Divided We Govern.

• Author: Fiorina, Morris

With the election of George Bush and a Democratic Congress in 1988, the country was assured of at least 10 consecutive years of divided government, an all-time, still-climbing record. The election results also swelled a trickle of writings about divided government into a good-sized stream, probably because the 1988 outcome indicated that divided government has become a characteristic feature of contemporary American politics and can no longer be viewed as an aberration attributable to contingencies like charismatic Republican presidents (the Eisenhower and Reagan years) and splits in the Democratic Party (the Nixon years).

Many of those who have written about divided government blame it for much of what's wrong with American politics today. James Sundquist of the Brookings Institution, for example, sees little but drift and stalemate under divided governments in comparison to periods when energetic presidents and their legislative majorities adopted major policy initiatives. Reformer Lloyd Cutler lays the chronic budgetary crisis directly at the feet of divided government. Writing in the William and Mary Law Review, he observes that "in modern times high deficits have occurred only with divided government.... The correlation between unacceptably high deficits and divided government is much too exact to be a coincidence." Professors Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter argue that divided government, in addition to fostering budgetary and foreign policy disputes, encourages frustrated presidents to go outside the law in order to achieve their aims and frustrated members of Congress to leak secrets and conduct destructive investigations in order to achieve theirs, and contributes to the politicization of the courts, the bureaucracy, and the media.

The critics' arguments are plausible and their examples often striking, but sometimes striking examples do not represent the larger universe of cases. A look at that larger universe suggests that the case against divided government is, to say, the least, exaggerated. In Divided We Govern(*), David Mayhew, a Yale political scientist, provides us with a first-rate study of the operation of American government during both unified and divided periods between 1946 and 1990 and finds nothing in the historical record to suggest that periods of divided government are any less productive than periods of unified control. Through exhaustive reviews, Mayhew identifies 267 instances of "significant" legislation -...