September 13, 2015
SINGLE PARTY GOVERNMENT:
Bipartisan legislation is making a comeback (Matthew Yglesias, September 13, 2015, Vox)
The only differences between the parties are partisan, not policy. Democrats would have routinely voted with W were he a Democrat and Republicans with the UR were he a Republican.Congress is actually getting less partisan, and has been for a few years. That's the somewhat surprising conclusion of an analysis done using data on co-sponsorship of legislation done by Quorum, a company that specializes in quantitative information about American politics.The variable tracked here is what share of bills introduced have at least one co-sponsor from the other party. And we can see here that while bipartisan bill writing is still well below its historical average levels, it has bounced back -- especially in the Senate -- from the nadir it reached in the 112th Congress.It's interesting to note that the small-scale revival of bipartisanship has happened even though we haven't seen any kind of meaningful resurgence of ideological moderates on Capitol Hill.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 13, 2015 8:15 AM
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