When political parties undermine themselves
Fifty years ago, Republicans strengthened their opponents. Will Democrats do the same?
Note: Today we are taking a quick break from our forum on cybernetics and bureaucracy to share an important essay by Senior Fellow Sarah Anzia that weaves together the themes of abundance and party-building.
Fifty years ago, when most states in the nation passed laws requiring collective bargaining for state and local government employees, the Democratic Party benefited in a big way. Membership in public-sector unions surged. Unions of government employees grew into some of the most politically active and influential groups in American politics. Much of their activism went toward supporting Democrats. Yet at the time, Republicans did little to try to stop it.
Actually, in most states, these “duty to bargain” laws of the late 1960s and early 1970s were passed under divided government. Republicans were in positions to block many of them, but they didn’t. In a few places, the laws were even passed by unified Republican governments. And typically, the percentage of Republicans supporting enactment was large. In Pennsylvania in 1968, 94 percent of Republican state legislators voted in favor of the law. In South Dakota two years later, Republican support was unanimous. Republicans therefore helped to pass laws that were a boon to the Democratic Party.
Today, political observers point to something seemingly similar happening in the Democratic Party. As an article in the New York Post put it, “Democrats are Losing Tomorrow’s Elections Today.” After the 2030 reapportionment, it explains, Democratic strongholds like California, New York, and Illinois will likely lose congressional seats (and thus Electoral College votes), whereas Republican states like Texas and Florida are on track to gain them. As for why states like California are losing population, The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas points to skyrocketing housing costs and policymakers’ failures to allow enough housing construction. In her words, “The Democrats Are Committing Partycide.”
Why do political parties sometimes support policies that undermine their own futures? In the case of housing and blue-state population loss, the explanation may be that policymakers simply didn’t know their actions would eventually hurt their party. But that makes the case of state labor laws all the more striking. By the 1960s, American labor was solidly aligned with the Democratic Party. Republicans surely knew that public-sector unions would go on to support Democrats. Why, then, did so many of them vote for laws that strengthened unions?
Terry Moe and I explored this question in our study of state legislators’ votes on these public-sector labor laws. It can be tempting to think of political parties as unitary actors, especially in today’s era of nationalized party brands, but the reality is that parties in government are made up of thousands of individuals elected from different constituencies — and they have a collective action problem. Individual legislators have incentives to be responsive to their local constituencies, and sometimes that means taking positions on policy that are not good for the party. The future electoral success of the party is therefore a collective good. If provided, it would benefit all members of the party, but individual members — thinking about their own political futures — may have incentives not to contribute to it.
That, effectively, is what happened with Republicans in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They did not overcome their collective action problem. The Republican Party at the time still had sizeable numbers of moderate and even liberal elected officials under the party tent. In our analysis, Moe and I found that Republicans elected from relatively moderate districts were significantly more likely to vote “yes.” Another push came from government employees: On average, Republicans from districts where a higher percentage of the workforce was employed by government were also more supportive. Furthermore, state and local governments at the time were beset by strikes of public-sector unions demanding recognition and bargaining rights. Politicians in both parties were under immense pressure to establish labor peace, and granting government workers collective bargaining rights was viewed as a way of doing that. The prevalence of government strikes was therefore another force pushing many state Republicans toward supporting duty-to-bargain laws — even though doing so was bad for their party.
Much had changed by 2011, the year Republicans in six states reversed course and pushed through rollbacks of public-sector collective bargaining rights. By that time, the Republicans in state government were a more homogenously conservative bunch, and the party’s efforts across the states were more coordinated than they had been in the past. Some Republicans did vote against the rollbacks — as before, those from more moderate constituencies with more government employees — but thanks to the party’s greater cohesion at that time, Republicans in 2011 largely voted together, in favor of weakening public-sector unions.
What does this tell us about Democrats’ housing dilemma today? One possibility is that they will simply change their policies. If Democratic policymakers in blue states did not know that their actions would eventually shift national electoral power to the Republican Party, then perhaps they will now work in synchronized fashion to fix the problem.
There is good reason, moreover, to think Democrats really did not know this would happen. After all, in some ways, this situation is quite different from the case of Republicans in the late ‘60s, where the link between their votes and stronger unions was very direct. For housing, much of the (in)action has happened in municipal governments. Nowadays, we know from political science research that city residents voice their opposition to high-density housing developments in local planning commission meetings—and that those dynamics work to delay and limit housing development. But the link between those city decisions and a weakened Democratic Party is indirect. If local housing policies have contributed to migration out of Democratically-led states, it is only because of the accumulation of many of those decisions in hundreds of cities over a long period of time. Local planning commissioners and city councilmembers were probably not thinking about these effects when they were considering individual housing proposals.
Still, the collective action problem is there. Even now that the consequences for the party are clearer, some Democratic policymakers may still resist allowing more housing in their cities. Compounding the challenge for Democrats is the reality that encouraging party discipline is probably considerably more difficult when the relevant policymakers are scattered across so many local governments—where most elections are nonpartisan, and where political party organizations are less involved.
Whether the Democratic Party will overcome this—perhaps by continuing to shift policymaking authority to the state level—remains to be seen. What the case of state labor laws tells us is that we cannot safely assume that elected officials will ignore the loudest voices in their local constituencies to advance the collective good of the party. Sometimes policymakers know a policy will hurt their party—and support it anyway.
Sarah Anzia is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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