American Political Science Review
1 March 1993
THE CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF DIVIDED GOVERNMENT: TOWARD
A NEW THEORY OF AMERICAN POLITICS?
DAVID W. BRADY Stanford University
The Politics of Divided Government. Edited by Gary
W. Cox and Samuel Kernell. Boulder: Westview
Press, 1991. 270p. $55.00 cloth, $15.95 paper.
Divided Government. By Morris Fiorina. New York:
MacMillan Publishing Company, 1992. 138p.
$10.50 paper.
The Electoral Origins of Divided Government: Com-
petition in U.S. House Elections, 1946-1988. By
Gary C. Jacobson. Boulder: Westview Press, 1990.
152p. $44.50 cloth, $15.95 paper.
Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking,
and Investigations, 1946-1990. By David R. May-
hew, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
228p. $25.00.
t is somewhat ironic that these four books on
I divided government have come out just months
before twelve years of divided government has, at
least temporarily, ended. The post-World War II era
of American politics has been characterized by di-
vided government—twenty-six years of Republican
Presidents and at least a Democratic House of Rep-
resentatives and two years of a Democratic President
and a Republican Congress compared to twenty years
of unified government with all but two of these years
being unified Democratic government. For such a
long-lived phenomenon, divided government gen-
erated little serious attention until James Sundquist's
(1988) Political Science Quarterly article called for a
new theory of divided government.1 Sundquist's
article and the election of George Bush to the presi-
dency generated a spate of work on divided govern-
ment. Bush's win was crucial in that previous Repub-
lican presidential victories had been viewed as
aberrations—Eisenhower, a war hero and the Korean
War in 1952, Nixon and an America divided over
Vietnam, and Reagan running against the backdrop
of Iran and a poor economy. No special circum-
stances surrounded George Bush's election in 1988
nor was it an incumbent reelection. Thus, political
scientists and reporters alike came to believe that
Republican Presidents and Democratic Congresses
were here to stay.
These four books and numerous other books and
articles on divided government followed the 1988
reelection results. Many of these works bemoaned
the effects of divided government, calling the effects
policy gridlock. Sundquist (1988), among others,
claimed that divided government was both inefficient
and irresponsible. Reformers sought ways to change
the system to lessen the probability of divided gov-
ernment. Political scientists on average were con-
cerned less with the normative argument; instead,
they concentrated on the causes of divided govern-
ment. These four books deal with both the causes and
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Vol. 87, No.
consequences of divided government. This essay
begins by first examining the various authors' views
of the causes of divided government and then ex-
plaining the authors' views of the consequences of
divided government. Before turning to this task, it is
worth noting how important the study of divided
government is to the field of American politics.
Fiorina correctly points out (pp. 3-5) that the re-
alignment synthesis of American politics has largely
played out as a vehicle for understanding how elec-
tions, institutions, and policy have fit together over
time. The study of divided government has the
potential to replace the realignment synthesis as the
major paradigm. Voters' preferences expressed
through elections, institutional structures, and public
policy outputs are all presumably different in an era
of divided government. Political parties, the domi-
nant vehicle for change under the realignment syn-
thesis, are structurally different. Moreover, politi-
cians behave differently when executives are of one
party and legislatures of the other. Given the poten-
tial of divided government studies to redefine a
synthesis, the most important question is, does di-
vided government make a difference? This question is
often put in other ways, such as the often heard claim
that unified gridlock occurred under President
Carter. Throughout this essay and in the conclusion,
I try to judge how far these authors take us toward a
theory that explicates the causes of divided govern-
ment and makes predictions about the direction of
public policy under both divided and unified govern-
ment.
CAUSES OF DIVIDED GOVERNMENT
There are two distinct approaches to the study of the
causes of divided government at the national level.
The first focuses on the Democratic Congress as the
source of divided government while the second seeks
to explain why Republicans have dominated recent
presidential elections. Gary Jacobson's book The Elec-
toral Origins of Divided Government focuses on the
Democratic Congress (essentially, the House of Rep-
resentatives) as the origin of divided government.
His argument is that the standard interpretation of
why the House is Democratic—incumbency advan-
tage—is seriously flawed. That is, the argument that
Democrats control the House because incumbents
win reelection, and there are more Democratic in-
cumbents is, according to Jacobson, not the major
reason why Democrats win House elections. Jacob-
son reviews the literature on incumbency and finds it
inadequate largely because Democrats win open-seat
elections more often than do Republicans, i.e., Dem-
 The Causes and Consequences of Divided Government
ocrats capture more former Republican seats that
come open than Republicans capture former Demo-
cratic seats in open elections.
The question then becomes, why are Democrats so
successful in House races? Jacobson argues that Dem-
ocrats have better candidates (as measured by levels
of previous political experience) and that they have
better positions on issues. The previous political
experience hypothesis is clearly and convincingly
demonstrated. The argument that Democrats have
better positions on issues is harder to demonstrate
and hangs on a distinction between local and national
issues. This distinction is crucial; John Petrocik, in his
contribution to the Cox and Kernell volume, similarly
claims that Republican presidential victories are a
result of Republican "ownership" of crucial issues
such as managing the economy. Both claims cannot
be true unless we distinguish between electoral lev-
els. In full form, the Petrocik argument is that at the
district level voters want as representatives indi-
viduals who will fight for and deliver government
goods and services beneficial to the district. Thus, for
example, whoever represents eastern Montana will
have to support agricultural policies that benefit the
wheat farmers and ranchers who dominate the
economy of eastern Montana. Beyond price supports
and programs benefiting their interests, the voters in
eastern Montana do not wish their tax burdens to
increase so as to support programs aiding other
interests. If voters in districts favor policies that
benefit them, they will elect candidates who favor
governmental action at the local level without com-
mitments, one way or the other, favoring govern-
mental actions benefiting other districts. Since Dem-
ocrats are on average more favorable to governmental
action, their policy positions will do "better."
How, if Democrats have "better" positions on local
issues, can this be squared with claims that Republi-
cans own issues on the national level? The answer
lies in how local issues aggregate at the national level.
If voters saw their House incumbent as spatially
distinct from the position of the member's party,
then the levels-of-election argument could be com-
patible with both Jacobson's and Petrocik's argu-
ments. 1 analyzed National Election Study (NES) data
for all presidential election years from 1960 through
1988 to determine if such a difference exists. Every
year that the NES asked respondents to place them-
selves on a liberal (1) to a conservative (7) scale, the
median voter was at 4, the Democratic party at about
2, and Republicans at 6. Their Republican represen-
tatives, however, averaged 4.5, while their Demo-
cratic representatives averaged 3.6. In short, mem-
bers can support government programs beneficial to
their districts and not get tarred with the too-liberal or
too-conservative brush borne by their national par-
ties. When all of these locally popular governmental
programs are aggregated nationally, the result is that
the majority Democratic party in the House sounds
like a cacophony of special interests saleable one at a
time locally but not coherently aggregated. From this
perspective, which party is the majority in the House
190
March 1993
does not matter; for majority parties to maintain their
status, the individual members have only to support
government programs which benefit their constitu-
ents.
Republicans, a la Petrocik, could then own certain
national issues like the economy because citizens
think of the country as a whole when voting for
President. Since Republicans are in the minority in
the House, they have a more homogeneous constit-
uency, and their presidential candidates can take
positions that are more appealing to a national con-
stituency. This argument is compatible with, even
underlies, Martin Wattenberg's essay (also in Cox
and Kernell) on how the party with the quickest,
cleanest primary victory wins the presidency. His
thesis is that the institution of the primaries generates
left-of-center Democratic primary voters and right-of-
center Republican primary voters, which in turn pulls
candidates away from the centrist November voters.
The party with the longest and most decisive primary
ends up with a candidate too far from the center and
with too little time to move there. A Democratic
majority in the House whose members support hun-
dreds of localized governmental programs creates a
heterogeneous party, which in general will have a
hard time easily nominating a centrist candidate. In
sum, both Jacobson's claim that Democratic House
candidates have "better" issue positions and Petro-
cik's and Wattenberg's arguments for Republican
presidential ascendancy are compatible if we distin-
guish between electoral levels and assume that voters
decide on different criteria, depending on the office
being contested. Research up to this point has not
clearly specified the linkage between congressional
and presidential elections. Without such specifica-
tions, the crucial roles of issues in explaining divided
government remains unknown.
Jacobson's second claim that Democrats have better
candidates for House seats as measured by previous
political experience is surely empirically true but
remains a puzzle in that we do not know why
Democrats have greater experience. Here Fiorina in
Divided Government makes a major contribution. Fio-
rina documents the rise of divided government at the
state level in American politics and shows that the
major factor in the rise of divided government in the
states is the decline of Republican control of the state
legislatures in the post-World War II period. Fiorina
offers some evidence that the decline of Republican
control of state legislatures is concomitant with the
rise of professionalized state legislatures. That is, the
greater the likelihood that a state legislature meets
full-time, has professional staff, and high pay for
legislatures, the greater the likelihood that the legis-
lature will be dominated by Democrats. Thus, an
unintended consequence of the movement to profes-
sionalize state legislatures was to diminish the state
base of potential Republican congressional candi-
dates. Democratic dominance of state legislatures
means that Democrats have a larger base of potential
congressional candidates schooled in the art of hiring
American Political Science Review
campaign teams, raising money, and running for
election at the state level.
Underlying Fiorina's analysis is the implicit as-
sumption that the opportunity costs for Republicans
running for office and winning or losing are higher
than for Democrats. One aspect of these opportunity
costs is that potential Republican candidates know
that, even if they win elections to the U.S. House,
they will not be chairs of committees or subcommit-
tees given the Democrats' forty-year dominance of
the House. At the state level, a brief analysis of the
data shows that Republicans in 1990 controlled over
two-thirds of the ten legislatures that meet for less
than six months every two years. Again, the idea is
that Republican businesspeople, farmers, ranchers,
and lawyers in a state like Wyoming can serve in the
state legislature without giving up their careers. Suf-
fice it to say that the question of opportunity costs
across parties will and should generate a good deal of
interesting research over the next decade.
Some scholars have tried to use the periods of
divided government at the end of the nineteenth
century as a vehicle to get a handle on the post-World
War II period (see Stewart's conclusion in Cox and
Kernell for a counterinterpretation). This research
will not, in my opinion, prove very useful because
the periods of divided government in the late nine-
teenth century differ in important ways. The major
difference is that in the late nineteenth century,
divided government occurred in off-year elections
when the electorate changed the majority party in
Congress. In the subsequent presidential election,
the off-year House elections correctly predicted
which party's presidential candidate would get the
most voters. That is to say that in the late nineteenth
century the presidential and congressional vote was
highly correlated over pairs of elections. In the post
World War II period and especially post-1964, the
divided government phenomenon is driven by the
rise of split-ticket voting and the level of the personal
vote for incumbent members of Congress. The rise of
the personal vote, especially in House elections,
breaks the connection between congressional and
presidential elections and scholarly attempts to deter-
mine the causes of and, ultimately, the consequences
of divided government depend on understanding the
nature of the presidential-congressional severance.
Neither the electoral-levels theory discussed above
nor the balancing theory discussed below can be used
to explain divided government in the late nineteenth
century.
The causes of divided government arguments in
the Jacobson, Fiorina, and Cox and Kernell books
feature two interpretations: one focusing on why the
Democrats control the House; the other on why the
Republicans control the presidency. I have argued
that these two strands of research are compatible if
one assumes that voters choose candidates at the
House level on local issues and that voters look for
different characteristics when making their choice on
the presidential level. Another major interpretation
191
Vol. 87, No. 1
accounting for divided government is the balancing
theory.
Fiorina reviews this literature and offers several
interpretations. Loosely, the idea is that at the na-
tional level voters choose Republican presidential
candidates from the right to balance a leftist Demo-
cratic Congress. The underlying model is a spatial
voter model where voters understand institutions
and vote accordingly. In a pure median voter model,
voters choose candidates closest to their positions
whereas, in a balancing model, voters may choose to
vote for a Republican presidential candidate who is
actually farther from their own position than is the
Democratic presidential candidate. Voters do this
because they realize (or act as if they realize) the
policy consequences of having both a Congress and a
President to the left of their ideal positions. Therefore
they vote for a Republican presidential candidate to
their right to cancel out the Congress and bring policy
closer to their ideal point. Fiorina points out that the
number of voters choosing this way need not be large
in order for balancing voters to determine outcomes
at the margin.
The balancing theory is appealing because it is
theoretically straightforward, takes institutions into
account, and squares fairly well with recent results at
the national level. As Fiorina points out, however,
there are a number of states with Republican legisla-
tures and Democratic governors where balancing
theories would have to be seriously modified to
account for these results. In addition, balancing mod-
els have not tested any alternative explanations such
as different issues at different levels. Can a balancing
theory account for President-elect Bill Clinton's
victory in 1992? Until either theory is more fully
specified or is tested against alternatives, we should
view the theory as one of a set of plausible but
unproven theories of the causes of divided govern-
ment.
CONSEQUENCES OF DIVIDED
GOVERNMENT
Not knowing the causes of divided government con-
stitutes a major problem for determining its conse-
quences. If, for example, the origins of divided gov-
ernment lie in Democratic control of the U.S. House,
the Democrats would be a heterogeneous, cacopho-
nous national party generally unable to put together
a winning presidential campaign. Then, when Dem-
ocratic Presidents are elected, they may be incapable
of governing. For example, the Carter presidency
may well have been what we could have predicted
given the nature of his electoral coalition, which
means also the standard interpretation that his pres-
idency was flawed because he had too many Geor-
gians or that his legislative liaison was weak would be
incorrect. Indeed, it may well be the case that Dem-
ocrats can only put together winning coalitions when
there is a sitting Republican President and a slow
The Causes and Consequences of Divided Government
economy. The only victorious Democrats in the post-
primary period (1964) have been Jimmy Carter and
Bill Clinton, both of whom ran after at least eight
years of Republican presidencies and campaigned on
a theme of change. The point is that a central ques-
tion about the consequences of divided government
is, does gridlock arise equally under both divided and
unified government?
The answer to this question depends upon the
definition of gridlock. Beginning with Sundquist,
many scholars have clearly come down on the side of
gridlock under divided government. For a long time,
this view predominated, and most political scientists,
in my opinion, still believe that the consequences of
divided government are stalemate and gridlock.
David Mayhew, in Divided We Govern, challenges this
view. Mayhew does not attempt to determine the
cause of divided government; rather he essentially
takes it as exogenous and examines the consequences
in terms of policy outputs (i.e., major policy changes)
and process (i.e., the frequency of congressional
investigations). Answering this question is a formid-
able task because one has to make tenuous as-
sumptions about what major policy change is and
what it means to say that the system is or is not
responding to the public's policy preferences. May-
hew does an admirable job with this difficult task. His
assumptions about major policies and his classifica-
tion of legislative acts are well thought out and
carefully derived. His conclusion is that divided gov-
ernment has not produced gridlock in either policy or
process. In general, the Congress and the President
have responded to changes in the public mood by
passing legislation roughly in accord with the public's
needs and desires. This is strong counterevidence to
those who believe that divided government yields
gridlock.
The essays by Kernell, McCubbins, Cox and
McCubbins, Stewart, and Cox and Kernell in The
Politics of Divided Government come to quite a different
conclusion about consequences than does Mayhew.
Cox and Kernell argue that partisan differences mag-
nify the institutional separation of powers. This mag-
nification leads to intense institutional conflict
wherein policy decisions are the result of an institu-
tionally structured bargaining process where each
party has a veto. In this bargaining game, three
strategies are available: (1) either the President or
Congress goes it alone without the other branch,
(2) there is an appeal to public opinion, or (3) both
branches bargain within the Beltway. Depending on
factors such as the location of the status quo and the
reversion point, public policy outputs are affected by
divided government. McCubbins' study of federal
spending and deficits argues that divided control of
Congress leads to increased deficits, while Cox and
McCubbins argue that divided government can
produce larger changes in policy than would alter-
ation of parties in power. Stewart finds that in the
late nineteenth century divided control of govern-
ment affected government spending levels. In short,
these authors' findings differ from Mayhew's. Most
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March 1993
of these studies are grounded in theories which
specify the roles of actors, institutions and parties in
the formation of public policy. Yet it is unclear what
they would predict about policy in the next four
years. Mayhew, who does not articulate a theory of
divided government, implicitly makes a clear predic-
tion about the next four years based on his obser-
vations: that they will not be much unlike the last
four. Still, the very different conclusions need to be
reconciled.
One crucial question regarding the consequences
of divided government is, by what mechanisms does
divided government work to shape final policy out-
puts? Here, articles by Matthew McCubbins and
Samuel Kernell on the role of institutional vetoes are
helpful. Republican presidents facing Democratic
congresses use threats of vetoes or actual vetoes to
drive policy toward their preferred positions. The
difficulty with going beyond this statement is that we
have no studies showing where the policy would
have been without the threatened or actual veto. For
example, how much different would the 1977 Energy
Act have been with a Republican President in office?
Under a unified Democratic government. President
Carter proposed an energy bill that emphasized con-
servation over exploration. In the House, using a
special feature of the 1974 reform, an ad hoc commit-
tee passed the Carter bill with few changes. In the
Senate, however, Senator Russell Long (D-LA) used
his committee to change dramatically Carter's legis-
lation. The resultant hundred-plus conference com-
mittee passed a final bill that did not vary much from
what a reelected Gerald Ford would likely have
passed through Congress.
A secondary issue regarding vetoes is their effects
on public confidence and on the campaign efforts of
Presidents who use them. President Bush, for exam-
ple, used the veto to push the 1991 Civil Rights Act
closer to his position. In the end, however, Bush
could not take credit for the Act given his continual
threats to veto. The Congress could not take full
credit for the Act since the President had called it a
quota bill. In contrast, bipartisan credit claiming
surrounded the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965
Voting Rights Act. McCubbins' and Kernell's articles
correctly focus attention on the importance of the
veto and, I hope, will generate further research in this
area.
Students of the consequences of divided govern-
ment differ in the extent to which they believe that
stalemate or gridlock results. Mayhew's study is the
best and most comprehensive study of the overall
effect of divided government. Those arguing the case
for stalemate have no comprehensive study, yet their
view has dominated public perceptions to the extent
that two-thirds of Americans now believe that di-
vided government is not a good thing. In the fol-
lowing section, I shall argue that we should attempt
to put together the two halves—causes and conse-
quences—and generate predictions from such com-
prehensive theories.
American Political Science Review
CONCLUSIONS
The first unified government since 1980 should pro-
vide an excellent opportunity for testing theories of
divided government. The first and most obvious
question is about the policy consequences of unified
government under President Clinton with the possi-
bilities ranging from gridlock through no conse-
quences to significant government action. Answers to
this question should depend on the causes of divided
government. None of the various theories offered in
these books explicitly make such predictions. In fair-
ness to the authors, they are often interested in a
more limited question (e.g., why is the House Dem-
ocratic) or in explaining the past or specific policies.
Nevertheless, any theory purporting to explain di-
vided government should tie together causes and
consequences such that predictions about the Clinton
presidency may be made.
Those who believe that divided government causes
gridlock should be willing to say that uniform gov-
ernment results in significant government activity.
Why have so few been willing to say at least this
much? My suspicion is that the Carter presidency
from 1976 to 1980 (which can hardly be characterized
as a period of significant change) makes predictions
difficult in lieu of a connecting theory. Jacobson is
essentially silent on the question of consequences;
Fiorina sees the complexity and suggests answers
without ever fully placing a solid bet on any of them;
and Mayhew implies that it would not make much
of a difference since divided government has not led
to gridlock. Balancing theories implicitly hold that
divided government yields centrist or status quo
policies. That is, the theory holds that the Democratic
Congress is left of the median voter while Republican
presidential candidates are right of the median voter.
Since voters take this into account when choosing
Republican Presidents, it follows that divided gov-
ernments constrain (left) congressional policies as
well as (right) presidential policies. Electing a Dem-
ocratic President slightly left of center logically
should move policy left, somewhere between the
Democratic President and the Democratic Congress.
Studies of specific policy areas might, depending
upon the location of the status quo, reveal little
movement in given areas, but overall government
activism should increase and policy should shift
leftward. That is, however, exactly the prediction this
model should have made for the Carter Adminis-
tration.
A theory of divided government based on interests
located in congressional districts yields quite another
prediction. Regardless of which party controls the
presidency, such a theory would argue that interests
dominate the policy process and that the median
member of Congress within various policy areas will
dominate policy results. On this view, a Clinton
presidency will not differ much from a Bush or a
Carter presidency since what drives policy is the
distribution of interests over states and districts, the
organization of the House and Senate committees,
193
Vol. 87, No. 1
and the location of the median House and Senate
member. Change in health care policy, for example,
will be hard to come by given the array and place-
ment of relevant interests in the Congress. Moreover,
the final health care policy result of a Clinton presi-
dency will be very similar to the Bush proposal—a
mix of private and public care with controls placed on
Medicare expenditures. Likewise, policy on Corpo-
rate Average Fuel Efficiency, which failed to pass in
1990 and 1991, will still have Democrats like John
Dingell (Michigan) and Bennett Johnston (Louisiana)
opposing higher standards.
An implicit difference between theories predicting
(if they predicted) change with unified government
and those predicting gridlock is how they view polit-
ical parties. If parties are viewed as more than the
aggregate of the preferences of their members' con-
stituencies, then one would predict coherent govern-
ment action. If parties are simply the sum of constit-
uent preferences, then legislation driving policy in a
coherent direction (left in the case of the Clinton
presidency) will be difficult to find. According to my
calculations, the median House member in the next
Congress is in Representative Charles Stenholm's
(D-TX) Conservative Democratic Caucus, and overall
policy results will be determined by that group's
position. Understanding divided government's
causes and consequences at root demands a theory of
political parties which ties together interests, elec-
tions, and member behavior in committees and on
the floor, and an understanding of how these ar-
rangements vary when the President is of the same
party as the congressional majority.
Research about the role of congressional parties in
the policy process converges on two widely differing
interpretations: one that party matters and the other
that party is simply the aggregate of member and,
ultimately, constituent preferences. Under the strong
party view, the President bargains with the majority
party median; while under the non-partisan view, the
President bargains with the floor median voter. As-
suming a Clinton presidency (where his position lies
between the Democratic party median and the con-
gressional median), the strong party view suggests
that policy will move left toward the party median;
while the non-partisan view suggests that Clinton
will deal with the median floor voter and policy will
not move left.
All of these books increase our understanding of
divided government. The Jacobson book raises the
level of debate about congressional elections and will
for some time shape the field. Mayhew's work on the
consequences of divided government is a powerful,
well-argued counter to the divided government grid-
lock scenario. No one examining the consequences of
divided government will be able to escape its influ-
ence. Articles by Petrocik, Wattenberg, McCubbins,
and Kernell (in Cox and Kernell) stand out as impor-
tant contributions to the study of divided govern-
ment. The Fiorina book is an excellent review of the
literature and, a la V.O. Key Jr., contains numerous
insightful hypotheses that should keep a generation
The Causes and Consequences of Divided Government
of doctoral students busy working on divided gov-
ernment dissertations. In short, progress toward un-
derstanding divided government has been made,
and, more importantly, new questions have been
raised.
Having said this, it is nevertheless the case that a
theory which combines the causes and consequences
of divided government, yielding predictions about
unified government, has yet to be devised. Some
might argue that this standard is too high in that it
asks for a general theory of government. My view,
however, is that unless we, as a profession, can offer
clear theories of how elections, institutions, and
194
March 1993
policy are connected and deduce predictions from
these theories, we shall simply be telling ad hoc
stories. Political scientists should look on the next
four years of unified government as an opportunity
to develop and test general theories of American
politics.
Notes
1. James L. Sundquist. "The New Era of Coalition Govern-
ment in the United States." (Political Science Quarterly 103
[1988]).