I was motivated to write this post by an interesting comment from “Andy Rudalevige”:http://users.dickinson.edu/~rudaleva/ in response to “my earlier post”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/03/whats_worse_politically_passin.html#comments on whether the Democrats were better off passing health care without the support of the majority of the country or looking incompetent for failing to move their most important domestic policy agenda. Andy suggested looking at the Republican motivation: if, as “many Republicans have claimed”:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34242_Page3.html, successful passage of health care reform will lead to a Republican House and Senate, then why are Republicans being so vehement in trying to prevent its passage?
Political science suggests two basic motivations for legislative behavior: ensuring their own reelection and pursuing changes in policy that move that policy closer to their own preferred policy. So let’s posit a world where Republicans believe that the current version of health care reform will in fact move policy farther from their preferred policy in terms of health care. The behavior we observe is vehement opposition to this bill, but going beyond simply voting against it to measures that seem genuinely targeted at try to ensure its defeat, such as trying to persuade individual Democrats to defect, threatening all sorts of procedural maneuvers to defeat the bill, etc. What can we conclude then about the beliefs of Republicans about the likely electoral effect of health care reform passing and/or their relative weighting of electoral vs. policy concerns?
It seems to me that we have to be living in one of these three versions of the world:
bq. Republicans don’t really believe that if health care reform passes it will help their electoral prospects, and therefore there is no trade-off between opposing health care reform and seeking re-election (ie., they buy the point I made in my “previous post”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/03/whats_worse_politically_passin.html).
bq. Republicans do believe that if health care reform passes it will help their electoral prospects, but dislike it so much that we have a real example of policy concerns trumping electoral concerns in their attempts to defeat the bill.
bq. Republicans do believe that if health care reform passes it will help their electoral prospects, but feel that in order to maintain credibility with the voters they need to appear to be trying to defeat it in every way possible. So electoral concerns still trump policy concerns (ie., privately Republicans want it to pass so they will do better in the coming elections), but politics dictate that the party keep up the appearance of opposing the bill.
Any thoughts on which of these scenarios are in play? I guess a final option is that the Republicans believe it is inevitable that health care reform will indeed pass, but they think if they repeat “health care reform will cost the Democrats the House and the Senate” enough times, it will become a dominant narrative heading into the campaign and help with the 2010 elections. So in this case it wouldn’t be a trade-off so much, but just making the best of a bad situation.