My impression (primarily from former representative Justin Amash) is that individual congresspeople have almost no power. Bills are crafted and introduced at the party level, and your choices are to vote with them or not. If you don’t vote with the party and are in a safe district (which most are), the party will support candidates who will go along with the party line in the primary. The only scenario in which an individual congressperson has power is a close vote in a contested district where the party can’t take the risk of a primary challenger.
First, I want to know if which parts of this are true, and in more detail. One guy tweeting does not constitute proof. Are elected officials sitting around watching Netflix all day, or do they still have the power to privately horse trade to support their goals.
Second, assuming it is true, where did the power go? Parties aren’t real, the power must be in specific humans or incentive systems. Does it all rest in the top three elected officials of each party? Their staff? Unelected party officers?
I’m very interested in evidence and arguments in either direction.
I assume we’re talking about the House here (the Senate is a little different)?
Definitionally the average member of the House is going to have 1⁄435 of the legislative influence, which is just not a lot. Back in the Congressional good old days, there was a lot of specialization. Legislation was mostly delegated to committees (and often by committees to subcommittees) where an individual voice matters numerically. So, an individual member could specialize in a particular issue area and end up having quite a bit of influence on that area, even if very little outside it. But, committees are effectively dead now, so the legislative power is concentrated in the leadership.
There’s a lot of other stuff that members do, though. Legislation has never been the majority of the job. Congress also does oversight of executive agencies and constituent service. Individual members also spend a great deal of time engaging in politicking directed at outside audiences, fundraising and retail politics. I’ve worked in a couple of different Congressional offices, and the members were always extremely busy (there’s a conventional wisdom that nowadays a lot of new members just don’t do that stuff and are instead totally focused on social media; in at least some cases, that’s true).
Over the last few decades, power has flowed out of Congress entirely and into the executive branch and the courts. Because Congress barely legislates anymore, the field is open for executive action on major policy questions, checked mostly by whether or not the courts will let the president do it. A huge amount of power has also built up in the ways that the courts interpret old statutes. Back in the good old days, Congress would pass a law, the courts would interpret it, and if Congress didn’t like that interpretation, they’d rewrite the law. Now, they don’t do that, and so the judicial interpretation just becomes the law indefinitely. The Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in INS v. Chadha also killed off Congress’s most important method for restraining the executive branch.
So, what changed in Congress?
Democrats held a continuous majority in the House for 40 years (1955-1995) and a Senate majority for that period save for an interlude in the early 80s. Partisan control of the White House alternated, but Republicans controlled the White House for the majority of that era, including an unbroken 12 year stretch under Reagan and Bush I. Everyone settled into an equilibrium based on bipartisanship. It didn’t make much sense to wait around for unified government to enact your agenda because it might never come. Because of their dominance, Congressional Democrats were also strongly incentivized not to let too much power flow to the executive. Specialization through committees and horse trading thrived in this environment.
In this millennium, we’ve settled into a new equilibrium where the parties alternate in power, and every newly elected president (Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump again) has entered power with control of Congress, and it’s well-understood that unified control of the government is on the table every four years. That means the incentive to engage in compromise legislation is basically gone (and with it the influence of rank-and-file members). Why compromise now, when you’re never more than a couple of years away from an opportunity to take power and get what you want without compromising? That puts the president in the driver’s seat as well—it’s the presidential candidate’s agenda that dominates the election every four years when you might be able to seize (or hold) power. Voters are, more or less, expecting Congress to enact that when they get there. So, there’s not a lot of room for Congressional creativity.
The other big factor here is death of local media. Back in the good old days, an individual member of Congress could maintain a meaningful local reputation because voters largely learned about politics from the local newspaper, and the local newspaper had correspondents in DC covering the behavior of the local representative(s). A politically informed voter had a pretty good basis for understanding how their representative was different from the average member of the same party, which created the environment for ticket splitting. With the nationalization of media over the past couple decades, informed voters are instead mostly consuming political news from nationally focused outlets that have no interest in covering the role of your local Congressperson (uninformed voters aren’t consuming much either way). Save for a few people that establish a nationally salient brand (e.g., AOC), that means everyone in Congress really just blends into an undifferentiated D or R (most people can’t actually name their representative in Congress but can identify their party). If voters are just going to respond to you as a D or an R, your interests become the same as the overall interests of that party, which increasingly just reduces to a stance for or against the incumbent president. Everyone has an opinion on Donald Trump. Nobody has an opinion on your local representative. In the House, if you’re new, they’re also essentially no time to establish a specific brand, even if it were possible, because the primary for your next election will happen barely more than a year after you take office.
Circling back around, that means that members of Congress in “swing” districts live or die in the general election with their party’s presidential candidate. So, if it’s the same party, you do whatever you can to support them which mostly just means deference to presidential wishes. If it’s the other party, you do whatever you can to oppose them, but everything just comes down to the president either way. In “safe” districts, as noted, the real election is the primary. The dynamics are slightly different there (and vary across the two parties) but never tilt in the direction of picking people who are interested in going to Congress and engaging in bipartisan compromise.
The independent reputation issue works a little better for senators than representatives (though the other problems plague the Senate). As a senator, you have a fighting chance at establishing an independent reputation because there’s still some room for state-level media coverage, though that’s dying off too, and there are sufficiently few senators that they may be able to break through to their own voters via the national media (ask yourself how many senators you can say something distinctive about vs. how many representatives you can say something about). Having 5 years rather than 1 to engage in reputation building is also helpful.
Save for a few people that establish a nationally salient brand (e.g., AOC), that means everyone in Congress really just blends into an undifferentiated D or R (most people can’t actually name their representative in Congress but can identify their party).
This suggests to me that local money should compose a smaller percentage of campaign funds over time. This is me pre-registering that I’m going to check this and publish results. If it’s false I will downgrade this hypothesis in my mind but not consider it disproven.
Congressmembers do have power, but it’s...weirdly distributed at the veto points? There is some horse trading, but it’s maximally in the “you gotta trust me it’s there” black-box aspects of the system (e.g., the famously opaque negotiation inside the NDAA process).
But power has definitely drained away from individual members; the standard account is roughly that a combo of 0) Increased transparency into Congress via things like C-SPAN and cable news generally, 1) leadership of committees and the parties consolidating more role-based power (especially in the House), 2) reduction in earmark-like things that enabled side deals to get bigger deals done, and 3) increased party polarization due to nationalization of party identities (measured through such things as DW-NOMINATE scores) were the key drivers,
Re: 0) and 3), Matt Yglesias occasionally mentions Secret Congress as one way of how things still get done in the legislature: namely, if there’s no public scrutiny on a topic, then it doesn’t necessarily get embroiled in partisan conflicts, and then politicians are actually willing to cooperate, strike deals, and pass legislation. Whereas any public attempts at legislating quickly become or look like zero-sum conflicts (if one side wins, the other side loses), so there’s little incentive for politicians to cooperate or make compromises, and then due to a plethora of veto points (like the filibuster), the default outcome is that no legislation gets passed.
One thing I recall is the (informal) Hastert Rule. Namely that in the House, nowadays leadership often doesn’t even bring bills up for a vote unless a majority of their party is in favor. Whereas if all bills came up for a vote, then you could imagine that even in a D/R-controlled legislature, occasionally a bill might pass that 100% of the minority and 20% of the majority would vote for.
Yup, this is very much part of it. But overall, it’s the tightening of a thousand screws rather than One Weird Trick.
In the House, in addition to the tradition changes that MondSemmel mentions, successive speakers over time have modified the formal House Rules iteratively to (generally) consolidate more power under the Speaker in a bunch of bureaucratically technical but important ways. (E.G., the Federalist Society on the right argues that Gingrich’s decision to cut committee staff sizes and impose term limits for committee chairs nerfed the power of committees relative to the Speaker https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/navigating-the-rules-of-the-people-s-house). Note that some view the current Speaker as intentionallychoosing to begin to reverse this trend as part of commitments he voluntarily made to his side of the aisle to somewhat empower individual Members, but this is seen even by his biggest fans as only a first step, and certainly not universally agreed upon even within his own Party.
In the Senate, similar trends are combined with a slow but fairly steady erosion of the scope of the filibuster (as well as the maximization of procedural hacks around the filibuster, such as how to use reconciliation), which de facto increases the power of the Senate Majority Leader in closely-divided Senates (most have been for the past 20 years). But this is not as far along as in the House, and various Senate Majority Leaders have approached this question differently, even within the same party, so bright line conclusions are harder to draw here. (E.G., Reid and Schumer had somewhat different approaches from each other, as do McConnell and Thune)
Can you elaborate on how the erosion of the filibuster empowers the party leaders? I figured the filibuster empowers the members (because there are ~never 60 votes for anything) to veto/stop arbitrary legislation, and thus any erosion of the filibuster would weaken the members’ ability to veto/stop legislation and thereby empower their ability to enact legislation instead.
Also, it’s my understanding that a majority of Senators could at any point abolish the filibuster, but they never want to no matter which party is in power, because it empowers individual Senators.
I’ve heard the earmark thing before, is there a good writeup about it?
It feels like it should be worldview-quake-y to many people, if-true. (in that “get rid of earmark pork” might have seemed like an obvious thing to do to reduce corruption but alas turns out it was loadbearing)
It seems intuitively reasonable to get rid of earmark pork, to require all bills to address a “single issue”, and to grant the executive a line-item veto.
But actual result of all these practices is to make legislative bargains harder to strike. Pork was occasionally used to secure key votes. Single-issue bills make it harder for legislators to strike actually enforceable deals, where the entire deal is passed atomically or not at all (reducing “betrayal”). And a line-item veto allows removing key aspects of a legislative deal.
I’m not saying that any of these things are good or bad. (Personally, I think some are good and some are bad.) But if your legislature isn’t based on deal-making, you may instead get very tight party control. Again, tight party control might be good or bad. And true-multiparty parliaments often seem to have even tighter party control, despite having more parties.
Personally I suspect the most important reason democracy works is that if the public is broadly dissatisfied, elections provide a cheap change of leadership (relative to things like civil war). It’s worth trying to reform obvious corruption and empirical problems. But there are no guarantees, and the actual process of governance can be pretty messy.
So my inclination is to ask, “Is the current executive/legislative coalition/legislative rules clearly broken? Then let’s try to fix it, and gamble on something that sounds better.” TL;dr: Re-roll on a 1 or 2, but don’t hold out for a 6.
The only scenario in which an individual congressperson has power is a close vote in a contested district where the party can’t take the risk of a primary challenger.
The last condition (party can’t risk a primary challenge) is only necessary when the congressperson plans to run again and can’t even credibly pretend to be willing to risk their nomination. Right now there are 54 congresspeople who have already announced that they won’t be recontesting their current seat; many of those are running for a different office, but a little over half are simply retiring. (And I don’t think that count includes any senators who aren’t up for election in 2026.)
And, of course, any congressperson can decide at any time that they care enough about a vote to risk losing their party’s support and getting a new job when their term is up. So unless there’s some kind of truly scary behind-the-scenes coercion, I think it’s a big exaggeration to say that they’re powerless even when a vote is close.
not an expert but my understanding is that individual senators have a lot more power than individual house reps, and some senators (esp chairs of important committees) have a lot more power than the average senator.
I don’t think this is a helpful frame, but if you want to use it, the power went to the people – mostly due the democratization of information, accelerated by the internet, social media, etc. – and they then turned it on each other, wasting most of it and leaving little for the people they elect to govern with.
Parties aren’t real, the power must be in specific humans or incentive systems.
I would caution against saying “parties aren’t real” for at least two reasons. First, it more-or-less invites definitional wars which are rarely productive. Second, when we think about explanatory and predictive theories, whether something is “real” (however you define it) is often irrelevant. What matters more is is the concept sufficiently clear / standardized / “objective” to measure something and thus serve as some replicable part of a theory.
Humans have long been interested in making sense of power through various theories. One approach is to reduce it to purely individual decisions. Another approach involves attributing power to groups of people or even culture. Models serve many purposes, so I try to ground these kinds of discussions with questions such as:
Are you trying to predict a person’s best next action?
Are you trying to design a political or institutional system such that individual power can manifest in productive ways?
Are you trying to measure the effectiveness of a given politician in a given system, keeping in mind the practical and realistic limits of their agency?
These are very different questions, leading to very different models.
I would caution against saying “parties aren’t real” for at least two reasons. First, it more-or-less invites definitional wars which are rarely productive. Second, when we think about explanatory and predictive theories, whether something is “real” (however you define it) is often irrelevant. What matters more is is the concept sufficiently clear / standardized / “objective” to measure something and thus serve as some replicable part of a theory.
I think this (implied) mode of reasoning can be pretty useful. For example:
Sally: A ghost just turned my television on again!
Tom: Ghosts aren’t real, so that’s not what happened.
But I’m like 75% sure that American political parties do exist (i.e., the correct ontology of the universe includes political parties alongside electrons, minds, and trees). I’d like to hear @Elizabeth’s argument against this.
My impression (primarily from former representative Justin Amash) is that individual congresspeople have almost no power. Bills are crafted and introduced at the party level, and your choices are to vote with them or not. If you don’t vote with the party and are in a safe district (which most are), the party will support candidates who will go along with the party line in the primary. The only scenario in which an individual congressperson has power is a close vote in a contested district where the party can’t take the risk of a primary challenger.
First, I want to know if which parts of this are true, and in more detail. One guy tweeting does not constitute proof. Are elected officials sitting around watching Netflix all day, or do they still have the power to privately horse trade to support their goals.
Second, assuming it is true, where did the power go? Parties aren’t real, the power must be in specific humans or incentive systems. Does it all rest in the top three elected officials of each party? Their staff? Unelected party officers?
I’m very interested in evidence and arguments in either direction.
I assume we’re talking about the House here (the Senate is a little different)?
Definitionally the average member of the House is going to have 1⁄435 of the legislative influence, which is just not a lot. Back in the Congressional good old days, there was a lot of specialization. Legislation was mostly delegated to committees (and often by committees to subcommittees) where an individual voice matters numerically. So, an individual member could specialize in a particular issue area and end up having quite a bit of influence on that area, even if very little outside it. But, committees are effectively dead now, so the legislative power is concentrated in the leadership.
There’s a lot of other stuff that members do, though. Legislation has never been the majority of the job. Congress also does oversight of executive agencies and constituent service. Individual members also spend a great deal of time engaging in politicking directed at outside audiences, fundraising and retail politics. I’ve worked in a couple of different Congressional offices, and the members were always extremely busy (there’s a conventional wisdom that nowadays a lot of new members just don’t do that stuff and are instead totally focused on social media; in at least some cases, that’s true).
Over the last few decades, power has flowed out of Congress entirely and into the executive branch and the courts. Because Congress barely legislates anymore, the field is open for executive action on major policy questions, checked mostly by whether or not the courts will let the president do it. A huge amount of power has also built up in the ways that the courts interpret old statutes. Back in the good old days, Congress would pass a law, the courts would interpret it, and if Congress didn’t like that interpretation, they’d rewrite the law. Now, they don’t do that, and so the judicial interpretation just becomes the law indefinitely. The Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in INS v. Chadha also killed off Congress’s most important method for restraining the executive branch.
So, what changed in Congress?
Democrats held a continuous majority in the House for 40 years (1955-1995) and a Senate majority for that period save for an interlude in the early 80s. Partisan control of the White House alternated, but Republicans controlled the White House for the majority of that era, including an unbroken 12 year stretch under Reagan and Bush I. Everyone settled into an equilibrium based on bipartisanship. It didn’t make much sense to wait around for unified government to enact your agenda because it might never come. Because of their dominance, Congressional Democrats were also strongly incentivized not to let too much power flow to the executive. Specialization through committees and horse trading thrived in this environment.
In this millennium, we’ve settled into a new equilibrium where the parties alternate in power, and every newly elected president (Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump again) has entered power with control of Congress, and it’s well-understood that unified control of the government is on the table every four years. That means the incentive to engage in compromise legislation is basically gone (and with it the influence of rank-and-file members). Why compromise now, when you’re never more than a couple of years away from an opportunity to take power and get what you want without compromising? That puts the president in the driver’s seat as well—it’s the presidential candidate’s agenda that dominates the election every four years when you might be able to seize (or hold) power. Voters are, more or less, expecting Congress to enact that when they get there. So, there’s not a lot of room for Congressional creativity.
The other big factor here is death of local media. Back in the good old days, an individual member of Congress could maintain a meaningful local reputation because voters largely learned about politics from the local newspaper, and the local newspaper had correspondents in DC covering the behavior of the local representative(s). A politically informed voter had a pretty good basis for understanding how their representative was different from the average member of the same party, which created the environment for ticket splitting. With the nationalization of media over the past couple decades, informed voters are instead mostly consuming political news from nationally focused outlets that have no interest in covering the role of your local Congressperson (uninformed voters aren’t consuming much either way). Save for a few people that establish a nationally salient brand (e.g., AOC), that means everyone in Congress really just blends into an undifferentiated D or R (most people can’t actually name their representative in Congress but can identify their party). If voters are just going to respond to you as a D or an R, your interests become the same as the overall interests of that party, which increasingly just reduces to a stance for or against the incumbent president. Everyone has an opinion on Donald Trump. Nobody has an opinion on your local representative. In the House, if you’re new, they’re also essentially no time to establish a specific brand, even if it were possible, because the primary for your next election will happen barely more than a year after you take office.
Circling back around, that means that members of Congress in “swing” districts live or die in the general election with their party’s presidential candidate. So, if it’s the same party, you do whatever you can to support them which mostly just means deference to presidential wishes. If it’s the other party, you do whatever you can to oppose them, but everything just comes down to the president either way. In “safe” districts, as noted, the real election is the primary. The dynamics are slightly different there (and vary across the two parties) but never tilt in the direction of picking people who are interested in going to Congress and engaging in bipartisan compromise.
The independent reputation issue works a little better for senators than representatives (though the other problems plague the Senate). As a senator, you have a fighting chance at establishing an independent reputation because there’s still some room for state-level media coverage, though that’s dying off too, and there are sufficiently few senators that they may be able to break through to their own voters via the national media (ask yourself how many senators you can say something distinctive about vs. how many representatives you can say something about). Having 5 years rather than 1 to engage in reputation building is also helpful.
This is a great comment! IMO would be good as a top-level shortform (or maybe even post).
agreed- I’d be especially interested in expansion or links on how the loss of local media affects things.
This suggests to me that local money should compose a smaller percentage of campaign funds over time. This is me pre-registering that I’m going to check this and publish results. If it’s false I will downgrade this hypothesis in my mind but not consider it disproven.
EDIT: prediction verified
Congressmembers do have power, but it’s...weirdly distributed at the veto points? There is some horse trading, but it’s maximally in the “you gotta trust me it’s there” black-box aspects of the system (e.g., the famously opaque negotiation inside the NDAA process).
But power has definitely drained away from individual members; the standard account is roughly that a combo of 0) Increased transparency into Congress via things like C-SPAN and cable news generally, 1) leadership of committees and the parties consolidating more role-based power (especially in the House), 2) reduction in earmark-like things that enabled side deals to get bigger deals done, and 3) increased party polarization due to nationalization of party identities (measured through such things as DW-NOMINATE scores) were the key drivers,
Re: 0) and 3), Matt Yglesias occasionally mentions Secret Congress as one way of how things still get done in the legislature: namely, if there’s no public scrutiny on a topic, then it doesn’t necessarily get embroiled in partisan conflicts, and then politicians are actually willing to cooperate, strike deals, and pass legislation. Whereas any public attempts at legislating quickly become or look like zero-sum conflicts (if one side wins, the other side loses), so there’s little incentive for politicians to cooperate or make compromises, and then due to a plethora of veto points (like the filibuster), the default outcome is that no legislation gets passed.
can you expand on “leadership of committees and the parties consolidating more role-based power (especially in the House)”?
One thing I recall is the (informal) Hastert Rule. Namely that in the House, nowadays leadership often doesn’t even bring bills up for a vote unless a majority of their party is in favor. Whereas if all bills came up for a vote, then you could imagine that even in a D/R-controlled legislature, occasionally a bill might pass that 100% of the minority and 20% of the majority would vote for.
Yup, this is very much part of it. But overall, it’s the tightening of a thousand screws rather than One Weird Trick.
In the House, in addition to the tradition changes that MondSemmel mentions, successive speakers over time have modified the formal House Rules iteratively to (generally) consolidate more power under the Speaker in a bunch of bureaucratically technical but important ways. (E.G., the Federalist Society on the right argues that Gingrich’s decision to cut committee staff sizes and impose term limits for committee chairs nerfed the power of committees relative to the Speaker https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/navigating-the-rules-of-the-people-s-house). Note that some view the current Speaker as intentionally choosing to begin to reverse this trend as part of commitments he voluntarily made to his side of the aisle to somewhat empower individual Members, but this is seen even by his biggest fans as only a first step, and certainly not universally agreed upon even within his own Party.
In the Senate, similar trends are combined with a slow but fairly steady erosion of the scope of the filibuster (as well as the maximization of procedural hacks around the filibuster, such as how to use reconciliation), which de facto increases the power of the Senate Majority Leader in closely-divided Senates (most have been for the past 20 years). But this is not as far along as in the House, and various Senate Majority Leaders have approached this question differently, even within the same party, so bright line conclusions are harder to draw here. (E.G., Reid and Schumer had somewhat different approaches from each other, as do McConnell and Thune)
Can you elaborate on how the erosion of the filibuster empowers the party leaders? I figured the filibuster empowers the members (because there are ~never 60 votes for anything) to veto/stop arbitrary legislation, and thus any erosion of the filibuster would weaken the members’ ability to veto/stop legislation and thereby empower their ability to enact legislation instead.
Also, it’s my understanding that a majority of Senators could at any point abolish the filibuster, but they never want to no matter which party is in power, because it empowers individual Senators.
I’ve heard the earmark thing before, is there a good writeup about it?
It feels like it should be worldview-quake-y to many people, if-true. (in that “get rid of earmark pork” might have seemed like an obvious thing to do to reduce corruption but alas turns out it was loadbearing)
This is a good summary by Vox, which in turn points to a bunch of deeper writeups if helpful https://archive.is/o6qj8
It seems intuitively reasonable to get rid of earmark pork, to require all bills to address a “single issue”, and to grant the executive a line-item veto.
But actual result of all these practices is to make legislative bargains harder to strike. Pork was occasionally used to secure key votes. Single-issue bills make it harder for legislators to strike actually enforceable deals, where the entire deal is passed atomically or not at all (reducing “betrayal”). And a line-item veto allows removing key aspects of a legislative deal.
I’m not saying that any of these things are good or bad. (Personally, I think some are good and some are bad.) But if your legislature isn’t based on deal-making, you may instead get very tight party control. Again, tight party control might be good or bad. And true-multiparty parliaments often seem to have even tighter party control, despite having more parties.
Personally I suspect the most important reason democracy works is that if the public is broadly dissatisfied, elections provide a cheap change of leadership (relative to things like civil war). It’s worth trying to reform obvious corruption and empirical problems. But there are no guarantees, and the actual process of governance can be pretty messy.
So my inclination is to ask, “Is the current executive/legislative coalition/legislative rules clearly broken? Then let’s try to fix it, and gamble on something that sounds better.” TL;dr: Re-roll on a 1 or 2, but don’t hold out for a 6.
The last condition (party can’t risk a primary challenge) is only necessary when the congressperson plans to run again and can’t even credibly pretend to be willing to risk their nomination. Right now there are 54 congresspeople who have already announced that they won’t be recontesting their current seat; many of those are running for a different office, but a little over half are simply retiring. (And I don’t think that count includes any senators who aren’t up for election in 2026.)
And, of course, any congressperson can decide at any time that they care enough about a vote to risk losing their party’s support and getting a new job when their term is up. So unless there’s some kind of truly scary behind-the-scenes coercion, I think it’s a big exaggeration to say that they’re powerless even when a vote is close.
not an expert but my understanding is that individual senators have a lot more power than individual house reps, and some senators (esp chairs of important committees) have a lot more power than the average senator.
I don’t think this is a helpful frame, but if you want to use it, the power went to the people – mostly due the democratization of information, accelerated by the internet, social media, etc. – and they then turned it on each other, wasting most of it and leaving little for the people they elect to govern with.
I would caution against saying “parties aren’t real” for at least two reasons. First, it more-or-less invites definitional wars which are rarely productive. Second, when we think about explanatory and predictive theories, whether something is “real” (however you define it) is often irrelevant. What matters more is is the concept sufficiently clear / standardized / “objective” to measure something and thus serve as some replicable part of a theory.
Humans have long been interested in making sense of power through various theories. One approach is to reduce it to purely individual decisions. Another approach involves attributing power to groups of people or even culture. Models serve many purposes, so I try to ground these kinds of discussions with questions such as:
Are you trying to predict a person’s best next action?
Are you trying to design a political or institutional system such that individual power can manifest in productive ways?
Are you trying to measure the effectiveness of a given politician in a given system, keeping in mind the practical and realistic limits of their agency?
These are very different questions, leading to very different models.
I think this (implied) mode of reasoning can be pretty useful. For example:
Sally: A ghost just turned my television on again!
Tom: Ghosts aren’t real, so that’s not what happened.
But I’m like 75% sure that American political parties do exist (i.e., the correct ontology of the universe includes political parties alongside electrons, minds, and trees). I’d like to hear @Elizabeth’s argument against this.