Here's a projection - based on past data - that the incoming 113th Congress will be just as gridlocked as its immediate predecessor, the one dubbed by some as the worst Congress ever:
There has been much discussion of “the fundamentals” lately. Armed with knowledge of the economy and presidential approval, political scientists knew a few months ago that Obama had a (slightly) favorable chance of winning the election. Now that the excitement of the election is behind us and politicians face the task of governing, what might the fundamentals tell us about the next two years of lawmaking?
In the realm of congressional politics, the fundamentals I’m referring to are the configurations of legislators’ preferences required to break gridlock, per the theory laid out by Keith Krehbiel in Pivotal Politics and David Brady and Craig Volden in Revolving Gridlock. Breaking gridlock means having supermajorities sufficiently large enough to ignore a veto threat or to invoke cloture in the Senate. These requirements can be summarized graphically in the form of a gridlock interval—any proposal to move policy away from a position that lies within this interval can be expected lack the requisite supermajority coalition.
By looking at how elections affect these intervals, we can understand and form expectations about how productive Congress will be. The key is how the interval shifts and shrinks (or stretches) over time. The more of the previous interval that is “freed up” by the election (i.e., does not overlap the subsequent interval), the more productive we can expect Congress to be.
To see what we might expect over the next two years based on these fundamentals, I computed a projected gridlock interval for the 113th Congress (using Keith Poole’s NOMINATE scores and the technique I used to predict lawmaking following 2008 election) and plotted it along with the gridlock intervals for the 110th through the 112th Congresses (2007-2012) for comparison. The projected interval for the 113th is virtually identical to the interval for the 112th, so we can expect Congress to do…ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!
