The topic of this episode is, “How has Congress evolved as an institution?”
My guest is Eric Schickler, the author of the book, “Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress”. It is the 20th anniversary of this classic text, which won the Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize for the best book on legislative politics. Eric is the Jeffrey and Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our Republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it — so it can better serve our nation.
Kevin Kosar:
I’m your host, Kevin Kosar. And I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC. Eric, welcome to the program.
Eric Schickler:
Great to be with you, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
You developed your book “Disjointed Pluralism” from your doctoral dissertation. What got you interested in the subject of Congress and its institutional evolution?
Eric Schickler:
Yeah, well it’s not what I actually started out thinking I was going to study in graduate school. I knew I was interested in political history and political development, but I really started out thinking I was most interested in the bureaucracy, bureaucratic politics, but when I was a graduate student in the early ’90s, it was a pretty exciting time in the field of Congress. There were a lot of new kind of major theoretical works that came out.
Eric Schickler:
Keith Krehbiel’s informational model of legislative politics, Gary Cox and Matt McCubbins Legislative Leviathan on parties. David Rohde’s work on conditional party government. And not too long before Ken Shepsle’s and Barry Weingast’s work on this kind of distributive or pork model of Congress.
Eric Schickler:
So there are all these big models out there. And when I was studying for my field exam, it struck me that they each kind of have their own little castle that they’ve built to understand one facet of Congress. And there are meant to be theories of Congress as a whole. And so what got me really interested is thinking, well, what’s the relationship across these theories? They can’t all be right, because they’re basically pointing to different kinds of interests as central to how Congress is to design. Yet, they each do capture something. And so the book grew out of this kind of interest or puzzle of what to make of these new kind of theoretical developments in the field.
Kevin Kosar:
Now, just to clarify for our listeners, in case they haven’t read your book yet, which I encourage them to do. When we speak of institutional evolution, what components are we speaking about? Chamber rules, committee numbers and their structures? What else?
Eric Schickler:
Sure. I mean, I take a pretty broad view of what counts as an institution. So certainly rules and procedures are central. Committee structure and organization is also central, but informal institutions also play a role. So for example, one of the things I talk about in the book is the expansion in minority obstruction in the Senate, the growth in the filibuster would be, I would understand that as an institutional change because it’s a change in how the kind of regular processes work, even in the absence of necessarily a rule change that led to that directly.
Kevin Kosar:
Now in your book, you argue, with a great deal of evidence, that if you want to understand Congress and how it alters itself, you should look at five types of interests and their interplay. What are those interests?
Eric Schickler:
Sure. So it starts out… I mean, I was a student of David Mayhew and so it starts out with what Mayhew taught us, which is we need to think about members’ individual re-election interests as a first and foremost. And Mayhew’s great insight is that you can think of a lot of features of Congress as designed to help each member promote their own reelection. And in Mayhew’s view, you can design rules and institutions that help all of them.
Eric Schickler:
It doesn’t have to be zero-sum conflict. And so he talks about Congress as an incumbent cartel. So individual reelection is one kind of motivation for institutions. Second one is individual power and having power basis for individual members. You can think of that as growing out of Richard Fenno’s classic work on Congress, where he talks about power as one of the motivations for members of Congress.
Eric Schickler:
And so members as individuals want to have opportunity. If you’re going to view Congress as a career, you’re being reelected all the time. Well, while you’re there, you want to exercise… Many members will want to exercise power. And so you can imagine trying to organize the institution in a way that provides power basis for individual members.
Eric Schickler:
So those two are kind of fundamentally about individuals, but we learned from Cox and McCubbins and Rohde that there also are party interests. And as members of parties, members can share a collective interest in the party gaining the majority. And so having a strong reputation and being effective. So we can think about party interests, especially majority party interest, is important to congressional organization. Notice how party interests pit members against each other, the majority versus minority, that’s the third. Fourth interest is policy-based interest.
Eric Schickler:
You can think about, for example, today, progressive Democrats who really want to move policy to the left. You can think about Tea Party Republicans in the early 2010 who had strong ideological vision. And members can organize themselves collectively to try to pursue those policy interests through forming, for example, caucuses. And then the final interest is congressional capacity in power.
Eric Schickler:
One way to think about this is, if Congress is a career for many members while they might have a stake in that institution, being a powerful prestigious actor in our political system. And so they’ll have a stake in trying to defend that congressional capacity and power, at least under certain circumstances, which is one of the… Kind of focuses of the book is really to think about, well, under what conditions will members stand up for congressional capacity and power?
Kevin Kosar:
This brings us to the title, “Disjointed Pluralism”, only two words, but there’s a lot of meaning packed in there. What do you mean by that term and can you unpack it for our listeners?
Eric Schickler:
Sure. I think in some ways it’s helpful to go back to some of those works I just mentioned. You can think about Mayhew and Gary Cox and Matt McCubbins and Krehbiel, each of those works basically takes one interest and says, what does Congress look like if it’s designed around that interest? So Mayhew as an incumbent cartel for reelection. Cox and McCubbins as a machine for the majority party to dominate.
Eric Schickler:
And so it looks at how do you organize Congress to do that. Krehbiel as a way to get information so members can then make wise policy. You can think about Krehbiel’s informational view as thinking about congressional capacity in policy. And the story of pluralism, the kind of core idea is, well, you can’t do all. If you try to do all of those at once, you’re going to have institutions that are working at cross purposes with one another.
Eric Schickler:
And so the argument I make in the book is really no single interest has dominated congressional development because members actually do, at least under certain circumstances, care about each of these interests or at least some subset of members do.
Eric Schickler:
And so institutional development gets driven really by the interrelationship, by the kind of clashing and complementarities of these multiple interests. So instead of Congress looking like a beautifully designed incumbent cartel or a majority party machine that makes the majority party able to achieve its policy goals and look really good while it does it.
Eric Schickler:
Instead, what we have are these complicated institutions that are really designed to serve multiple interests that are often in tension with one another. And so in a sense, what Disjointed Pluralism tries to get at is the kind of messiness of Congress.
Eric Schickler:
Why are so many people dissatisfied with Congress? It’s because Congress is intended to serve these multiple purposes that are in tension with one another. And given that no one interest dominates consistently, what you get are institutions that I argue would have kind of tensions and contradictions built into them over time.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah. It’s worth underscoring that as an entity, Congress is very different from say, a private sector firm, which has an overriding longstanding interest in bringing in more revenues than the costs it runs.
Eric Schickler:
Yeah. I mean, the analogy I use with my students is, imagine you have 53 football players who all want to win games, how do you organize yourself? Well, you get a coach who then is able to kind of internalize that collective goal and assign roles accordingly. But if on the other hand you have a team, but 10 members want one thing and 12 members want something very different and 15 members want—agree with one group on one thing, but disagree on others.
Eric Schickler:
No coach is going to be able to satisfy all those goals. And in fact, each group is going to try to design the organization in ways to help serve its interests. And the result is going to look a lot messier, a lot more complicated and not achieve any one goal in a kind of optimal way, even if it does overall, at least under some circumstances perform reasonably well.
Kevin Kosar:
To make this theory of “Disjointed Pluralism” more concrete for our listeners, please explain how these competing interests transformed Congress from 1970 to 1989, which is the subject of chapter five?
Eric Schickler:
Sure. I mean, so 1970 to 89 is a pretty interesting period because at the start of the period, you still have a system of committee government, essentially where congressional committees are really the center of the action. Parties are weak on the whole. Strong seniority system. So essentially to gain power, you need to work your way up in the committee system over time.
Eric Schickler:
And there’s still kind of the legacy of the conservative coalition, where on many of these committees, conservative Southern committee chairs who were Democrats would work closely with ranking Republican members, tended to be moderate conservatives and often frustrate the ambitions of the liberal Democrats who are kind of trying to gain ascendancy. That’s the start of it. What I argue is that the reform movement of the 1970s, which really transforms that Congress, is driven not just by one interest, say liberal Democrats wanting to get their policy, but by multiple interests.
Eric Schickler:
So one goal is liberals trying to undercut the power of these Southern chairs. But part of the power of the reform movement also came from many, many members, liberal and also though some young Republican members, who wanted to decentralize power. Who wanted chances to exercise power as individuals. And so actually the seniority system gets challenged in both the Democratic and Republican caucuses. It’s not just a Democratic shift.
Eric Schickler:
And these members kind of joined together to pass a series of reforms that really fragment power in the institution. So for example, sunshine reforms that open Congress up in addition to the seniority changes. Democrats passed the subcommittee bill of rights, which decentralizes power within committees. And the argument I make in the book is that you need to understand these reforms are really driven by a combination of interests. Liberals wanting liberal policy, junior members wanting a chance to exercise power, and also at the same time, some interest of Democrats in trying to make the party a more coherent policy making entity.
Eric Schickler:
But it’s really the combination of those that drives the reform movement. And what it leads to is, in a sense, reforms that push in two directions at the same time. So while the leadership gets some new power and tools, for example, the speaker can assign members to the rules committee and do multiple referrals, at the same time, power really got decentralized within communities.
Eric Schickler:
And so instead of 20 strong chairs, you now had essentially 80 strong subcommittee chairs or 80 to 100 strong subcommittee chairs. And that fragmentation actually creates a lot of problems for these Democratic leaders to sort through in the first decade after the reform movement. So instead of this being a kind of smoothed story of creating party government, I argue that Democrats, due to these multiple interests, try to push in two different directions that really created a lot of tensions with one another.
Eric Schickler:
That’s essentially the first major part of the chapter. Second part looks at what happens when Democrats finally do consolidate party government under [Speaker] Jim Wright and kind of diminishes the importance of some of these decentralizing reforms and consolidates a lot more power in the speakership through, for example, using the rules committee as a real strong arm.
Eric Schickler:
And what I argue in the book is that while Wright is able to consolidate power, you can think of this as one interest. Party interests starting to dominate, that provokes a reaction and the most visible form of that reaction is the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Conservative Opportunity Society, the kind of bomb throwers who see themselves as shut out by Wright.
Eric Schickler:
And so embrace much more radical tactics of attacking the houses and institution and ultimately that succeeds in toppling Jim Wright. At the same time though, I argued that it’s not just Republicans. There are a lot of rested Democrats who don’t like this consolidation of power. And so again, I argue in the book that, that points to the kind of fragility of efforts to consolidate leadership power in Congress.
Kevin Kosar:
And if I could just throw in a follow-up thought. From where I sit, there’s a certain irony about this period also. The early seventies was, as I view it, in great degree, Congress as an institution pushing back against executive overreach. So it passed the Congressional Budget Act. It turned the Legislative Reference Service into the Congressional Research Service, created CBO (Congressional Budget Office), created the Office of Technology Assessment, added more staff — it augmented itself as a counter pose to the executive branch. Yet, as we’re getting towards the end of this period of time, what we’re seeing is Congress behind speakers playing follow the leader with the president, and much more clearly lining up behind an executive. The days when Democrats would stand up to Jimmy Carter and give him fits because they disagreed. We don’t see much of that anymore.
Eric Schickler:
Yeah, no, I agree with that. I think there are a couple of aspects to that. One is that the reform movement of pushing back against the president itself was shaped by these multiple interests. So if you think about the Congressional Budget Act, which is one of the cases I talk about in the chapter, as you say, one of the main goals is to counter Nixon’s impoundments and get back the power of the purse.
Eric Schickler:
But at the same time, it was shaped by the need, for example, to accommodate existing power centers within Congress, the appropriations and tax committees and their kind of power based concerns, and also shaped by kind of ideological tensions between liberals who are very reluctant to see anything that’s going to limit spending and Conservatives who are trying to find ways to limit spending and they’re each kind of fighting over what to include.
Eric Schickler:
And so what ends up happening is you layer this new process of budget committees on top of the preexisting structure of tax and appropriating committees without taking anything away. And so that itself makes the Budget Act this kind of uneasy tool or imperfect tool for Congress due to these multiple interests.
Eric Schickler:
And also just due to the sequencing of layering on top of older institutions. So I think that’s part of the story. The other part though, that you point to, I think in some sense, anticipates what’s happening… What happens in the 90s and 2000s. And in some sense this gets at, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is, well, have things changed in a way that may differ from what I would’ve expected writing this book a couple of decades ago. And I think that what you’re pointing to in terms of Congress and the president, I think has a lot to do with the ever increasing strength of partisanship on Capitol Hill. And in the book, I basically argued that when one interest gets too powerful, is too ascendant, members who share other kinds of interests tend to get rested and rebel and try to topple things.
Eric Schickler:
And I think with changes in our party system, that may be breaking down to at least some extent. And in particular, where that hurts the most, I think is in the interest in congressional capacity and power. Where members are much more willing when they’re in the majority and have unified control to really defer to the president and look to the president for leadership, as you say. And I think that aspect has maybe gone further than I would’ve anticipated.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah. You can see the interests over time, kind of undermining one another. The centralization of power in the speaker’s office led to an imperiousness which sowed anger amongst the GOP and a revolt. And so they start asserting themselves in new ways using speeches after hours to draw public attention and to pick fights and create divisions that are good to campaign upon. And then they start winning.
Kevin Kosar:
And so suddenly the re-election imperative or interest becomes extremely predominant, which therefore encourages members of Congress to perhaps start lining up behind your guy in the White House even when you don’t disagree. It’s been 20 years since the book’s been published. And you’ve done a lot of scholarly research since then. Do these five types of interests still explain Congress, or have you found additional interest and variables that affect Congress in its evolution?
Eric Schickler:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think, I guess one way to think about it is that I actually think it’s less in terms of additional interests what’s changed, than in terms of which of these interests may be of themselves faded out due to changes in the political context.
Eric Schickler:
And again, I would say, the point you made about Republicans gaining power by attacking the institution in the nineties underneath Gingrich, and these new tactics, I think one of the longer term effects of that strategy for rising to power is I think a lot of… Especially Republican members though, I think now some Democrats as well, don’t necessarily see themselves as having a stake in Congress’ capacity and power. They don’t have that tie or allegiance to the institution. And I think that’s kind of short circuited or made it a lot harder to get adaptations that then defend Congress’ has power.
Eric Schickler:
I think that shift is really important. I mean, we have efforts now to reform Congress to try to correct that and certainly have not given up hope on that, but I think that things certainly went further in the direction of Congress conceding to the president than I would’ve anticipated. I think the one outside change that I do think is really important is the role of primaries in this sorted, polarized electorate in effecting members’ interests.
Eric Schickler:
That the fear of a primary challenger from an ideological primary challenge of going after you for not being loyal enough to the party, a true believer, I think that has had a real effect on the balance of interests that members care about.
Eric Schickler:
And again, for example, Republicans in the Trump years, the fear of a Trump fuel challenge in a primary gets members’ attention and makes it much less likely that they’re going to stand up to the president. And I think, one question is whether Democrats would change as internally to them. Did they start also to see that dynamic with respect to primaries or not? But I think that more aggressive role of primaries I think is a really important change that’s maybe changed the balance across these interests.
Kevin Kosar:
One last question for you. As we all know, Congress presently is continuing to evolve, and in the house there’s a select committee on the modernization of Congress that’s playing a direct role in reform. Over in the Senate, there’s no such entity that owns reform or seems to be pushing that ball forward. That noted, what can the theory of disjointed pluralism tell us about how to think about current reform and its possible trajectories in the two chambers?
Eric Schickler:
I think probably the main lesson of the book, as I see it, is the idea of thinking about reforms as common carriers. That the most effective reform movements are ones that tap into multiple member interests. That find ways to align these multiple interests together. If you think about the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, which really created the modern committee system, they included in that reform package several features to try to kind of make it palatable for members.
Eric Schickler:
A new pension system and a pay raise. New resources for them in terms of staffing. And so while the primary goal I argue was to boost congressional capacity, and power versus an ascendant president, they built in features of the Bill to kind of make it worth it for individual members, to make it suit their interests, to finding ways to align multiple interests together, rather than trying to get some purist vision of what the ideal organization looks like. I think that kind of realpolitik vision is one that really fits the pluralistic character of Congress historically, and I think, at least, hopefully to this day.
Kevin Kosar:
Eric, thank you for helping us understand how Congress evolves and the factors affecting its development. Happy anniversary.
Eric Schickler:
All right. Thanks so much, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Elayne Allen and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others, and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging @AEI. We hope you have a great day.
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