In a time of polarized political parties, conflict seems to prevail over cooperation within legislatures. Given low levels of legislative productivity and high levels of gridlock, it seems like lawmakers are unwilling to make compromises. In their book, Sarah E. Anderson, Daniel M. Butler, and Laurel Harbridge-Yong explore whether this is true. Drawing on evidence from survey experiments of samples of state legislators and local elected officials, they consider lawmakers’ willingness to support compromises, as well as the reasons why elected officials refuse to support policy outcomes that deliver only some, but not all, of their desired policy goals.
The authors’ survey experiments of elite samples of elected officials represent an exciting and important innovation for how we study legislative behavior. Rather than making assumptions about the motivations of elites, they take a behavioral approach to legislative politics by investigating how elected officials approach different hypothetical policy dilemmas. These survey experiments, coupled with a deft use of quotes from state legislators, provide terrific insights into what drives the decision-making process of lawmakers and how they see their constituents.
In their first set of survey experiments, elected officials are asked about their willingness to support policy compromises on the size of a gas tax or a budget proposal. The authors find that rejecting compromise is uncommon: 77% of state legislators and 87% of local elected officials are willing to accept the compromise that is proposed to them. This is remarkable given the conventional wisdom that the preferences of lawmakers obstruct cooperation and compromises in politics. Although the authors are most interested in the small minority who rejects compromises, it is fascinating to see that lawmakers generally seem quite willing to accept policy outcomes that deliver only part of what they desire in politics. It suggests that the barriers to compromise may not be within the personal voting calculus of lawmakers but are rooted elsewhere—perhaps within legislative institutions or the structure of the policy process.
For the minority of lawmakers who refuse these proposed compromises, what explains their opposition? The authors find little evidence of moral opposition to supporting compromises, because support for the policy does not shift when it is framed in moral terms. Likewise, support for the proposed compromise seems insensitive to whether the proposal was bipartisan, offered by the legislator’s own party, or backed by the opposing party. To try to better understand why some lawmakers oppose the proposed compromise, they look to the preferences that participants reported in a pretest questionnaire. They find little evidence of strategic thinking: those who think they might achieve a better outcome in future sessions are not less willing to endorse the compromise. Instead, the authors argue that fears of electoral retribution drive resistance to compromise, because those who express opposition to the policy proposal are also more likely to say that they fear supporting compromises will have negative repercussions at the ballot box.
Yet even as lawmakers may fear retribution from constituents for their support of compromise, these fears seem misplaced. When average Americans are asked to evaluate a member of Congress’s hypothetical vote on a policy compromise, they give more favorable ratings to lawmakers who voted in support of the compromise bill than to those who voted against it. The rewards for compromise come from co-partisans and opposing partisans alike. Even when looking at subsets of voters who might be the most prone to dislike compromise—such as likely primary voters, campaign donors, Tea Party supporters, and strong partisans—lawmakers who compromise earn more favorable ratings than lawmakers who refuse to compromise. The only penalties for supporting compromises are found among a small subset of likely primary voters who share the partisanship of the lawmaker but say that they prefer to see their senator reject the proposed compromise—a group that represents about one-third of co-partisan likely primary voters.
For the authors, this is the subset of voters who may drive the fears of electoral retribution expressed by lawmakers. However, the larger takeaway is arguably that lawmakers who oppose compromise fundamentally misperceive the demands of their constituents. Given that an estimated 20% of Americans participated in congressional primaries in 2018, and experimental results show that an overwhelming majority of primary voters favored a compromise outcome, it seems unwise for legislators to cast votes against compromises out of fears of incurring the wrath of what amounts to single-digit shares of the electorate.
The authors close by exploring what could be done to encourage lawmakers to broker compromises. In contrast to others who simply speculate about the practical implications of their scholarship, the authors do something far more interesting: they use experiments to test possible interventions to encourage lawmakers to consider compromises. They focus on two possibilities: emphasis on shared goals and conducting policy negotiations in private sessions. They find little evidence that decision makers are more supportive of compromise when primed to focus on shared goals. However, lawmakers express greater optimism about the possibility of reaching successful compromises in private meetings than in public deliberations.
Across their experiments, the authors focus on a single-dimension policy space, where a compromise represents any policy proposal that improves on the status quo while falling short of the legislators’ ideal outcome. This definition of compromise represents a useful simplification within an experimental setting and allows the authors to consider the sensitivity of support for compromise to the size of the policy gains that are made. A limitation of this approach is that it may oversimplify how lawmakers evaluate compromises in practice. Compromises are defined as agreements where both sides have to make concessions to achieve policy gains. It is arguably the cost of those concessions that makes compromises more challenging to support, rather than the failure to achieve all of the party’s goals. But within a single-dimension policy space, it is not necessarily clear that anything has been ceded to the other side: compromises are presented as outcomes that simply fall short of an ideal outcome. In practice, lawmakers struggle with compromises because they must weigh the value of what is gained in a compromise against the concessions needed to meet the demands of the opposing side, where costs and benefits are rarely on the same metric. Investigating how lawmakers grapple with these trade-offs will be important to explore in future work.
Through their innovative research approach, the authors provide valuable insights into how lawmakers perceive the demands of their constituents. Although they focus on primary voters as a force that might dissuade legislators from compromises, many of the other findings from the book are equally intriguing. The average lawmaker is happy to sign on to compromises, regardless of whether that proposal comes from their own party or the opposing side. When members oppose compromises, it is not because they are stalling in the hopes of securing some better future outcome for their party; it is because they believe that it would alienate some portion of constituents they represent. This is a fascinating book that should be of interest both to those who want to better understand legislative behavior and to those who want to find ways to improve legislative productivity in a time of gridlock and polarization.
