THE ROOTCAUSE OF U.S. CONGRESSIONAL GRIDLOCK

In politics, gridlock refers to the difficulty of passing laws fulfilling a party's political agenda in a legislature that is nearly evenly divided, or in which two legislative houses, or the executive branch and the legislature are controlled by different political parties. In United States politics, gridlock frequently refers to occasions when the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate are controlled by different parties, or by a different party than the party of the president. Gridlock may also occur within the Senate, when no party has a filibuster-proof majority (most major legislation (apart from budgets) requires a 60% vote to bring a bill or nomination to the floor for a vote)

Congressional 'gridlock' is a serious problem in the United States, as it means that Congress doesn't take action to address various pressing policy challenges. What conditions are sufficient to motivate legislative action? In a democracy, this question has to be answered in reference to the views and interests of the public. But there is no free-standing thing called “public opinion” or “the public interest.” Rather, the form those take is shaped by political institutions. In other words, the constitutional structure shapes what counts as public consensus.

The U.S. constitutional structure requires a pretty high degree of consensus for action. The House of Representatives is highly responsive to short-term shifts in public opinion and highly responsive to local interests. By contrast the U.S. Senate is much less responsive to short-term shifts . Any individual Senator only faces the electorate every six years, and never do more than (roughly) a third of them face the voters in any election and that has a state-wide constituency. The President is elected every four years,  can only be reelected once, and has a national constituency (as refracted through the odd prism of the electoral college). Absent the very rare occurrence of a veto override, legislative action only occurs if all three institutional actors are on board.

In other words, getting things done requires negotiation between actors structured to have short-, medium-, and long-term perspectives and between actors structured to have local, state-wide, and national perspectives. Public consensus for legislative action is pretty high and hard to achieve.

Another important factor to be taken into account is that political views can and do change as a result of politics itself. That is to say, politicians seek to reflect public opinion, but they also seek to shape it. Consensus often doesn’t just exist out there in the world; it has to be built.

Because of the U.S. constitutional structure, unified government requires that one party outcompete the other over broad swaths of the country and over multiple election cycles. Precisely because unified government is so hard to achieve, its presence is an indication that one party has the sort of deep public consensus behind its platform that is necessary for substantial legislative action. But under divided government, which now persists into the 113th Congress, neither party’s platform has that sort of clear mandate. Therefore less is getting done.  But plenty still gets done, and, again, this is because the public consensus exists.