How often do votes in the Senate or House fall along party lines?

October 2, 2013 6:17 AM

That is to say, how often will Republicans overwhelmingly vote one way and Democrats vote the opposite way, and how often do majorities within both parties vote the same way? Do Democrats and Republicans agree on most things, but the news outlets only report on the disagreements? Or do they indeed disagree on everything? Where might I go to get such numbers?
posted by jwhite1979 to Law & Government (9 answers total)

I think it depends on which era in history you're talking about - or what they're voting on. This particular Congress voted unanimously on whether to bestow the Congressional Medal of Honor on a platoon of black marines from World War II.

Congressional voting records are a matter of public record; here's a series of links to track down how Congress voted on various bills going back to about 1990. But I suspect you'll find it's a little all over the place in terms of whether there are trends.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:30 AM on October 2, 2013

Do Democrats and Republicans agree on most things, but the news outlets only report on the disagreements? Or do they indeed disagree on everything?

Neither of those are literally true. In 2001, when the Senate was around 50/50, it voted for the Patriot Act 99-1. But that was right after a terrorist attack, so it might be the exception that proves the rule.
posted by John Cohen at 6:58 AM on October 2, 2013 [1 favorite]

And of course, a symbolic vote on something totally uncontroversial that any politician would be crazy to vote against, like the Marines example, isn't indicative of much.
posted by John Cohen at 6:59 AM on October 2, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: There are a number of analytics available. Perhaps most on point would be House Democrats vote with party and House Republicans vote with party. I believe you will see that the rate with which representatives move in concert with their leadership is quite high, more so for the Republicans. The Senate tends to be a bit more independent, reflecting their power relative to the party Senate Rs and Senate Ds. In the Senate, the pattern is reversed, with more Democrats toeing the party line than Republicans. This also reflects to a certain degree the differences between being the majority party and the minority party. The trend to vote more or less in lockstep is a relatively recent one -- past Congresses had far more individual cross the aisles. Part of this is a result of the move of the South to the Republican side, previously many Southern Democrats were ideologically closer to the Republicans on many issues. You can still see that effect to a certain degree, Democrats from Utah and North Carolina are less likely to agree with their leadership and Republicans from left-leaning districts are more likely to break ranks.
posted by Lame_username at 7:18 AM on October 2, 2013 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Lovely answer, Lame_username. Thank you.
posted by jwhite1979 at 10:16 AM on October 2, 2013

Current House Republicans have pledged to vote as their caucus directs. literally every GOP lawmaker in the chamber voted for their government-shutdown plan. There were zero defections. Having party members toe the line is a goal for both parties. Democrats who vote against party lines get called Blue Dog Democrats. But the current GOP House members seem unusually rigid. I am obviously partisan, but Maddow tends to get the facts right. I had a better link about the GOP House members voting in lock-step but can't find it.
posted by theora55 at 10:27 AM on October 2, 2013

This may also be appropriate reading. The New Yorker is clearly left, but is also good at facts. and no more answers from me, I promise.
posted by theora55 at 10:44 AM on October 2, 2013

If you want to really dig into this, check out VoteView.org, scholarly home to measures of polarization like DW-NOMINATE (Wikipedia explainer) and a lot of raw data. The VoteView blog explores the research in relation to current events, including a bunch of posts on the shutdown.
posted by JackBurden at 6:03 PM on October 2, 2013 [1 favorite]

Democrats who vote against party lines get called Blue Dog Democrats.

To clarify, the Blue Dog Coalition is an actual caucus. They may vote against the Democratic caucus overall in some budget issues but my sense, lately, is that they have a very diminished role compared to the group's heyday in the Clinton and Bush years, when there was actual ideological overlap between the parties and they had (political-science-defined) leverage. These days they're more a motley collection of Democratic holdouts in red-tilting districts.

Incidentally, James Fallows has been writing a bit about this recently:

Why This Is Not Just 'Washington Breakdown,' in 3 Graphs (and 1 Story)

Why This Is Not Just 'Washington Dysfunction,' in 1 More Graph

Your False-Equivalence Guide to the Days Ahead: A kind of politics we have not seen for more than 150 years

The first two are more numbers-oriented, but the last does touch on something important, I think -- that the style of governance we are used to may be no more, may have ceased to be, may have expired and gone to meet its maker. We had a sort of bipartisan consensus, out of some necessity, during the Cold War, and got pretty used to things working themselves out due to some pretty strong gravitational pulls to which both parties were subject, but that may be changing and we are going to have a different sort of politics as a result. Not being used to this, well, it's going to startle and confuse some people.
posted by dhartung at 5:15 AM on October 3, 2013 [2 favorites]