You also place a lot of importance on incumbency, right?
Yes. If you take almost two and a half centuries of presidential elections, when an elected incumbent runs again, that candidate wins roughly two-thirds of the time. But if there is no incumbent running, the party that won the White House last time keeps it only about half the time.
That distinction changes how we understand political eras. People say the New Deal era extended for 20 or 30 years, but the Democrats ran four incumbents in a row in 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1948. Those victories were not necessarily repeated affirmations of a coalitional victory. A great deal of what happened was connected to incumbency.
What practical lesson follows from those historical patterns?
If you win an election and run the country, you have to realize that sooner or later, and probably sooner, you are going to lose the White House. You have to plan for that. You are crazy if you do not plan for losing the White House.
If you want to make an imprint, you have to find something that will survive a party change in the White House. The problem is that a party takes over and thinks it has won forever.
What should victorious parties do to plan properly for losing power?
If you want to solidify something into law and practice, it is good to have support from both parties. Consider Social Security or Medicare. Majorities of both parties voted for Social Security in the 1930s, and a majority of House Republicans voted to enact Medicare. These were not simply single-party accomplishments.
More recently, infrastructure and semiconductor legislation enacted during the Biden administration received Republican support in the Senate. That bipartisan support helps those policies endure. It shows the importance of the coalition you assemble.
People should know this: You are going to lose control. If you want to leave an imprint, you need to try to get the paw print of people from the other party on it.
Are there limits to what political science can explain?
Some things cannot be explained systematically. Life goes on, and in political life and the life of the world there are innovations, surprises, and adventures. Who expected the Soviet Union to collapse?
There is only so much social scientists can do. If you look for patterns in the past, they can be helpful to some degree, both explanatorily and predictively. But they are a long way from supplying certainty about anything.
If you were sitting in 1990 and asked whether the United States was going to experience a rise of conservative populism, most people would not have seen it coming. It is somewhat easier now to see why it came along, but most people would not have predicted it, even with the evidence available at the time.
Maybe forecasting future events should not be the province of political science, even with rapidly evolving tools.
New techniques can help us understand the past. Economists are now combining time-series analysis with county-level election analysis, working across space and time simultaneously. Those techniques can help explain, insofar as it is possible, the rise of conservative populism.
You can see, for example, the reaction to the enactment of NAFTA in county and congressional district election returns. It hurt the Democrats, even though the agreement had more Republican than Democratic support. It went on the books under Clinton, and Clinton and the Democrats were blamed for it.
With artificial intelligence coming along, we will probably see new explanatory ventures, or explanatory adventures. But it is difficult to predict what the next important innovation in analysis will be.
What is the biggest misconception Americans have about Congress?
People tend not to see how difficult it is to get 435 people, or at least most of them, signed on to something. The common story about Capitol Hill is inaction. Congress cannot get off the dime. You can find an op-ed making that complaint almost every day.
The misconception is that politically possible things can be done instantaneously, and therefore should be done instantaneously. It is a misconception about what is politically possible.
Which I suppose contributes to the unpopularity of Congress.
Congress has been underperforming in public opinion polls for roughly 80 years. But what people do not see is that underperforming is a very important part of political life. If Congress went along with every idea that came along and put it into law tomorrow morning, we would be worse off. If legislators put things on the books that were not likely to command support down the line, why do it?
Presidents can fire off actions. Members of Congress cannot do that. So there is a misconception about the potentiality of congressional action.
When people say Congress is failing to act, are they overlooking the president’s role?
Presidents are very important to the legislative process. That has always been true, although it has become increasingly true over time.
Generally speaking, since about 1900, the system in practice has been highly dependent on presidents participating in and leading the legislative process. So when people say Congress is not doing anything, that is at least partly a comment about the presidency, or about relations between the presidency and Congress. Those relations can be vexed, and often are.
Even more so in recent years, right?
Over the last 40 or 50 years, Congress has also been losing influence to the courts and the White House. Recent presidents have become fed up with the difficulty of getting things through Capitol Hill, so they act on their own.
One reason is the Senate filibuster, which requires 60 votes to act on most matters. It makes action difficult, messy, and sometimes impossible. That has helped create a situation in which presidents act on their own, even when it is constitutionally dicey for them to do so.
To me, that is a sufficient reason for getting rid of the filibuster. The separation-of-powers arrangement is being altered by the difficulty of acting on Capitol Hill, particularly in the Senate.
Is contemporary partisan polarization historically unusual?
The current degree of partisan polarization on Capitol Hill goes back roughly a quarter century, although it developed gradually. You would find more bipartisan activity under Clinton and George W. Bush than we have seen since then.
But it is not an absolute desert. Under Biden, there was bipartisan action on infrastructure, semiconductor policy, and foreign aid. Bipartisan policymaking still happens.
Congress is more partisan now than it was in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, although it is not necessarily more partisan than it was in the late 19th century, in the decades after the Civil War.
Even in circumstances of considerable partisanship, the minority party is often consequential in policymaking. That remains part of the system.
Are there episodes from congressional history that today’s observers should revisit?
One is Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing plan in 1937. There is a wonderful book about it, The 168 Days. It is a fascinating event.
Here was a very popular president, elected with more than 60 percent of the vote and with immense majorities on Capitol Hill, and he was rejected on this issue. How did that happen? What mistakes did he make? What mobilizing devices and patterns brought him down? Why did dozens of Democratic senators from his own party go against him? People should look at that.
Another important story is the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The place of the Senate, the House, the presidency, and public opinion in getting those measures over the finish line is a very, very good story.
These episodes show that large congressional majorities do not guarantee presidential success, and that major legislative accomplishments depend upon a complicated alignment of institutions, parties, leaders, and public opinion.
Americans often worry that government is no longer capable of accomplishing major things. Is that concern new?
From roughly 1940 through the mid-1970s, the major complaint among intellectuals and the public was that Congress could not do anything. Full books were written about the deadlock of democracy. Critics blamed the committee system, the seniority system, districting, and other features of Congress.
There can be spurts of activity, as in the 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt or beginning in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson. But the complaint about congressional inaction is quite common in American history.
How far back?
For generations before the Civil War, Congress put much of its energy into keeping the country from falling apart through measures such as the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850. It could not do very much else because there was not enough agreement in Congress or in the country.
During the Civil War, after the Southern members left, Congress acted in a major way on domestic policy, including banking, railroads, and universities. They had to get rid of the Southern opposition in order to do that. Agreement, or the removal of a blocking coalition, made action possible.
Your writing has remained accessible beyond an academic audience. Why is that important?
It is very important for political scientists, sociologists, economists, and other social scientists to think and write in a fashion that has some connection to the public.
These disciplines can degenerate into scholasticism that nobody else is interested in. There is a point in trying to think in a fashion that is accessible and to write in a fashion that is accessible. Writing in a fashion that people want to read is very important.
It is hard to become successful without being a reasonably decent writer. Writing helps you connect with your colleagues, but also with people outside the trade and outside the discipline.
These disciplines should have some social utility. After all, why should they be financed? I do not mean that you have to write something that appears on the op-ed page the next day. That is not the point. Scholars should be contributing to an explanation or illumination of things that has some influence beyond a small coterie.
What advice would you give graduate students and younger scholars who want their research to have lasting value?
They should read a lot. They should invest a lot in history as well as contemporary work. Reading history should be involved in doing their data sets and in the way they approach their subjects.
They should be willing to be bold. Good and influential social science is a matter of risk-taking. You have to be able to make assertions that people are going to hit you for, and then defend them.
Can you provide examples of what you mean?
Some of the very important work in political science has been done by people who took great risks. Robert Putnam’s work on social capital was a very venturesome and influential enterprise. Then there was James Scott, my colleague who died recently, who was famously and importantly influential around the world with Seeing Like a State and his other books.
You need courage and individuality. You have to know a lot, and you have to be willing to step aside from scholasticism. You also should not get buried too deeply in methodology. Methodology should not dictate what you do. It should be an assistant to what you do rather than a dictator.
Are there important areas of American politics that political scientists are neglecting?
There is very little writing about American national political institutions. I once looked through many years and hundreds of articles in the American Political Science Review. There was remarkably little dealing with the presidency as an institution, very little on the Supreme Court, and not all that much on Congress.
The American presidency is probably the most important political institution in the world, not just to Americans but to the world. Why do political scientists not study it more?
They don’t?
Some do. Stephen Skowronek has been especially inventive and important in studying the presidency. But he is unusual. The study of the courts has largely moved into law schools, while political scientists have generally hunkered down in large data sets and statistical testing. Those are not always useful enterprises for studying American national institutions.
Studying something does not have to mean writing an equation. Studying and thinking about something in the fashion of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton is also political science.
What are you working on now?
I have a new paper called “Concepts: The Behavioral Revolution Revisited.” It is about the intellectual revolution in political science in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, who was doing what, and what we can say about it.
The chief generative political science departments at that time included Yale, Harvard, and Michigan. My argument is that the trademark enterprise of that generation, both the faculty and the graduate students who came out of it, was the forging and flexing of a concept. Robert Putnam’s social capital is a perfect example.
The Yale Political Science Department in the 1960s was really something else.
Looking back on your career, what stands out?
I have been very lucky. There is a lot of luck that goes into a career. I could make a list of places where I might have flunked out in my career and gone nowhere, but I did not.
I was lucky when I was fairly young to be at Harvard and then at Yale. Harvard was very good for me in the 1950s and 1960s as an intellectual spawning place. The Yale department, when I arrived as a youngster in the 1960s and 1970s, was an intellectual hothouse. I was very lucky to be in these places and to profit from being in them.
Certainly, there’s more than luck involved?
You also need courage and individuality. You have to know a lot, and you have to be willing to take risks.
