Let me add two thoughts to the Monkey Cage thread on the FY 2011 spending deal. John Sides “started”:https://themonkeycage.org/2011/04/median_voters_and_the_budget_d.html by asking whether the final deal merely reflect the intersection of the White House and ideological centers of the House and Senate. “Scott Adler and John Wilkerson”:https://themonkeycage.org/2011/04/more_on_the_logic_of_the_budge.html and “Sarah Binder”:https://themonkeycage.org/2011/04/congressional_dealmaking.html have already weighed in with excellent answers, and “Erik Voeten”:https://themonkeycage.org/2011/04/more_spatial_voting_and_the_bu.html (channeling “Keith Poole”:http://voteview.spia.uga.edu/blog/) illustrated that the “no” votes came from the ideological wings of both parties. I have a nerdy point and a substantive comment.
**_The Spatial Model Doesn’t Work Well When Politics is Involved_**
First, when academics say that we expect the outcome to reflect the views of the median legislator, there are a number of implied assumptions required to get there. Three critical ones are:
* Every legislator has a fixed and known policy view, aka ideology.
* Legislators “win” to the extent that policy outcomes conform to their ideal policy.
* legislators treat every vote as a choice between two alternatives (e.g. a proposal and the status quo) and selects the option that is “closer” to their ideal policy.
This works fine when one is trying to explain why Republicans and moderate Democrats voted against the Affordable Care Act, albeit by discounting the political side of the contest. But the appropriations deal highlights the limitations of this approach. First, what is the “status quo”? Last year’s funding? Obama’s budget? Anticipated budget outcomes following a government shutdown? It’s not clear what the choice is.
Second, and more important, to understand this debate one needs a more complex notion of representation. Real life legislators have a number of constituencies they are trying to please: a) primary election voters, b) general election voters, c) donors & interest groups, d) spouses, e) their own consciences. When these constituencies align, it is easier to fold them into a single ideal point: Barney Frank is a liberal, Ron Paul is a conservative, and it is trivial to account for the overlapping incentives for them to behave as such. But to the extent that legislators face competing pressures from actors who reward or punish them based on their individual votes, then we can explain a lot by accounting for this cross-pressuring.
In this case, legislators of both parties faced tensions between their party base (primary voters at home, donors, party-affiliated interest groups, and (ahem) bloggers) who expected their “team” to stand firm on its spending priorities, no matter what the cost, and the danger that the rest of the attentive would blame their party–or both parties–for a government shutdown. The party bases may insist upon fidelity because a) they distrust their elected leaders and will treat any vote or outcome that differs from their preferred policy as a betrayal (the GOP’s Tea Party problem), b) they have unrealistic expectations about what they could win if their Congressional allies would only try harder, or c) they are playing a long game and believe that forceful expression of their views will win converts in the long run.
Even if the outcome of the appropriations debate reflected the views of the moderates of both chambers, this is not because a “middle plus one wing” coalition has won, but because the wings of both parties have sided with their party base and left the rest of the legislature to take responsibility for a dissatisfying compromise.
**_FY 2011 Appropriations as a Scrimmage for the Great Budget Fight of 2011_**
Substantively, the appropriations deal was a minor issue. Congress has to fund the government somehow, and was “six months late”:https://themonkeycage.org/2011/04/431_days_and_counting_for_a_bu.html already. After three months of posturing and negotiations, the $38.5 billion in cuts reduced the “projected $1.548 trillion on-budget deficit”:http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=12039 by about 2.5 percent.
It was fascinating as politics, however. Cutting a deal would require bipartisan leadership and legislative majorities willing to disappoint their party base; in particular, Speaker Boehner would have to either convince conservatives in the Tea Party/Republican Study Committee wing of his party to settle for less than everything they wanted, or disappoint them and start striking deals with Democratic moderates. Amid all the discussion over who “won” this round, the most interesting point is that a deal was reached at all. What were the conditions for a deal to happen?
* Consensus that something had to done (no one seriously considered not funding the federal government for six months), including dire consequences for inaction.
* A (semi-)fixed deadline for making a decision
* Top-level negotiations
These conditions provide a blueprint for addressing larger budget and tax issues. Over the next two months, the question will be, what policies or conditions should we attach to legislation to raise the debt limit? Based on the appropriations fight, it would seem that the decision will be reached at the last hour (perhaps literally!) following negotiations amongst (the staff of) President Obama, Speaker Boehner, and Majority Leader Reid, and ample press coverage of the implications of debt default by the federal government.