When lobbyists have to pick a side
Partisan polarization has sucked in the special interests that long kept Congress pragmatic.
Among the great paradoxes of the modern Congress is the extent to which it is simultaneously characterized by both hyperpartisanship and bipartisanship. Indeed, despite the competitive, partisan pressures that Congress faces, instances of successful policymaking remain as bipartisan as ever.
As contributors to Hypertext have amply documented, omnibus legislating provides at least a partial resolution to the hyperpartisan-bipartisan paradox of modern congressional policymaking. By combining logrolling with centralization, omnibus legislating provides both the bipartisan agreement typically necessary to pass legislation and the careful partisan content-control necessary for brand maintenance in the Era of Insecure Majorities.
Lurking under the surface of this shift to omnibus legislation, however, lies a lesser-appreciated change among the political actors traditionally credited with greasing the wheels of congressional policymaking: interest groups. And as the political ecosystem has shifted beneath the feet of these actors, omnibus legislating has become both more important and, arguably, more problematic.
Interest groups are central to policymaking, but they are changing
The American Founders viewed organized interests as dangerous, but inevitable. To curb their influence, James Madison argued, it was actually necessary to multiply their numbers, making permanent alliances among them difficult. As Madison famously declared in Federalist No. 10, “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire,” and to curtail the dangers of faction, a nation must “take in a greater variety of parties and interests.” In so doing, “you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”
For much of American history, this theory seems to have been proven right. By narrowly pursuing their preferred policy goals, interest groups have routinely aligned themselves with both Republicans and Democrats simultaneously. Similarly, groups often coalesce to support one legislative effort, while at the same time squaring off against one another on a different initiative. Together, interest groups traditionally form the basis for much of the bipartisanship that has characterized successful policymaking in the U.S. Congress.
But in new work, Alexander Furnas, Geoffrey Lorenz, and I have found that interest groups today struggle to achieve these fluid, “strange bedfellow” dynamics. Instead, special interests have faced consistent pressures to signal allegiance to one party or the other in the ongoing partisan struggle for control over Congress. Concerned about interest groups’ ability to aid partisan opponents in achieving policy victories, party leaders have sought to engender their sustained loyalty.
In exchange for access to congressional offices, our research suggests, partisans now expect interest groups to signal such loyalty by expanding their issue positions and priorities outside their core areas of interest — engaging in what some have called “mission creep.” This sharpens the party brand: By discouraging groups from contributing their reputations and resources to the other team, a party can more forcefully claim to be the “party of” the constituency or cause in question—whether it be the party of gun owners, environmental protection, family values, or civil rights. Even if the interest group in question is not one that large groups of voters would recognize or care about, demanding its loyalty prevents the opposing party from leveraging that group’s expertise and connections in pursuit of its policy aims.
This “pull” dynamic engenders a separate “push” dynamic from the jilted party: Partisan-consistent issue expansion serves to make a group more toxic to the opposing party. In other words, even if a group desires to work with members of the opposing party in pursuit of a narrow, shared interest, the opposing party may view the partnership as too politically risky for their own brand — or simply too unpleasant to be worth pursuing. Refusing such cooperation becomes another way to tout one’s own party “brand.” In both circumstances, parties benefit from group loyalty in their ongoing battle for control over the levers of government.
The result of these changes has been a transformation of the very nature of “special” interests. Rather than the sort of pragmatic policy-seekers that the Framers envisioned, interest groups today more closely resemble programmatic parties —despite the fact that decades of scholarship has depicted parties and groups as natural counterbalances to one another. And indeed, as many groups have matured in this new role, they now reinforce polarizing trends rather than resist them.
What difference does this make for lawmaking?
These dynamics have simultaneously rendered policymaking more difficult and made bipartisanship more potent for policy success.
Typically, when interest groups align in support of a piece of legislation, members of Congress gain at least two important pieces of information from observing the constellation of groups supporting a bill: greater confidence about the effects of the policy and political intelligence about the ramifications of voting “yea.” Thus, as scholarship has consistently shown, diverse support coalitions—collections of groups that differ from one another along multiple dimensions—enjoy the most success. Such diversity signals that multiple distinct constituencies believe in the effectiveness of the policy, while also giving legislators confidence that they will not pay unexpected political costs for supporting it.
But that signal weakens considerably if legislators see previously disparate interest groups routinely coalescing around bills from the party they have become aligned with. Instead of seeing a broad spectrum of substantive agreement, legislators simply witness the same set of “usual suspects” showing their team bona fides. As we find in our work, then, interest or issue diversity in a coalition no longer predicts legislative success in the same way it has in the past.
On the other hand, another kind of diversity—ideological or “partisan” diversity—has arguably grown more informative. Inasmuch as mission creep makes certain groups toxic to one party or the other, a support coalition of both left- and right-leaning groups signals quite a lot about the underlying legislation. Indeed, if a piece of legislation was able to attract the support of such disparate groups, it must be sorely needed—and politically safe.
In short, the political logic of legislative support coalitions has been transformed. Whereas groups could once coalesce around a bill by concentrating mostly on their narrow interest in it, and re-election motives of a small group of committee members, they now must think hard about partisan branding and about the majority-making motives of party leaders. In this regard, the great advantage of omnibus legislation is that it reduces complexity. The fact that these packages are cobbled together by legislative leaders means groups aligned with the majority party can always assume they are safe to join, allowing them to focus squarely on getting their priorities into the bill.
Ironically, though, omnibus legislating may also exacerbate the “partisanization” of interest groups in Washington. That is, insofar as omnibus legislating deepens the role of party leaders in crafting legislation, groups must rely even more on the party to achieve their policy goals. Party leaders not only bargain over the eventual ideological content of legislation, but they ultimately exercise considerable control over which issues get folded into omnibus legislation. As a result, if groups wish to achieve policy victories, they face considerable needs to stay in the good books of party leaders.
In sum, the shift to omnibus legislating represents both an opportunity and further challenge for policy-seeking interests in Washington. Although such legislating allows interests to continue their policy pursuits in a gridlock and partisan environment, the centralization of the policymaking process further incentivizes increasingly not-so-special interests to further align with one party or the other. Thus, what were once cross-partisan agents of compromise today stand to reinforce the cleavages of our rigid party divide.
Jesse Crosson is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Program on American Institutional Renewal (PAIR) at Purdue University. His work investigates why common “depolarizing” forces in American politics, such as special interests and political geography, have failed to break through modern hyperpartisanship — and what that hyperpartisanship means for policymaking and representation. In addition to publishing this work in peer-reviewed journals, he is currently completing a book manuscript Taking Sides, from which he draws here. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan.
Image: DonkeyHotey via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/52101315423.
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