How Partisan Conflict in Congress Affects Public Opinion
| Author | Laurel Harbridge,D.J. Flynn |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1532673X15610425 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2015
Article
American Politics Research
2016, Vol. 44(5) 875 –902
How Partisan Conflict in
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X15610425
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Opinion: Strategies,
Outcomes, and Issue
Differences
D.J. Flynn1 and Laurel Harbridge1
Abstract
Scholars are increasingly interested in how partisan conflict in Congress
affects public evaluations of institutional performance. Yet, existing
research overlooks how the public responds to one of the most widely
discussed consequences of partisan conflict: legislative gridlock. We develop
expectations about how partisan conflict resulting in partisan wins, losses,
and gridlock will affect evaluations of Congress, and how these relationships
will differ across consensus and non-consensus issues. Results from two
survey experiments indicate that partisan conflict resulting in a victory
for one’s own party boosts approval relative to compromise, but conflict
resulting in gridlock substantially damages approval. However, the degree
to which gridlock decreases approval hinges on the type of policy under
consideration. On consensus issues, citizens reward legislative action by
either party—their party or the opposing party—over gridlock.
Keywords
Congress, partisanship, gridlock, public opinion
1Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Corresponding Author:
Laurel Harbridge, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Faculty Fellow,
Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, 601 University Place, Evanston,
IL 60208, USA.
Email: l-harbridge@northwestern.edu
876
American Politics Research 44(5)
To what extent does partisan conflict in Congress affect public evaluations
of institutional performance? In recent years, historic levels of party polar-
ization have coincided with some of the lowest congressional approval rat-
ings in decades (McCarty, Poole, & Rosenthal, 2006; Pew Research Center,
2015; Theriault, 2008). There are several reasons to think that heightened
party conflict would have significant effects on approval. In general, a large
body of research suggests that governing strategies—and resulting policy
outputs—influence public attitudes toward and the perceived legitimacy of
political institutions (e.g., Doherty, 2015a; Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2002).
Partisan conflict in particular plays a central role in governing strategies,
affecting both legislative processes and policy outputs. Thus, a growing
body of literature seeks to isolate when and why partisan conflict increases
or decreases evaluations of Congress, and whether the public prefers bipar-
tisan compromise to partisan conflict (Durr, Martin, & Wolbrecht, 1997;
Harbridge & Malhotra, 2011; Harbridge, Malhotra, & Harrison, 2014; Jones,
2013; Ramirez, 2009).
Although illuminating in many regards, these studies tell us little about
how the public responds to one of the most widely discussed consequences of
partisan conflict: legislative gridlock (see Mann & Ornstein, 2012). Extant
studies of partisan conflict and public opinion often overlook the outcome of
conflict (Durr et al., 1997; Ramirez, 2009) or explicitly focus on partisan
victories (Harbridge et al., 2014). This gap is all the more surprising given
recent public and scholarly concern about partisan conflict and legislative
productivity (e.g., Binder, 2014; Jones, 2001; Mann & Ornstein, 2006, 2012).
In this article, we address this gap by examining how the public responds
when partisan conflict results in legislative gridlock.1
We argue that the key to understanding the complex relationship between
partisan conflict and public opinion lies in considering the implications of
partisan conflict for legislative outcomes, in particular whether conflict
results in gridlock. When parties eschew compromise, partisan conflict can
result in a win for one’s own party, a win for the opposing party, or gridlock.
Specifically, we suggest that while citizens approve of partisan conflict when
it results in a win for their party, they should disapprove when it prevents
Congress from performing its basic responsibilities to address national prob-
lems (Adler & Wilkerson, 2013; Butler & Powell, 2014; Hibbing & Theiss-
Morse, 1995). Evaluations of Congress may not only be lower following
gridlock than when partisanship results in a win for one’s own side, but on
issues where the parties disagree over the means but agree on the end goals
of policy (i.e., consensus issues), gridlock may be even worse than a win for
the opposing side. On more contentious issues, gridlock may still damage
congressional evaluations, but may be viewed more similarly to a victory by
Flynn and Harbridge
877
the opposing party. We test these expectations with two survey experiments
in which we manipulate the consequences of party conflict for legislative
outcomes. Our approach varies not just the legislative behavior of the parties
(i.e., compromise or partisanship) but also the consequence of partisanship
(i.e., a partisan win, partisan loss, or gridlock). As a result, this work speaks
to larger questions regarding the relationship between approaches to govern-
ing, policy outputs, institutional approval, and legitimacy (Gibson, Caldeira,
& Spence, 2005; Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2001; Tyler, 1994).
We make three novel contributions to the literature on partisan conflict
and public opinion toward Congress. First, we test when party conflict is
attractive by comparing evaluations of Congressional performance across
different legislative strategies—partisanship versus compromise—and out-
comes of partisanship—a win for one’s own party, a win for the opposing
party, and gridlock. Second, we investigate whether the effect of gridlock on
public opinion depends on whether gridlock is framed as resulting from ideo-
logical disagreement versus strategic partisan considerations (e.g., elections).
The media regularly invoke both ideological and strategic partisan frames in
their coverage of politics (Cappella & Jamieson, 1997; Lawrence, 2000), and
this distinction may be important for understanding how the public reacts to
legislative gridlock. Third, we consider how a critical issue-level factor—the
degree of cross-party consensus over policy goals—affects public responses
to gridlock. The opposition to gridlock may be much greater when consensus
exists on policy goals (even as parties disagree on the means) than when par-
ties disagree over both the means and the goals of policy. Combined, our
approach sheds light on the complex relationship between partisan conflict
and public opinion, and highlights how public evaluations of Congress rest
on considerations that go beyond policy congruence.
The experimental results indicate that citizens approve of how Congress is
handling policy making when partisan conflict produces a win for one’s own
party. However, we also uncover evidence that citizens disapprove when par-
tisan conflict prevents Congress from acting on an important national issue.
In fact, on a consensus issue, partisans are more approving of Congress’ han-
dling of policy making when a policy debate results in a win for the other
party than when the debate ends in gridlock. This surprising finding runs
counter to the prevailing view of partisans in the mass public as hostile to
members of and ideas from the opposing party (e.g., Iyengar, Sood, & Lelkes,
2012). While some research suggests that citizens may endorse a range of
policy proposals to deal with national problems (Egan, 2014), that work has
failed to link proposals to particular parties (e.g., “Party A suggests Solution
a, Party B suggests Solution b”)—arguably the most common format in
which policy proposals are described in the real world. We address this gap
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American Politics Research 44(5)
and find that people still value action by the opposing party on consensus
issues. These results are striking in light of research on partisan cues, which
suggests that citizens should move overwhelmingly in the direction of their
party’s position (Druckman, Peterson, & Slothuus, 2013; Slothuus & de
Vreese, 2010). Finally, while both frames for gridlock—ideological and
partisan—result in lower evaluations of Congress, the evidence is suggestive
that approval is lowest when gridlock is attributed to strategic partisan behav-
ior. Citizens are significantly more accepting of legislative inaction when it is
characterized as the result of genuine ideological disagreements between the
two parties.
Background and Expectations
National polls regularly uncover widespread support for bipartisan coopera-
tion in Congress. For instance, Pew Research Center (2012) reports that 8 in
10 Americans agree with the statement “I like political leaders who are will-
ing to make compromises in order to get the job done.” Likewise, 6 in 10
respondents prefer that the majority in Congress tries to pass legislation with
bipartisan support as opposed to passing legislation without minority support
(CBS News, 2009). Recent increases in party polarization (e.g., McCarty
et al., 2006; Theriault, 2008), resulting in both partisan victories and legisla-
tive gridlock (Binder, 2003, 2014; Burden, 2011; Jones, 2001), stand in stark
contrast to this expectation. Driven in part by this contradiction, in recent
years, scholars have begun to re-examine...
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