Political Memes

Nah, just putting words together doesn't make them true, and they aren't. The parties consistently vote differently & non-cooperatively on legislation as roll call votes & their analyses show.

• According to roll call analysis, non-cooperation in Congress has increased exponentially over at least 6 decades, and dissatisfaction with weak congressional productivity may be due to harder ideologues failing to realize that.

  Excerpts

  partisanship or non-cooperation in the U.S. Congress has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years with no sign of abating or reversing

  See graphs of probability distributions of cross- & same-party pair agreements increasingly diverge over congressional sessions. See networks of pairwise agreements between members for each congressional session increasingly split by party over time. From historical heights of cross-party cooperation around the 1970s, cross-party agreement has declined significantly at an exponential rate as same-party agreement has grown.

  Cooperator prevalence has decreased by two orders of magnitude from the 1970s to 2000s. From 1967 to 1979, Congress often had over 10,000 cooperators (max: 12,921) and was comprised of at least 10% cooperators (max: 13.4%), i.e. at least 10% of CP pairs agreed on more issues than SP pairs. In comparison, 2001–2010 held fewer than 1,500 cooperators (min: 181) with fewer than 1.5% (min: 0.2%) of CP pairs acting as cooperators (Table 1). Longitudinally, partisanship/non-cooperation has been increasing at an annual rate of about 5% over the last 60 years. The average number of disagreements on roll call votes between CP pairs is increasing exponentially (Fig 3A), as illustrated by an exponential growth model in the form of y = c₀e^γt^ which exhibits a fit (F₃₁ = 236.22, α = 0.05, R² = 0.88, p < 0.0001).

  The harder ideologues who claim their parties aren't partisan enough instead of recognizing the partisanship is peaking may paradoxically be contributing to their own dissatisfaction with congressional productivity.

  Our analysis shows that Congressional partisanship has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years, and has had negative effects on Congressional productivity. This is particularly apparent in the steady reduction of the number of bills introduced onto the floor, suggesting that the primary negative effect of increasing partisanship is a loss of Congressional innovation.

  This increase in non-cooperation leads to an interesting electoral paradox. While U.S. voters have been selecting increasingly partisan representatives for 40 years, public opinion of the U.S. Congress has been steadily declining.

  Voters might believe that highly partisan candidates will ‘tip the scale’ in one party’s favor. However, based on correlations shown here, a partisan candidate may lack cooperation needed to pass legislation.

  Current affairs do not explain this height in party division.

  Certainly current affairs do not seem to divide potential cooperators, as cross-party relationships peaked in arguably the most tumultuous period in recent U.S. history, marked with numerous political assassinations and Vietnam War and the resignation of President Nixon, as illustrated by others, such as [23–25].

• DW-NOMINATE scores of congressional voting records confirm increasingly polarized party voting.

• An analysis of party conformity over the last 2 decades finds higher party unity among Democrats.

  In the House and the Senate, the average party conformity score was higher for Democrats than Republicans over the nearly 18,000 total votes taken. Democrats in the House voted with their party 90.4 percent of the time; Republicans in the House, 89.3 percent of the time. In the Senate, the gulf was wider: Democrats lined up 89.8 percent of the time while Republicans did so only 86.6 percent of the time.

  Over the past 20 years, Democrats have, in fact, been more likely to stick together on votes than have Republicans.

Not voting as hardline ideologues would want doesn't imply they aren't the representatives people voted for or the parties are cooperating. More than ever, the parties largely aren't cooperating, because they're as partisan people voted (particularly on the right).