Partisan Infighting Among House Republicans: Leaders, Factions, and Networks of Interests

• Date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12168
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• Author: Jon Mackay,William Bendix

WILLIAM BENDIX

Keene State College

JON MACKAY

University of Waterloo

Partisan Infighting Among House

Republicans: Leaders, Factions,

and Networks of Interests

Congressional parties are commonly viewed as unified legislative teams, but

recent intraparty battles have revealed serious ideological divisions within the House

Republican caucus. Using annual ratings from nearly 300 interest groups, we estimate

the ideological locations of Republican legislators in order to map their party’s factional

structure. Based on the distribution of interest-group support from 2001 to 2012, we

detect three Republican factions that we characterize as worker oriented, pro-business,

and ethno-radical. We find that Republican leaders block bills by legislators in the work-

er and ethno-radical subgroups and that they advance bills by members in the corporate

faction.

Historically high levels of congressional polarization have

encouraged scholars to view each party as ideologically homogenous

(see, e.g., Poole and Rosenthal 2007; Roberts and Smith 2003; Theriault

2008). Yet, since 2010, many House Republicans have def‌ied their party

leaders on key issues, often to serve the Tea Party movement. In particu-

lar, these members have adopted hardline, populist positions on taxation,

the debt ceiling, and immigration reform that so-called establishment

Republicans have considered irresponsible (Mann and Ornstein 2012).

This internal f‌ighting has made it diff‌icult for leaders of the Republican

majority to advance a legislative agenda that broadly satisf‌ies their

caucus. The Republican Party is still comprised of conservatives who

uniformly oppose Democratic priorities, but its members have often split

on the most salient f‌loor votes. As one observer has remarked: “Today’s

Republican Party is an assemblage of tribes with no real leader”

(Sullivan 2013).

The ongoing battle over the Republican agenda has renewed

scholarly interest in factions and the ideological composition of congres-

sional parties (e.g., Brady 2010; Kabaservice 2012). But there are no

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 42, 4, November 2017 549

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12168

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C2017 Washington University in St. Louis

established quantitative methods for identifying and measuring the size

of intraparty groups in Congress. Consequently, the congressional litera-

ture has overlooked a number of important questions on party

composition. How does the factional structure of the majority affect its

legislative agenda? How do majority-party leaders manage and respond

to conf‌licting factions within their caucus? Do they reward or punish

members of various ideological subgroups? In this article, we present a

method for detecting multiple factions within the congressional parties,

and we examine leadership strategies for maintaining unity within an

ideologically divided party. We focus our analysis primarily on House

Republicans because their public disagreements over policy and legisla-

tion give us an ideal opportunity to examine the dynamics of partisan

inf‌ighting.

To determine the ideological composition of congressional parties,

we examine the collection of interest groups that align with each caucus.

Our assumption, following the early insights of Schattschneider (1960)

and Truman (1951), as well as more recent observations by Bawn et al.

(2012), among others, is that the congressional parties manage a coali-

tion of interests with intense and, at times, competing preferences. These

coalitions potentially reveal the ideological makeup of each party. Exam-

ining the period from the 107th to the 112th Congress (2001–12), we

use annual interest-group scores from a large, diverse set of organiza-

tions to estimate the ideological locations of House members and to map

the factional structure of the parties. Specif‌ically, we create a bipartite or

two-mode network relating interest groups and their annual ratings of all

House members. We project this two-mode network to create two sepa-

rate single-mode networks: (1) where interest groups are related by the

similarity in which they score House members and (2) where legislators

are related by the similarity in which they have been scored by interest

groups. Then, using a hierarchical clustering algorithm on a correlation

matrix of similarities between actors, we identify ideological factions

within each party.

Our analysis shows that interest groups cluster predictably into two

broad camps, split along a liberal-conservative line. Democratic legisla-

tors tend to be rated highly by social-justice groups and labor unions;

Republicans tend to be rated highly by religious organizations and indus-

try lobbies. Although we f‌ind clear evidence of partisan polarization, we

also f‌ind strong indications of internal party divisions. Notably, within

the House Republican caucus, we detect three distinct factions. Each one

is rated favorably by a different subset of interest groups, and each one

predates the rise of the Tea Party. Based on the distribution of interest-

group support across the Republican caucus, we surmise that one

550 William Bendix and Jon MacKay