Politics in the USA, Sixth Edition

Postscript

American politics in the twenty-

first century

In the functioning of any political system there are two kinds of forces at
work. There are those long-term historical and structural factors which form
the basis of the system, and there are the recent developments, economic,
political, social, which bring change to the day-to-day working of politics and
modify its character. The problem for the observer is to try to judge the ex-
tent to which recent developments represent significant permanent change,
or are merely transient. Significant changes have taken place in American
politics in recent decades; we will attempt to summarise them here, and to
comment on their likely effects.
We have seen that pluralism, a continual series of changing coalitions of
innumerable groups operating to make policy compromises through a com-
plex mechanism of institutions, has characterised the American political
system. An essential prerequisite of this system has been the fluid character
of the party system in the Congress, allowing groups to form and re-form
according to the issue: issue-oriented politics. This enabled not only compro-
mise within Congress between contending interests, but also compromises
between president and Congress, so that coalitions could form in favour of,
or against, presidential policies; a president could sometimes be defeated
because sections of the president’s party voted against the administration’s
policies, and could sometimes win because a significant number of Senators
or Congressmen of the opposing party would vote for the administration’s
policies. This fluidity was particularly important in the second half of the
twentieth century when ‘divided government’, a president of one party faced
by a majority of the other party controlling one or both Houses of Congress,
became so common; it could work only because many votes in Congress were
taken by bipartisan majorities. A rigid system of party discipline along the
lines of the British system would have resulted in total deadlock.
Since 1994 there has been a significant increase in partisanship in the
Congress. Party discipline has not reached European heights, it is true,
but in the House of Representatives in particular the atmosphere of party
politics has been more confrontational, more passionate, in which deviations