy. The longtime Republican trump card, anti-communism, matched the traditional Congressional trump card (Democratic and Republican), investigation into constitutionally-dubious executive-branch doings. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled executive put the squeeze on the Democratic Congress’s domestic agenda with its policy of tax cuts and budget deficits, for which it had just enough Congressional support to sustain—thanks to the depleted by still numerous-enough-to-make-things-awkward ranks of Southern Democrats. In this double conflict within a divided government, the Republicans enjoyed a narrow, vulnerable, and (thanks to George H. W. Bush’s mishandling of the 1991 recession) temporary victory, setting the stage for the politics of the 1990s.
Divided government in the 1990s saw a musical-chairs reversal, with Democrats controlling the White House, Republicans controlling Congress. The first reversal was made possible by victory in the Cold War. Foreign and military policy lost its saliency, at least for the time; coupled with economic recession, this cost the Republicans the presidency. But the young, untried President Clinton overreached in pushing for a national health-care system and in other areas. Congressional Republicans seized control, for the first time in a generation, in the midterm election of 1992.
The new century saw a slight abatement of the trend. The George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations saw divided government, but only in the final two years of their second terms—the ‘lame-duck’ years of any presidency, with or without a hostile Congress.
‘Divided government’ became a common feature of American politics throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the first years of the twenty-first, with only a few short-lived exceptions: the early years of the Johnson Administration; the blundering, weak Carter Administration; in effect the firs couple of Reagan years when Republicans had a workable coalition with conservative Democrats; the first, inept, two years of Clinton; the first administrations of George W. Bush and Obama. Its analytic value for understanding major tendencies in contemporary politics is very strong, so long as one keeps an eye on who the players are and what policies they are attempting to enact. As seen above, the power equations within the overall structure of divided government are constantly shifting, and even divided government itself has on occasion been breached.
Divided government does not necessarily mean lack of government, a Burnsian ‘deadlock of democracy.’ David L. Mayhew’s study, Divided We Govern, identifies many other factors that influence policy outcomes. The most important structural factor, perhaps even more than the executive-legislative division, is the bicameral division between House and Senate. Sarah A. Binder has argued that bicameralism is more relevant to policy than divided government. This is clearly consistent with Madison’s argument in Federalist 62, which Binder cites, but even more in keeping with John Adams’s massive study, Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, the pioneering work in American in the field of historical and comparative politics, the principal point of which is to establish the utility of bicameralism as against unicameralism as an essential component for making republican government properly deliberative. The underlying principle is simple: If, to reach the president’s desk, a major bill must pass two hurdles instead of one, and if each ‘hurdle’ is made of different materials—if, for example, members of the ‘lower’ house have shorter terms and smaller constituencies than members of the ‘upper’ house—that bill must be very well-thought-of indeed merely to survive legislative scrutiny, let alone executive scrutiny. When action slows, thought has time to take effect. When action flows, those who can act may see their opportunity and take it: divided government doesn’t divide the bureaucracy; when others cannot legislate, it can still regulate.
Other factors that lead to gridlock or no-gridlock, as Binder observes, include ideational divergence (the greater the divergence, the less incentive for compromise) and the pent-up energy of a party many years out of power, now victorious (most strikingly, Republicans of the Class of ’94), who tend to unite militantly to obtain those legislative objects they’ve long for during their years in the desert. The extra-institutional fact. public sentiment, also matters—the most obvious example in the last century being the first years of the New Deal, when divided government was nearly impossible.
A perennial possibility in the American political framework, divided government has occurred more often since World War II, owing to the instability of the old Democratic Party coalition that predated the war and the political ramifications of the Cold War that came out of that war. Its analytical value in understanding major tendencies in contemporary politics is high, but it is one factor among several, not an analytic panacea.
Works Cited
Binder, Sarah A.: “The Dynamics of Legislative Gridlock, 1947-96.” American Political Science Review, Volume 93, Number 3, September 1999, 519-533.
Mayhew, David R.: Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigation, 1946-2002. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Scocpol, Theda: Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
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