Delayed Gratification

• Date: 01 September 2016
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912916648015
• Author: Travis J. Baker
• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

2016, Vol. 69(3) 457 –468

© 2016 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912916648015

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Article

Presidents frequently encounter staunch opposition on

their policy priorities (Mann and Ornstein 2012), and

the lack of opposition-party support often comes with-

out a clear, ideologically based explanation (Lee 2009).

The 2013 debt ceiling crisis typifies the current state of

affairs. With the country approaching default, President

Obama asked Congress to increase the debt ceiling with

no strings attached. Speaker Boehner (Republican-Ohio;

R-OH) and Republicans in Congress refused, stating

they did “not support raising the debt ceiling without

reducing government spending at the same time.”1 The

stalemate eventually led to a government shutdown,

even though Republicans voted to increase the debt ceil-

ing seven times during President Bush’s tenure, not

once with spending reductions attached.2 Congressional

Republicans apparently trusted a copartisan president

with a higher debt ceiling, but not an opposition-party

president. For their part, Democrats also had little trust

for an opposition-party president—Republicans passed

those seven debt ceiling increases under President Bush

with very little Democratic support. In fact, then-Sena-

tor Obama was one of the votes’ most vocal opponents.3

Clearly, raising the debt ceiling meant something differ-

ent when the other party controlled the White House.

Much previous research treats all legislative activity

as ideological in nature and cannot explain Obama’s dif-

ficulty with the debt ceiling. But Frances Lee (2009)

cogently makes the argument that a large amount of the

disagreement in Congress derives not from genuine ideo-

logical differences between the parties but rather from

parties’ efforts to discredit one another to gain an advan-

tage in the next election. Presidential efforts to dampen

this partisan competition only make it worse, as party-

line votes are much more likely to occur on presidential

priorities (pp. 74–102). However, a major limitation of

this study is that it treats the presidential effect uniformly

across all legislation. It does not consider that the presi-

dential effect varies in size, although it almost certainly

does—not all presidential priorities receive equal treat-

ment in Congress. This leaves open the question of when,

and therefore why, the partisan divide in Congress is

more or less likely to widen on presidential priorities.

This paper answers that question: the more importance

the president places on a policy priority, the greater the

partisan divide in Congress. The following evidence for

this explanation provides further support for Lee’s argu-

ment, extends the argument to explain variation in the

presidential effect, and also provides researchers with a

new way to measure nonideological (at least, not imme-

diately ideological) partisan disagreement. First, I review

648015PRQXXX10.1177/1065912916648015Political Research QuarterlyBaker

research-article2016

1University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Corresponding Author:

Travis J. Baker, University of California, Los Angeles,

4289 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.

Email: tbaker17@ucla.edu

Delayed Gratification: Party Competition

for White House Control in the U.S.

House of Representatives

Travis J. Baker1

Abstract

Americans expect the president to lead Congress, but Congress’s partisan divide typically widens on presidential

priorities. More often, presidents are reduced to leading their copartisans rather than Congress as a whole, but

why? In this paper, I argue that competition for White House control creates incentives for parties to disagree on

presidents’ policy agendas, regardless of the contents of those agendas. I use an original data set of members’ roll-

call vote decisions on presidents’ agendas between 1971 and 2010 to show that partisan polarization is larger on

presidents’ priorities and largest on their top priorities, above and beyond what we would expect from members’

ideologies and standard party effects. These findings persist over time and under a wide range of alternative model

specifications, bringing us closer to understanding the partisan conflict so prevalent in today’s politics.

Keywords

presidents, parties, polarization, partisan conflict